1st CCIE lab attempt blog and help for candidates.

Turgon

A decent night's rest. Once we get back from the weekly food shopping its back on the remote racks for the day.

Turgon

IWEB Vol II Lab no 8 - DONE

It's a good one this one with access-lists used everywhere. Also illustrates the layering of subsequent QoS tasks into an existing FRTS map-class. ACLs turned up in multicast Auto RP, QoS (for VoIP class map), Security. The rack session died before I got to IP services and an attempt on the homerack didn't turn out too well as Im short of features for wccp and ip sla and the like. Still the point was made. The configurations are fairly elementary. I can see me spending a couple of weeks simply turning over IP services things as the marks are easy kills. I will need to practice sla some more though

No rack sessions available this evening so I either cobble the homerack together and make a start on lab no 9 (I can do BGP and Multicast at home) and do IPv6, Security, Systems Management and IP Services on a remote session tommorow. I will most certainly need the latest IOS for those things.

Postscript - Interviews Monday and Tuesday went ok. Agents called today about contracts in Edinburgh and Amsterdam. No shortage of jobs to be put forward for and interview opportunities but companies are simply taking an age to give anyone a start in this economy.

Turgon

Cobbled together a variant of lab no 9 on the homerack. Did IP addressing, frame, configured own OSPF with virtual links, EIGRP, RIP and did redistribution. No switches, no backbone routers. Will do what I can in the BGP tasks and complete the rest using tonights rack session. Received amusing call from agent who is looking for Network Architect to work local government contract covering VoIP, PIX, Wireless, basically everything you can think of for 30 dollars an hour. Needless to say I was unavailable

Turgon

Taking a break to give my wife a hand. Shes fed up with me doing racks all afternoon. Will try and get some time in when my son is in bed.

Turgon

He's away and the configs are loading. I will see if I can zap through BGP and beyond on lab 9 now.

Turgon

The rack session ended an hour earlier than Im used to due to the clocks changing a little while back here but no matter. I got BGP, Multicast and Ipv6 cleared and will do QoS and the rest tomorrow. This is a good lab and shouldn't be spoiled by rushing along. Tunneling is a strong theme, it came up in multicast and Ipv6. Overall the tasks from BGP onwards were resolved in a simple way, but that is the elegance of lab no 9, its a good illustration of how to do clever things with lean configurations to meet particular requirements.

Good work. It's been a while since I did Ipv6 tunneling so a good refresher.

We just hit 850 hours of configuration time all in. Starting out I wasn't bad at this stuff. After all the hours and reflection the last 2.5 years I'm a far better engineer for all the work I put in. My awareness and understanding is good. Just need to bring things together now. Next week will be a reading week prior to a mock exam and I should get labs 9 and 10 closed down this weekend before I start the revision for the mock. My target since returning to the UK from the Russian holiday was to concentrate on consolidating my core topics for the rest of this year. I can say that things have gone well in that regard. In fact I think I may even be running a little ahead of schedule so I will start to look over the v4 topics in December. I have been back in the country two months now and by the time this weekend is through I will have accomplished a good deal; prep for the written exam and a written pass, configured the first 10 labs from the IWEB Vol II workbook, made copious notes and prepared mnemosyne for my revision. Not bad. It's been a lot of work, and more lies ahead but I reckon the next six weeks will really bear fruit thanks to the efforts I made the last two months.

Turgon

Looked over distance and distribute lists in Doyle Vol I this morning followed by FRTS in End to End Qos by Szigeti. Once Im done helping with cleaning the house its lab 9 completion on the home rack as the remote rack slots have gone. Then I will complete my notes for Systems Management and IP services in labs 6 - 10.

Turgon

IWEB Vol II Lab 9 - DONE

I like the way QoS was put together in this lab. Overall a very elegant lab and really well put together. Lab 10 tomorrow and then lots of revision during the course of next week. The way in which all the various configurations hang together is coming much easier now. I just need to sit down and go over a couple of hundred of them patiently.

Turgon

IWEB Vol II Lab 10 - DONE

Full of 007 configs particularly security and IP services.

It's done. I completed the labs I set myself. Now I will finish off my notes and embark on a fortnight of reading to go over configurations and make better sense of it all. I will not do these labs again so they can be jettisoned to the archive. My next heavy stint of hands on configuration will be a mock exam. Moving into December I will start to look over the new topics on the lab exam so no doubt I will be obtaining a new workbook as well as some Cisco Press material for that. So far as the legacy materials are concerned Im done with them. I shall not configure labs 11 - 20 a second time as it's essentially more of the same with a few things that did not come up on labs 1 - 10 thrown in. Has it all been worth it? Well I certainly learned a great deal, and lately I feel that not only my core topics but also the non core topics are better. But the best I can do with the old stuff now is continue to work those topics through more reading and sporadic mock exams. It's time now to begin to divert hands on time into the new subjects. I also believe more reading and quiet reflection is important. I have 22 weeks until the end of April to prepare for the lab. I need to become watertight on many subjects, some old and some new. OEQ practice and Troubleshooting practice will be absolutely essential. If I fail in April, its 3 months later end of July. If a third attempt is necessary it's end of October. If still no good I will call it a day and stop spending anymore time or money on it. It will have been three and a half years by then and there are only so many evenings and weekends Im prepared to give up for the sake of the family who need me at home.

I would come out of it all a much more accomplished engineer, but without a number. While I would be disappointed about that, to be honest I can handle 90% of what is thrown at me in the field so far as R&S is concerned anyway. I should add that it has been something of a concern of late that there are so many other things I could be learning instead of sinking all my study hours into this stuff. The CCIE is still respected out there in terms of hireability, but I find it will often be forgone if one can bring a slew of other goodies to the table, some of which I really need some time out to learn properly. The cumulative expense of rackhire, books, workbooks, exams is not inconsequential either.

So that's the plan. Whatever happens, the plan works.

Turgon

Battering IP services and Systems Management labs 1 - 5 into mnemosyne today. Also some reflection on filtering mechanisms using route-maps, as-path access-lists, prefix-lists and access-lists. All good stuff. Doing labs 6 - 10 now.

Turgon

Labs 6 - 10 System Management and IP services now written up in mnemosyne. Everything I want is in the can now. Fantastic. It should be fun going over it all tomorrow.

GiddyG

Just a quick question... and I have to say I have marvelled at the way you have gone about your studying with the labs and note taking... does the CCIE need to be retaken every 3 years like the CCNA?

Turgon

GiddyG wrote: »

Just a quick question... and I have to say I have marvelled at the way you have gone about your studying with the labs and note taking... does the CCIE need to be retaken every 3 years like the CCNA?

You have to take the written exam again every couple of years to recertify. Thanks for the compliments. Not all CCIE candidates take this long to complete thing but Im generally pretty short of available daily study time so its little and often!

Turgon

Revising BGP filtering in mnemosyne today.

ncsugrad2002

Turgon wrote: »

You have to take the written exam again every couple of years to recertify. Thanks for the compliments. Not all CCIE candidates take this long to complete thing but Im generally pretty short of available daily study time so its little and often!

Yep..also note you can re-take any CCIE written exam and it counts towards any existing CCIE cert.

So, if you have CCIE R&S and pass the CCIE Voice written then that counts as renewal. In case anyone was wondering

Turgon

Turning over my notes on BGP filtering this morning and now working BGP exercises in the command memorizer. Many, many hours of work ahead doing drills.

Turgon

Back home after a couple of days away visiting folks who have been unwell. Tomorrow I will pick up on BGP configuration revision again. I have decided also to start looking at Voice as it's clear this is important in the market place. Regarding jobs I have seen one requiring a UNIX specialist in Holland. Not for me that one but if you are good all rounder in Solaris 10 it may be worth considering. European and US rates are not easily compared as the rates in the US tend to be much higher to compensate the contractor for everything they have to pay for stateside, but I would imagine the same job in the US if it was offered there would be coming in at 1000 dollars per day at least. Not bad for knowing your way around a box. You would need to be able to design and build out an entire infrastructure though so have plenty of experience doing that.

Turgon

I can tell you from personal experience that building up comprehensive notes on configurations by protocol is a VERY time consuming activity. To that end I can relate to the work that went in to the command memoriser. I have to say that section BGP 5 offers just about the best tool to learn regular expressions I have seen to date.

More BGP practice now..

stlsmoore

Turgon how much voice experience did you have, I was just curious? My current company handles a lot VoIP but I'm most interested in just the routing and switching work we do here.

Turgon

stlsmoore wrote: »

Turgon how much voice experience did you have, I was just curious? My current company handles a lot VoIP but I'm most interested in just the routing and switching work we do here.

Good question. It really depends on what you mean on voice experience. Over the years I have done some PBX work and kroning and patching and what have you. I also supported Call Manager briefly back in 2003. For VoIP my work in the field hasn't presented me with as much opportunity as I would like as I was primarly employed to take care of R&S deployments in enterprise datacentres. Certainly I have some theoretical awareness. I will be picking off CCVP in the months ahead as it's an area that offers more employment options at the moment. I have considered building a lab at home but given the expense and lack of space I will most probably rent some remote rack time and grab a CCIE voice workbook. That should afford me all the access I need to get to upto speed.

Does that answer your question?

stlsmoore

Yes it very much does thanks, I'm thinking that there's going to be no way around at least learning the fundamentals of VoIP for network engineers in the years to come.

sides14

I have been thinking the same thing about voice. Most companies are looking at ways to cut costs and a likely scenario is to provide self-contained between branch offices. Looking at the job mark in the US, voice definitely has a lot of income potential.

ncsugrad2002

sides14 wrote: »

I have been thinking the same thing about voice. Most companies are looking at ways to cut costs and a likely scenario is to provide self-contained between branch offices. Looking at the job mark in the US, voice definitely has a lot of income potential.

CCIE-Voice is (I believe) the highest paid of all the CCIE's. It's something like a 25% average increase over other CCIE certs. There is a huge lack of CCIE Voice certified people and a massive demand, esp in the US right now. If you have that cert and are making less than $150K/year then you aren't doing it right

Turgon

Nevermind CCIE Voice, there's actually a shortage of Voice *experienced* people across the piece at all levels.

With caps on spending throughout organisations there is a push on now to make savings and Voice/Convergence is top of the list. The problem is that far too many of the sales weenies, project managers and champions of voice inside companies (with bonuses and reputations as well as jobs at stake), just dont understand how to do it properly. It's a big opportunity for technical people as *everyone* will be pulling on them to make it work. Voice is one of the most common things asked for in what few jobs are going now. Lots of people can do routing and switching. My advice to anyone in the networking genre is to look for any opportunities you can find to get hands on with voice. On that note I will be starting to invest more time in this before the year is out. I will still study for the CCIE in R&S and take a punt on it next year, but if the recent changes are anything to go by it's going to be extremely difficult for anyone to pass that test. I think the days of 200 new CCIE's a month sailing by are long gone. I imagine a number of training vendors are facing an uncomfortable few months ahead. For my part I have plenty of experience going for me with R&S and the lack of the CCIE has never held me back, add to which I have demonstrably improved in many areas since I started my studies. It's a toss up between spending what little study time I have available chasing a very difficult target, or spreading that time picking off a number of things that will be very useful in the employment stakes i.e Voice and Juniper. Easy decision at the moment based on the present CCIE pass rate. Let's hope it improves and not due to more people being inclined to ****.

Turgon

More BGP filtering practice this afternoon. Later today I will start to practice QoS configurations.

Turgon

Some decent work on BGP and general routing today. Just started to revisit QoS again and not a moment too soon. Just got battered on shaping and policing details in a Trancender practice test. Its one of those subjects where you really tail off quickly on the mechanics if you dont work over them regularly. I will study some configurations this evening.

sides14

Very realistic view. While the CCIE R&S is your primary objective, I think you have taken a good look future opportunities. Most companies that I know around Arizona and California installed their PBXs 10 to 15 years ago. Going the voice convergence route is a good way to make money.

Turgon

sides14 wrote: »

Very realistic view. While the CCIE R&S is your primary objective, I think you have taken a good look future opportunities. Most companies that I know around Arizona and California installed their PBXs 10 to 15 years ago. Going the voice convergence route is a good way to make money.

Yup. Always remain realistic!

Using Command Memoriser today to go over QoS configurations.

Turgon

Ok went through the first lot of QoS questions in the CM. A good refresher. The hardest thing about QoS is the theory, with practice the configurations really do make a lot more sense. A short break then onto the second batch of QoS questions.

Turgon

Went through the second part of QoS in CM. That's me and QoS done for today. The last example was interesting, using a single policy map with two class-maps matching on the fr-dlci value to determine bandwidth alloted to two DLCI's. All done with a single policy map on the physical interface. Different from the map-class and FRTS approach doled out in many examples. Different and messed up. Stuff like that will fail your lab attempt. Cool.

Multicast tomorrow.