1st CCIE lab attempt blog and help for candidates.

Turgon

INE Vol III Lab 2 - Ongoing..

I got switching and WAN done today and went onto RIP. But it was a busy day with a number of meetings at work that left me with much to think about. I went for a second session but it's 9:23 pm now with an hour on the clock. We got the kids off to bed after a very busy day at work, Im tired. Time to sack it and enjoy the rest of the evening with a beer with my wife. This means I will have to do another session to finish this thing tomorrow which costs money but I see no point clattering this lab for another hour. I need a break. Much going on at work to ponder over..

The main thing is I did a session the second day after returning to this stuff and I have to say, when I did have time to get down to it today it flowed rather well. Good. Its a long game this, no point killing yourself for a week only to stop studying for the next three. Overall, progress. On to 1000 lab hours..

Turgon

INE Vol III Lab no 2 - DONE

Well not quite actually. I ran out of racktime to do sections 5.2 (AS-Path Prepending) and 5.3 BGP Summarisation, but the solutions make sense to me so I will call it. Buying another rack slot to complete two questions is lunacy and Im too tired to start another one this evening. A good session today.

Turgon

I was polishing off the remaining sections in INE Vol III lab no 3 today when it became apparent that my previous lab session was not saved at the point I left it. So the session became fix what was missing, IGPs and BGP mostly. Still it's all good practice. Then I got too busy at work and had to leave it.

Turgon

Up a 6am this morning, drive to site and all morning configuring in the DC. Everything fixed up. Long drive home then the weekend followed by house stuff, packing etc. No labs planned or possible. Tired.

Turgon

Work for house moving continues this weekend. Saturday was busy enough on that front. Last week was a good one for lab prep and I will have time in the week ahead to continue pressing on with more INE Vol III labs. Cool.

Turgon

Famous last words. I have four hour long meetings on Monday at work. Lab plans for the day destroyed. Try again Tuesday.

Turgon

Had an early start so managed to get a couple of lab hours in before the busy day started. Hit up INE VOL III lab no 2 and did the IGP section again. Ran out of time to troubleshoot some minor peering issues but good practice anyhow. I will call it quits on lab no 2 now. On to no 3 next session..

Turgon

Full on day today. Family time and lots of packing to do this evening. On the road tomorrow.

Turgon

The move to the new house is over. Exhausting. Back to lab practice in the week ahead..

bertieb

Congrats on the move Turgon, and still wishing you all the best with the CCIE-a-thon.

Turgon

This is proving way more difficult than I had hoped. Im far too busy at work to engage in any lab prep. In the evenings my wife needs a hand with the kids and there is lots to do as we are still unpacking in the new place. My best option for a week or two is read Vol II and update my notes on the technologies. I have forgotten many things. I have a week vacation coming in a couple of weeks so I could get some labtime in every other evening when the kids are in bed, but during the day I will need to take the strain with the kids and help sort out a thousand things in the new place. No real lab time possibilities during the day without a lot of grief at home.

Turgon

An early start. Notes being updated with the content I dumped into mnemosyne earlier in the year and they are taking shape nicely. I noticed I only put the INE Vol II questions in for some of the topics so I need to check the solutions guides for those. IPv6, Multicast done yesterday evening, RIP this morning. I will press on today and get the rest of the IGP Q + A's in there. Should be a very helpful revision aid this. Aside from the usual enemy, time to study which is more compressed than ever on the home front as we have just moved into a new house, three technical ones need to be countered..

1. Filtering and Best Path. I blow on this because without regular practice you just lose the instinct for the mechanics. My notes will help here and if I can get these down pat it will take me a long way. They are everywhere on the blueprint for almost all protocols.

2. Post core tasks. MPLS/IPv6/Multicast/QoS/Security/IP Services/Systems Management
Im off base on these and they must be made stronger. Again, notes and reading.

3. Troubleshooting. Need to work the TS vendor materials for this later in the year.

Wrapping around all these is the core practice which is the foundation for a lab pass, but Im actually feeling pretty good about that. It isn't as strong as it needs to be yet but just a few recent lab sessions told me that the fingers remembered enough for these topics to be much stronger by year end with more practice. Practice and the recall will do the rest.

July/August/September..revision, revision, revision. October mock, then revision and November mock. Troubleshooting December for fun. Written January if my lab prep has improved. Mocks and revision Jan/Feb/March. Lab April 2012.

Back on with the note taking now..

reaper81

Looks like you have a plan, I hope you can keep up with it. With the amount of hours you've already put in you just need to push to get over the top.

The last week with Jason passing and also that I have realized the insane amount of time you have to put into this I'm trying to keep to a stricter schedule.

If you do some Vol2 labs give me a ping if you get stuck on something and we can discuss and compare notes etc.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Looks like you have a plan, I hope you can keep up with it. With the amount of hours you've already put in you just need to push to get over the top.

The last week with Jason passing and also that I have realized the insane amount of time you have to put into this I'm trying to keep to a stricter schedule.

If you do some Vol2 labs give me a ping if you get stuck on something and we can discuss and compare notes etc.

hehehe..I have put a lot of elapsed time into the track, but I haven't overdone the amount of time I have actually spent preparing. 1000 hours of lab time isn't uncommon, it's just lots of CCIE candidates manage to compress it into an 18 month timeframe. In some senses my study hours are higher than someone who studies like that because you have to return to things after gaps. Everyone's bandwidth to study is a little different. For my part my job description tells me I already have the sort of job that CCIE's want and I have been flat out doing it for over a year now both running a complex SP and leading it's redesign. A job like that really takes your energy and focus all day long often with fallout into the evenings and weekends. I have to get results and lead a busy and experienced technical team which is under pressure. Once home in the evenings I need to disconnect and my family need me. Long rack sessions in the evenings would put pressure on us at home and make me fatigued for work. Can't afford that, I need to hit my targets there! Weekends rarely open up the possibility to disappear into the study for a 6 hour stint on labs as my wife has plans for me and the family

These are my realities and Im comfortable with that. For my part I have a great job with no obligation to pass this thing. At the very least my dipping in and out of this thing has certainly helped me in my work the last 4 years.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

The last week with Jason passing and also that I have realized the insane amount of time you have to put into this I'm trying to keep to a stricter schedule.

I think your process is just fine. Be wary of comparisons with other candidates. The main ingredient to a lab pass is daily configuration on routers and switches for an extended period of time. 2 hour sessions work, 3 hours are better. At the weekends you are looking at 4 hour minimum sessions Saturday and Sunday. If you can do that for 9 months you are good to go. The most important thing though is regularity, even if you cant amass long sessions each day or each evening you want to be studying daily. A lot of candidates throw everything they have at super intensity study regimes only to run out of gas in a matter of months. Often this is because they have too much going on at work and at home and they run into issues on both of those fronts. There are things going on outside of studytime that are also important like your job and your personal life. Both make demands on your study capacity. So yes, keep a stricter schedule but make sure you balance the other things out as well.

reaper81

My current schedule is to do 4 x 4hr sessions per week, I do these during the weekdays. I know that I will probably have to use the weekends also but so far I have made them familytime only. That is the only time I can truly dedicate to the family but I might have to sacrifice at least one of either saturday/sunday for labs.

Either that or do all weekdays 5x 4hr sessions. CCIE is tough on the family indeed.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

My current schedule is to do 4 x 4hr sessions per week, I do these during the weekdays. I know that I will probably have to use the weekends also but so far I have made them familytime only. That is the only time I can truly dedicate to the family but I might have to sacrifice at least one of either saturday/sunday for labs.

Either that or do all weekdays 5x 4hr sessions. CCIE is tough on the family indeed.

I think hammering 4 evening sessions a week after work is not bad going at all to be honest. I certainly couldn't keep that up after busy days at the office. It would cause a lot of grief at home as well as after work Im needed at home to give my wife a hand with the little ones until 9pm. If you go for weekends you really need some buy in from your wife because it will be a regular thing and it gets old for many wives. For my part weekend mornings are a very busy time for the family getting the kids up, dressed, having breakfast and what have you so I cant do labs then. The afternoon and early evening is family time, shopping and chores. That's important for all of us because the working week is really full on. It's also when my wife gets a break from running the home all week and running after two small children. So there is real time pressure. Disappearing into the spare bedroom to do racktime will take large chunks of time from somewhere at the weekend. Guess you will have to talk it over indoors. My wife's mantra is I have a great job and dont need the CCIE, especially if its going to take me away from family interaction in a big and regular way which it would do. My boss feels the same way.

Turgon

More INE Vol II RIP, EIGRP and OSPF configs transferred from Mnemosyne into my word document. Over 80 pages now and the subject sections are starting to look really well. Reads well too, you can see the symmetry in the command line syntax across various protocols. Easy revision notes that should get my practice lab marks up nicely.

Turgon

On vacation for a few days now. It's been a tough year professionally and on the homefront. When I return from leave work commitments will get harder until the end of the year and I must focus and lead the teams. I shall continue to keep this individual thread going but otherwise that's it on TE for a while..

reaper81

Sorry to hear that but glad you are doing so well on the job. Your time will come eventually when everything settles down.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Sorry to hear that but glad you are doing so well on the job. Your time will come eventually when everything settles down.

I doubt it. Once you are past the CCIE level they work for you, but we can dream! It's fine. I have the 'Job'. If I have time, I will be a CCIE but my boss would rather I carry on getting results than get distracted 'with all that'.

Turgon

BGP note taking sometime this weekend. Configs from INE Vol II.

Turgon

On vacation but no studies yet, still enslaved getting stuff out of boxes, putting up shelves and other crap in the new place. Took a peak last night at some work related project stuff I need to pull together.

Turgon

Im thinking of setting up a wireless enabled rack in the garage. Has anybody done this? Perhaps if I connect the termserver to a hub with an AP that would suffice.

alan2308

All my equipment is in the basement. I have an old Linksys router that I flashed with DD-WRT and configured as a wireless bridge connecting it to my home network. It works great.

Turgon

The weekend. An enormous week ahead at work going by the number of architecture meetings I have been invited to. Many of them I have to lead and give whiteboard presentations. If I can get on top of the remaining house stuff my wife wants doing today I may get a gap to do some BGP studies. Get it out of mnemosyne and into my notes. That would complete the EGP/IGP work nicely. Just all the other things then.

Turgon

A full on week of implementation meetings for a major UK wide design Im leading at work as Technical Architect, also presented to operations and training new engineers on the network migration. Friday spent designing a converged WAN solution encorporating IPS, Internet, MPLS with VRF lite, QoS requirements and 6500 headaches. Progress made. No time for CCIE studies. This weekend, cleaned my car and picked raspberries with my wife and son. We pulled 2 kilos so need the same in sugar to make the jam. Many build and migration headaches in the weeks ahead but a good week on design/build and migration meetings so it's all good.

Turgon

Gardening and a day with the kids. No time for studies on Sunday.

Turgon

An exhausting but productive week at work on the MPLS core design and DC migration involving 6500's, ASA, ACE et al. We may spend another couple of million dollars. No studies possible. Gave Cisco a grilling today on metro switches. It's all good.

jamesp1983

Turgon wrote: »

An exhausting but productive week at work on the MPLS core design and DC migration involving 6500's, ASA, ACE et al. We may spend another couple of million dollars. No studies possible. Gave Cisco a grilling today on metro switches. It's all good.

I want your job.