David's CCIE: R+S Thread

gorebrush

Today is the first day in a long while I'll been worrying about "whether I'll make it in time".

While I've tried my best, studying has been slower this past few weeks than in previous months. I've got 5 full months left to go before October and most of September I've got booked off work in preparation. All I can do now is pick up the pace again and see what I've got in the tank. There is a mobile lab in February in London should I fail attempt number 1, though I was tempted to forego October altogether and hold off until Feb, but I'm not sure.

I am keen to get this done so I can take a break for a few months because sometimes it just feels like it's all I do. Well, for the main it is, but last few days have been less than productive so I am worried that I am losing my momentum.

I think I just need a good sleep and a regroup and pick up where I left off tomorrow. I've covered all the technology. While I'm not a master yet, I can configure probably 80% by looking at it and rest I can look up. I definitely feel looking back like I have, in general, made very good progress. I just need to pick up the pace a bit to make it in time for October.

I can do this.

ande0255

Are you stuck on any particular subject tou find dry or boring? That kills my study habits, and I don't even notice it's killed my momentum until thd momentum is almost gone.

Kind of funny way I labbed towards the end of my CCNA studies, I'd spend all night on Fridays drinking (which was usual) and labbing (which was not), and I'd keep adding and tweaking configs until I broke the lab. The next day I'd wake up with a headache and little recollection of the config changes I made, and spend all Saturday troubleshooting it until it was fixed, with one hell of a hangover.

Ahhh the good old days. You will be alright though, sounds like you should switch topics for a bit, or start drinking more

gorebrush

Well I started doing the v5 practice labs by Cisco this week. I did the first one, and well I am about 50% of the way through it. What pleases me is that while I did not know all of the commands straight off - at least for the 50% that I have completed - for what I have seen, I at least knew what the solutions were to the problems. I need a lot more practice at this point - but at least I can glean from the questions what solutions need to be in place.

I could really do with INE releasing the full v5 practice labs - and soon, but in the meantime I do still have plenty to keep me occupied. I think overall I am in a good place in my studies, there is still much to do though.

gorebrush

Heh, so I am really at a bit of a crossroads at the moment. Progress on the study has been slow but quality has been OK - at least for what I have managed to do. I have to pay for my lab attempt in July and as it stands I am really tempted to forget about October and head for Feb 2015 as this is the next mobile Lab in London. I feel I am very competent but the fear of failure is too great. I want to go into this exam and absolutely nail it. IT's not like I can't do it - I just see some of the posts that people are putting up and I'm thinking "Well, I don't really think about all that" and I'm not getting into the real nitty gritty.

I think the best thing I can do is to crack on until the end of June and see how I feel then. If I can put in a good solid 6 weeks of study between now and then - I believe this will help me decide what it is I want to do.

If I *do* decide to wait until Feb then it isnt the end of the world as another 4 months would be very welcome. We'll see. Just need to ensure I am getting my hours in really.

gorebrush

Labbed up IPsec VPN and VTI's with IOSv this morning.

Nice and easy, just a few lines of configuration to think about.

IOSv is also nice.

I'm selling a bunch of routers too if anyone is interested.

gorebrush

So this morning I very nearly made a very expensive mistake. I spotted a lab slot for a week later than mine so I booked it and dropped my current booking.

Thing was, I assumed the lab is still in the middle of London, so proceeded to look at trains/hotels.

Then I actually looked at my confirmation mail only to realise that the *actual* location of the lab is actually not even in the middle of London - it's very near Heathrow and very feasible to drive to and requires one less day of actual hotelling.

Can drive up on the Monday, get some rest, go scope out the place, then go lab it up on the Tuesday.

Hotel and travel cost is now only ~ £130 instead of the near £250 I budgeted for central London, and I've got my car too. Bonus.

deth1k

hang on isn't there one near Finsbury Circus? :O also what's your new date, might see you there :P

gorebrush

I thought it was there, but I was indeed wrong. Just as well, I nearly splurged £300 on hotels and travel for the wrong place.

deth1k

so where does it say which office you will be taking exam at? i've had my payment confirmation (not taken out yet) however it didn't say where it was :S

gorebrush

The e-mail that they sent confirming my lab slot told me the address.

deth1k

when's your lab date? just managed to find the address which was emailed when i made initial booking and not payment. Feltham Office it is for me then :P

gorebrush

14th October

gorebrush

So yesterday was the introductory session for the RSv5 from INE. Hope you all watched it, their new ATC class is starting next week and Brian did mention that he'll probably be covering the new v5 specific topics first. Can't wait. I've also got the v5 workbook and I've started browsing through that and taking some exercises.

I've settled on my final build for practice and I'll be doing what INE are - I've got 10 x CSR builds and I'll probably use Rack Rentals for what I can't lab at home. The CSR is great to work with, I can leave the routers running more or less all the time and it doesn't burn too much electricity. Least I hope not

Top tip from the introductory session, for those of you who are using the CSR: -

With SecureCRT you can drag and drop most of their config files onto the CSR telnet window (make sure it has "enable" and "configure terminal" at the beginning otherwise you'll have a bad time doing this) and then you can issue the following commands: -

copy runn flash:myconfig.cfg

This is handy because you can entirely replace the running configuration with whatever you have in flash.

So, I did a write erase and reloaded all my devices to get a blank config, then did

copy runn flash:blank.cfg

Then to copy any other config that you have in flash into memory, simply invoke: -

config replace flash:myconfig.cfg

This then means you can jump back and forth between all configurations because there is no "physical" connectivity to worry about on the CSR's as they run across a vSwitch anyway.

Again, using SecureCRT you can issue this command to all sessions, so you can load configs on all 5, 10, 20, however many CSR's you happen to have loaded up at the time.

So I also did Foundation Lab 1 - and most of my base switching and routing skills are fairly sound enough to get on with that. I think I'll use some rack rental to cover more larger topologies while I'm waiting for INE to push the rest of their foundation/full practice labs up though. Plenty still to do but I like it when I know I can practice effectively. I've still got a lot of reading to do at this point, and I'm still way off a CCIE passing Lab, but now is the time to get really stuck in. 5 montes to go, and I've got time on my side - of course -as long as I use it wisely!

gorebrush

So 550 reading hours and 250 labbing hours done. Not where I thought I would be at this point. I think I have concentrated more on reading/videos up until this point than practicing. I think this has actually helped because I don't spend a lot of time fumbling around the command line. I know a lot of where the actual things are that I need to configure, but I still need a lot more practice to help get my speed up and refine my configuration skills. I'm now going through the v5 workbook from beginning to end (again) to see if I have any fundamental weak areas. Only up to RIP at the moment as I've gone more or less through the switching and the basic routing sections in only a few hours. RIP is not presenting too many issues, though some of the more advanced stuff towards the end needs another run or two. I believe my theory is fairly sound though. 550+ hours of reading and videos I think have helped immensely, but we are not done yet, not by a long shot.

I just need a lot more practice is about the key thing I can take away at the moment.

xnx

Wow, still up at this time :O

I finished my lab session at 2AM and can only imagine the motivation needed to study for a CCIE; I've not even fully covered CCNP route redistribution yet

How much of a salary increase can you expect? I've seen CCNP jobs (3 years~ exp) at 35-40k near me... i'm guessing your aiming for 50k ish?

gorebrush

Hah I'm at work I work night shifts, 12 hours so this is just "late evening" for me at the moment.

I'm looking at 60K in a year or two and another CCIE or 2... (I think I could add SP quickly, and I really want to get more DC under my belt too)

gorebrush

So today I have taken some time out to look again at my schedule. I'm feeling pretty cool about it. I'm fairly happy with each technology as an individual unit, and I'm actually happy with things like MPLS VPN and the high level concepts. I think my 555 hours of reading have paid off. High end there is nothing in the entire blueprint that makes me throw a complete "wtf".

My schedule going forward.

June - Will be going through the entire INE Advanced Technology Labs (aka v5 Workbook) and assessing weak areas. Full appraisal of my current knowledge base is what the aim is here.

July + August - This period will be used to practice, practice and practice. Come up with my own labs, and generally try and seek out the most random combinations of the technologies in order to test my skills and speed. I already have a few in mind that I want to build on my own - and generally surrounding MPLS. It is dead easy with my CSR lab now to build 10-15-20 routers and throw some debian clients in there for testing. I like using Debian because the footprint for an installation is less than a 1Gb and I can easily add a GUI or whatever services I want to try and run over it. For things like Multicast testing I'll probably setup a few Windows clients and stream video over that way. I tried this before with my physical topology and that was fun. I'll probably do it again for the v5 lab and probably try some other things like Windows Deployment/Ghost or something which I know is multicast in it's nature.

September - Full lab practice mode and accepting no substitutes. My lab date is October 14th. I'm waiting for approval for my "holiday" this year, I've taken three full shift rotations off in September, so I finish work on the 20th September and do not return until 19th October. I want to go into work holding an A4 piece of paper with my magic numbers on printed as large as I can, and I intend to pin it to my cubicle.

I am fairly aware that Multicast is a weak area of mine, as is QoS, at least from a configuration standpoint. Conceptually I am happy with the what and how.

What I really need to work on, is the "why". It is difficult to glean this sometimes from the videos alone but I have started to read the Cisco DocCD a bit more and there are some fairly good articles on there that go into the design and why you would want to do things a certain way. My job helps a bit with this too as I've got real world exposure to a lot of the technologies. Though annoyingly we never touch OSPF or BGP in any real anger, but that's a minor annoyance.

I've got my ESX server setup a treat now, there are 20 CSR's on standby and 32GB of RAM to power them all. I really have no excuses now

gorebrush

Spent a few hours reviewing Routing TCP/IP Vol 1. I can see a few weak areas to work on, so been labbing them today. Shall continue tomorrow.

gorebrush

I am adding 8 hours to the lab clock today. Finished off RIP and covered pretty much all of EIGRP study today. Nothing scary in there, but I really dig the new Named Mode operation of EIGRP. So much better in terms of logical layout.

For those who haven't seen it yet..

You know that we have the "Classic" configuration of EIGRP where the relevant bits of the config are split between global config mode and the interface level stuff, well not with Named Mode.

I'm not going to write the entirety of what I've learned today, but basically the config is now all kept within the global mode.

So

router eigrp named_mode
ip address-family ipv4 unicast autonomous-system 100

Where the 2nd command should look familiar to you - it is basically saying that for named_mode, we are in AS 100.

From there then all the commands are further split into different sections.

Instead of configuring a summary-address directly under the interface before, now we do: -

af-interface interface gigabit1
summary-address 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 leak-map whatever

For example

Go learn it. It's awesome.

Also, the Wide Metric is handy too, will help compensate for links up to 4.2TB (yep, TB) in bandwidth!

tomtom1

You're making some nice progress. Keep up the good work!

gorebrush

Yes I'm getting there slowly. OSPF lately, read the John T Moy book today and will read through the RFC tomorrow. Then lab it.

Then BGP and I have then completed routing.

Switching I am done with - just need to lab VTP v3. Added bonus - my 2 3750's support it.

gorebrush

Reading RFC's is hard work. They are quite, dry. But, all the information you will ever need is in them.

I'm going to lab OSPF now for the rest of the afternoon, then I can get on with BGP. I think I'll need to revisit some of the newer/different features, i.e. OSPFv3 - but I think I'll leave that until I revise IPv6 as a whole.

I'll be happy once I've mastered BGP properly though. I think I may spend a few days on it as opposed to an afternoon or two just revising it. You can get away with that for RIP and EIGRP, but not so for OSPF/BGP.

Be glad to get the routing protocols done out of the way - I think I'll move onto MPLS after that. In fact, the order they are presented within the v5 lab workbook is pretty much the way I want to tackle it.

gorebrush

So I read the majority of RFC2328 today. It did get a bit hard going though. But I then got into the workbooks and assessed all the tasks and a lot of it made good sense already. Will lab it up tomorrow and OSPF is done. Onto BGP then. Looking forward to that.

Once the routing protocols are done - I can do MPLS then IPv6 to complement the routing protocols.

4 months to go and strangely I'm starting to feel confident.

gorebrush

So, life has altered my plans for me somewhat. I have had to drop my October lab. I'm now heading back to London in Feb of 2015. While I am a little bummed I've got to put it back, well I've got another 4 months to prepare. I'm not desperate to get it done by October, not like my job depends on it, so another few months more time is not a bad thing. Just remember that life does get in the way of these things sometimes.

gorebrush

February 6th 2015. New lab date. Plenty of time to absolutely nail it.

silver145

Good man! glad to see you still going

i just got back from a week bootcamp with Globalknowledge, got week 2 in November so got lots to learn on before then!!


had a question for you: are you using GNS3 for V5? also what ios are you using?

CheerS

gorebrush

Hello - I am still plugging away, albeit very slowly. I've got plenty of time though, but lots of things going on outside of work/studying which has slowed it down somewhat. I must at least attempt in Feb otherwise I'll have to do the written again, but I'll get back into the swing of things.

Also, I'm using combination of CSR and physical routers. I can run 20 CSR's so that'll cover 99% of things. The physical routers are so I can practice the serial stuff and well just coz...

gorebrush

Time to get back on the blogging horse. I really feel that not posting here is detrimental to my overall progress. So the last two days I have spent mainly watching BGP videos or reading BGP books. I've tried some of the exercises and an oft-recurring thing happens - I get bored within minutes of starting to lab I think it's because the amount of configuration involved with BGP is a bit repetitive. I did at least *read* through a fair chunk of the BGP exercises (INE v5 workbook) and they make sense and are easy enough.

I'm hoping the rest of their video's are posted soon. I've seen all the v4 ones, but as I've also been following along with the majority of the v5 - then it's nice to be watching the videos that are mostly relevant (with regard to DMVPN) - to be honest, I'll admit it probably wont make a massive difference long term because BGP is still BGP

I'm getting back into it slowly, I've had a very poor few weeks study due to outside influences. I'm getting back into the groove though, I hope!

gorebrush

Still here, and still plugging away. Watched all the BGP videos from INE ATC v5 - and now I'm going from the beginning again, switching.

Going to watch through videos in bulk and make my final notes, then tackle each section in the workbook. My advice to you is that after putting in well over 600 hours at theory level - coming to the practical side of things is much easier than I used to study this. 6 full months left to the lab and at the moment I am feely quietly confident.

I think I can do this easily enough as long as I keep this pace up. Good luck to all other candidates. I may go quiet for a while, but believe me I am still plugging away at it.

lrb

Awesome work on clocking over 600 hundred hours on the thoery component man! You'll nail the lab if you keep the pace up