New guy going for CCIE

reaper81

Longest racksession so far, 5 hours. Decided to finish this Vol2 lab no matter what time it took. I'm trying harder to keep a schedule. On the positive note I had no issues at all lasting this long which is promising for the lab. Overall felt pretty good for this lab. Now I'm hitting the sack... It's 1 AM here.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Longest racksession so far, 5 hours. Decided to finish this Vol2 lab no matter what time it took. I'm trying harder to keep a schedule. On the positive note I had no issues at all lasting this long which is promising for the lab. Overall felt pretty good for this lab. Now I'm hitting the sack... It's 1 AM here.

Good work. There will be many 1AM sessions ahead. I think the Vol II lab per week is a good target. The encouraging thing is you are now starting to encounter fewer questions that spook you which means you have done enough practice to get around the blueprint. Putting notes together and revising them will help you get the mechanics down in your mind so you have options to do things as you encounter them in the practice labs. Lab, notes, revise notes, lab, update notes, revise notes, lab..make that a compulsion each day, but also be careful with long stints each evening so you are rested for work and dont get the 'honey we need to talk' conversation from your wife three months from now because by then the damage is done and you will have to scale back your study programme.

reaper81

Thanks Turgon.

Good advice. My plan as you noted is to do one Vol2 lab per week and the scenarios from Vol1 that I couldn't solve for the Vol2 lab.

So my plan is something like this:

Monday - Lab 19.30 - 23.30
Tuesday - Lab 19.30 - late (01.30 ish)
Wednesday - Rest and hang out with fiancee and son
Thursday - Lab 19.30 - 23.30 (finish Vol2, later if needed)
Friday - Rest and hang out with fiancee and son
Saturday - Rest and hang out with fiancee and son
Sunday - Lab 19.30 - 23.30

During labs I take notes. During my commute I revise notes, put stuff into Anki and write blogposts etc and also read and watch ATC.

This gives me around 15-20 hours per week labbing. My fiancee is onboard and the good thing is she is starting to study in the fall. She is going to be a nurse so hopefully some nights we can do studying together.

I know most people say that study during weekends is a must but I'm trying not to sacrifice too much of the weekends since I do spend a lot of time studying during the week.

If I keep to this schedule and I also plan on taking a bootcamp if new employer is onboard then I hope to be close to 1000 hours in early 2012 (february?). That should be enough to give it a good shot at the lab.

hono

Here is my plan for study:

(I use the ine training program 48 weeks)

Monday - Lab 20:00 - 0:00 ( ATC, Vol 1 missin topics..)
Tuesday - Lab 20:00 - 0:00 (Vol 1 and notes)
Wednesday - Family
Thursday - Lab 20:00 - 0:00 (Vol 2 and Vol 4 TS-lab)
Friday - Lab 20:00 - 0:00 (Vol 2 lab)
Saturday - Lab 8:00 - 12:00 (Vol 2 lab) afternoon and rest with family
Sunday - Lab 8.30 - 12.00 (Vol 2 lab) afternoon and rest with family

approximatively 24 hours/week
and all days: Anki,
And audio bootcamps in my travel home/work (1h30/day)

I'll hope try lab in November...if I'm ready

Daniel

reaper81

That is a lot of labbing

Good luck with your studies. If you like we could do some chatting on MSN, AOL etc. I have a few guys preparing for CCIE on there also.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Thanks Turgon.

Good advice. My plan as you noted is to do one Vol2 lab per week and the scenarios from Vol1 that I couldn't solve for the Vol2 lab.

So my plan is something like this:

Monday - Lab 19.30 - 23.30
Tuesday - Lab 19.30 - late (01.30 ish)
Wednesday - Rest and hang out with fiancee and son
Thursday - Lab 19.30 - 23.30 (finish Vol2, later if needed)
Friday - Rest and hang out with fiancee and son
Saturday - Rest and hang out with fiancee and son
Sunday - Lab 19.30 - 23.30

During labs I take notes. During my commute I revise notes, put stuff into Anki and write blogposts etc and also read and watch ATC.

This gives me around 15-20 hours per week labbing. My fiancee is onboard and the good thing is she is starting to study in the fall. She is going to be a nurse so hopefully some nights we can do studying together.

I know most people say that study during weekends is a must but I'm trying not to sacrifice too much of the weekends since I do spend a lot of time studying during the week.

If I keep to this schedule and I also plan on taking a bootcamp if new employer is onboard then I hope to be close to 1000 hours in early 2012 (february?). That should be enough to give it a good shot at the lab.

It's a good plan if it is sustainable. For that you need to consider the impact of study hours on the rest of your life and commitments which you clearly have. Run with the schedule and see if you can keep it up. Best to start modestly, see how it goes and build up from there if the routine affords you some more hours once everyone has acclimatised to it. I have seen a lot of candidates try and slaughter the prep but the programme they give themselves just isn't sustainable. The note taking and reading of notes is key. I do a lot of that myself because my availability to sit down and dedicate 3+ hours to lab sessions is very poor professionally and socially. I find note revision really helpful. You must remember that the workbooks essentially give you exercises to go through that build on one another to provide you with examples of meeting requirements, often in different ways. Once you have done the workbooks, repeating them is useful for speed, getting better at right first time config and deeper appreciation of verification methods (all important). But really, the purpose of the labbook exercise is mostly complete once you have been through them and got your awareness up. What you then need to do is compile an impressive list of notes, lifting the examples off the workbooks into a readable format. Then you revise them. It's the only way to keep the stuff current in your head, particularly if you dont get much regular labtime.

My notes are broken down by protocols. Each protocol has subheadings..basic config, timers, authentication, metrics, filtering, best path, default routing, summarization etc, and over time you can see the parallels of the constructs betwee protocols. This helps with the encyclopedia of knowledge you need in your head to give you the various options to meet the sorts of requirements the labbooks will teach you about.

reaper81

Interesting.

So far the stuff I've put into Anki is config related only. Configure feature x do not use feature y. There are some questions on theory but not that many. Might have to include more stuff. Problem is the time it takes to get everything down and then not having time to revise it.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Interesting.

So far the stuff I've put into Anki is config related only. Configure feature x do not use feature y. There are some questions on theory but not that many. Might have to include more stuff. Problem is the time it takes to get everything down and then not having time to revise it.

It takes bloody ages to get the config content out of the Vol II workbook and typed into a word document running to about 250 pages. But it's worth it!

hono

reaper81 wrote: »

That is a lot of labbing

Good luck with your studies. If you like we could do some chatting on MSN, AOL etc. I have a few guys preparing for CCIE on there also.

Yes a lot of lab, but with a home lab it's more easy..

For chatting, why not, it could also help us and motivate us a little more ...

reaper81

3 hours of labs tonight. I'm trying to keep a schedule so I don't get weeks without labs. Going good so far. My son is visiting his grand parents in the weekend so should be good time to do lots of labs.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

3 hours of labs tonight. I'm trying to keep a schedule so I don't get weeks without labs. Going good so far. My son is visiting his grand parents in the weekend so should be good time to do lots of labs.

Keep at it..500 lab hours

reaper81

No labs today, have two sessions booked for tomorrow. Ended up doing some redistribution labs a friend had created. All good fun

Starting to get a good feel for route redistribution.

aragoen_celtdra

reaper81 wrote: »

No labs today.. Ended up doing some redistribution labs a friend had created. .

Doesn't this constitute a "lab"? =D

reaper81

Yeah it does. Didn't plan on doing any studying but found a new post on his site and couldn't stay away from it Guess I'm really going into study mode.

aragoen_celtdra

reaper81 wrote: »

Yeah it does. Didn't plan on doing any studying but found a new post on his site and couldn't stay away from it Guess I'm really going into study mode.

Sometimes the best learning happens when you don't plan it (unexpected network failure, a question randomly thrown at you, or a friend with an interesting scenario)

reaper81

Good session. Almost another 4 hours in the bank. Need to lookup some stuff on multicast like filtering.

Spent some time today trying to create a devious redistribution lab. This is actually more difficult than expected to create loops etc. It takes a lot of understanding of protocols to be successful. I recommend everyone to try it

Having a friend beta test the lab if it works out well I'll put it on my blog.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

No labs today, have two sessions booked for tomorrow. Ended up doing some redistribution labs a friend had created. All good fun

Starting to get a good feel for route redistribution.

I shouldn't get too hung up on route redistribution. Understand what metrics you need to do it, the feedback problem and the loop avoidance measures i.e tags and route-maps or the distance command. Some of them are native to the protocol anyway i.e eigrp. Also be aware of the redistribute connected problem. Do all that and you are mostly covered.

reaper81

Yeah, I'm done with redistribution. There is a redistribution scenario in pretty much every Vol2 anyways. It's fun creating your own scenarios, when I'm done with the CCIE I think I will crate some labs and TS scenarios for people studying. Not any time for that now though.

Need to do som debugging of PIM to get a complete picture of the join/prune process. Saw an interesting post that describe what happens if RP connects to shared tree and SPT over the same interface.

reaper81

Nice 3 hour session in the morning. Going to watch some videos and maybe come back for either Vol1 or Vol3.

reaper81

Did some Vol3. Had some issues with my broadband so got thrown out a few times which bothered me.

Learned some cool things with virtual link and that you can form OSPF adjacencies even though not on the same subnet.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Did some Vol3. Had some issues with my broadband so got thrown out a few times which bothered me.

Learned some cool things with virtual link and that you can form OSPF adjacencies even though not on the same subnet.

I hope you are keeping notes of these things as you discover them in the workbooks. There are about 400 and you wont remember them. Read your notes often.

reaper81

Yes, I do keep notes. Not of everything but I try to put these special things in notes and often I type in lab scenarios in Anki.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Yes, I do keep notes. Not of everything but I try to put these special things in notes and often I type in lab scenarios in Anki.

Keep doing that. Its a big factor in a lab pass. Once you know the fundamental constructs of the protocols you need to practice the various ways to make adjacencies, filter things, adjust timers and metrics and the best path tricks. Also watch out for fixes to native ways a protocol works that gives another problems..no ip split horizon for IGPs on a hub router, no ip pim nbma for multicast. Without this approach you do labs for the rest of your life. You understand as you go along but you dont retain.

Forsaken_GA

I tend to make notes of the little gotchas as references, it's usually the little one line commands that enable the Stupid Router Trick to solve the task, so those are the ones that are going to fade the quickest, since they're not used all the time.

reaper81

Redid Vol3 lab 7 and went very smooth this time. One command that I should use more often is show ip ospf border-routers, very handy. I should reach 600 hours (total) before the month is over.

reaper81

Picking my son up tomorrow. It's been lonely here without him but study has been good. Will be nice to have him back, he seems to have had a great time with his grand parents. Will try to do another Vol3 lab tomorrow.

reaper81

Weird day. Picked up my son today and really glad to have him back. He fell asleep on the way home which totally messed up his sleeping routing. Fiancee is sick... So couldn't lab until after 21 and then Dynamips decided to be an ass so not that much done today, should probably just call it a day. Might watch a video before going to sleep.

Guess the sweet ain't as sweet without the bitter :P

reaper81

Have been shaping up my multicast a bit. Concepts are pretty simple but need to look ut for RPF failures and multicast over NBMA topologies. Going to do a Vol3 lab tomorrow and then next week is TS. Will try some Vol4 and maybe also ASET labs.

Then after that conquer the beast that is QoS.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Have been shaping up my multicast a bit. Concepts are pretty simple but need to look ut for RPF failures and multicast over NBMA topologies. Going to do a Vol3 lab tomorrow and then next week is TS. Will try some Vol4 and maybe also ASET labs.

Then after that conquer the beast that is QoS.

Ah yes ASET labs. The secret weapon. If only I had access to those

For QoS, write up as many configs as you can find in the workbooks and revise them.

reaper81

Another 2.5 hours in the books. Not having access to rack rental is kind of bugging me out. When you do labs on Dynamips or whatever you spend almost as much time creating workarounds or running into bugs as you do on actual studying. Will have to with what I've got for now. Will try to do some ASET labs this week, hopefully they perform better