New guy going for CCIE

jamesp1983

reaper81 wrote: »

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

That is my number 1 gripe with Dynamips... all of the little Dynamips workarounds and substitutions.

reaper81

Finished my first Cisco ASET TS lab. The topology was 30 routers and some frame-switches, all running IOU. From what I've heard this is very similar to the real TS at the lab. I did well, finished in time and 9 or 10 points out of 11 depending on how strict you grade it. There were to questions that I found to not be totally clear. Have a look at these:

1.2 TROUBLE TICKET 2
R19 should be logging all telnet access attempts, successful or not. Configure R19 as needed such that telnet access is logged.

In the solution they just configured an ACL for the VTY that logged both allowed and non allowed connections. While this provides som logging it does not actually log anything more than packets hitting ACL. My solution was to use login on-success and login on-failure for logging, what do you think?

1.10 TROUBLE TICKET 10
R1’s routing table has a summary pointing to Null0. Modify R1 so that there are no routes to Null0.

R1 had auto-summary turned on. I figured they still wanted the summary but not the discard route so I announced a summary on the Ethernet interface with an AD of 255 which meant the route to Null0 was gone. If the grading script just looks for the route then I would be fine but if it also looks for no auto-summary I would loose points. To me that task is not perfectly clear what is requested of us.

Forsaken_GA

reaper81 wrote: »

1.2 TROUBLE TICKET 2
R19 should be logging all telnet access attempts, successful or not. Configure R19 as needed such that telnet access is logged.

You got tricked by the wording. The task is to log all telnet access attempts, not log which side of the successful/unsuccessful divide those attempts fell on.

If the task had been worded like this -

R19 should be logging all telnet access attempts. Configure R19 as needed such that telnet access is logged.

To remove all suggestion of success/failure in the login attempts, would you still have chosen to implement your solution, or would you have gone to the ACL solution first?

reaper81

Yeah,

I think I got tricked by the successful or not part. The wording is everything and getting accustomed to it will do whonders for the lab.

reaper81

Since beginning to study for CCIE I have now done 500 study sessions (both written and lab) for a total of 578 hours. That is roughly 69 minutes per session which shows that even shorter session help to add up to the numbers.

Next milestone is 600 hours. While all of these milestones are not major in any way it is good to keep track of where you are in your studies and it helps to keep motivated.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Since beginning to study for CCIE I have now done 500 study sessions (both written and lab) for a total of 578 hours. That is roughly 69 minutes per session which shows that even shorter session help to add up to the numbers.

Next milestone is 600 hours. While all of these milestones are not major in any way it is good to keep track of where you are in your studies and it helps to keep motivated.

It all helps. The numbers are frightening for many students who like to rely on marathon sessions. You can't cram 578 hours in a weekend

hono

reaper81 wrote: »

Finished my first Cisco ASET TS lab. The topology was 30 routers and some frame-switches, all running IOU. From what I've heard this is very similar to the real TS at the lab. I did well, finished in time and 9 or 10 points out of 11 depending on how strict you grade it. There were to questions that I found to not be totally clear. Have a look at these:

1.2 TROUBLE TICKET 2
R19 should be logging all telnet access attempts, successful or not. Configure R19 as needed such that telnet access is logged.

In the solution they just configured an ACL for the VTY that logged both allowed and non allowed connections. While this provides som logging it does not actually log anything more than packets hitting ACL. My solution was to use login on-success and login on-failure for logging, what do you think?

1.10 TROUBLE TICKET 10
R1’s routing table has a summary pointing to Null0. Modify R1 so that there are no routes to Null0.

R1 had auto-summary turned on. I figured they still wanted the summary but not the discard route so I announced a summary on the Ethernet interface with an AD of 255 which meant the route to Null0 was gone. If the grading script just looks for the route then I would be fine but if it also looks for no auto-summary I would loose points. To me that task is not perfectly clear what is requested of us.

hello Reaper81,

I did not know ASET lab, I just look at is very interresting,

I will definitely try the TS lab before the end of the week

thank you for the information,

Daniel

Turgon

hono wrote: »

hello Reaper81,

I did not know ASET lab, I just look at is very interresting,

I will definitely try the TS lab before the end of the week

thank you for the information,

Daniel

ASET are the secret sauce to passing the actual lab exam and not generally available. Get some

hono

Turgon wrote: »

ASET are the secret sauce to passing the actual lab exam and not generally available. Get some

yes, I think,

And in addition, there are about thirty labs for R & S...

an additional source of training...

Daniel

reaper81

Added 1100 tokens to my account today. That means I have roughly 1250 tokens so that should put me in good shape for the rest of the time preparing for the lab.

I might do Dynamips for some Vol1 stuff but doing rack rentals lets me focus on technology instead of stuff that is not behaving well or not supported etc.

Tonight is a night off, might do some notes for Anki but other than that need a rest. Back on the rack tomorrow again.

reaper81

Added some notes for Anki. Tonight is lab night and will do an ASET TS lab.

hono

reaper81 wrote: »

Added some notes for Anki. Tonight is lab night and will do an ASET TS lab.

I planned for Saturday morning the two ASET TS Lab,
The first at 8:00 and the second for 10:15...

jason_lunde

Pound that troubleshooting...it will definitely benefit you (it was the most stressful part for me). If you get the time, definitely try to do the vol 2 TS scenarios, and you may even see if you can get to try one of those new 360 labs. I did CIERS-TC-LAB02, which is that 2-hour TS on IOU (30+ devices), and then a 6.5 hour config section. It was quite good, and a little tricky. Plus it helped really get me in the routine of TS and then config, and the pounding it will put on your head. I was gonna give my 2 cents to your question on GS, but you got a pretty good response. I did like your solution but can also relate to the their response. When in doubt..configure both.

Turgon

jason_lunde wrote: »

Pound that troubleshooting...it will definitely benefit you (it was the most stressful part for me). If you get the time, definitely try to do the vol 2 TS scenarios, and you may even see if you can get to try one of those new 360 labs. I did CIERS-TC-LAB02, which is that 2-hour TS on IOU (30+ devices), and then a 6.5 hour config section. It was quite good, and a little tricky. Plus it helped really get me in the routine of TS and then config, and the pounding it will put on your head. I was gonna give my 2 cents to your question on GS, but you got a pretty good response. I did like your solution but can also relate to the their response. When in doubt..configure both.

How much do the 360 TS labs cost for a one time paying customer? Do you have to shell out $$$$$ to join 360?

jason_lunde

Turgon wrote: »

How much do the 360 TS labs cost for a one time paying customer? Do you have to shell out $$$$$ to join 360?

I think I shelled out $350 for that mock exam through Netmasters. I think you know Rauf right? If you give him a call I think they can schedule it for you that way. I know my grades for it were accessed through the 360 portal, so they would probably have to set you up a login. From my experience 360 setup is like INE. You have a portal, but you only see what you have paid for.

Here Turgon, I looked this up for you. This is the same mock I took, but available for $439 through Cisco direct:
https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/market/prod/productView.se.work?/nxt/rcrs/proieidentity/=19420&/nxt/rcrs/aisidentity/=2523

Netmasters is cheaper though. But you can purchase them kind of separately it seems.

down77

reaper81 wrote: »

Added some notes for Anki. Tonight is lab night and will do an ASET TS lab.

Asked my CAM about ASET and he had no clue what it was... how do you like the program so far?

reaper81

I think the TS labs have been good so far. It's good mixing it up a bit. The other vendors material is fine and you shouldn't mix too much, you will only feel unsecure. This stuff is however probably made by people with insight to lab so it is a lot more similar to real lab than the vendor materials.

I might do some regular labs as well later on but I will complete the INE stuff first.

reaper81

Another TS lab completed. This one was really though. The topology is large and it involved lots of PE-CE routing and MPLS VPN. I think I got 6 or 7 tickets correct out of 10 so it was not a disaster by any means.

Tonight I will either do more TS labs or notes revision. Depends if I can get a slot or not.

TesseracT

Just wanted to say I've been enjoying reading about your progress. Not sure if you've mentioned this but do you have any idea yet of when you want to sit the lab?

reaper81

Glad to hear. I do like writing about it for some reason, guess that is why I also run a blog

My plan is to keep labbing, go to Narbiks bootcamp in November if my new employer is willing and then sit the lab in february.

reaper81

Retook one of the ASET TS labs since racks were booked anyway. Made sure I understood all of the solutions. The negative thing about ASET is that you get no SG, only a final configuration file. You don't get the initial configuration so I had to login to all 30 routers and do a show run, save that to a file. Then I did a diff with the final configs to compare what had changed.

It is easy to loose points, you really need to read and understand the tasks. One ticket was to make sure that traffic always went through one router. I used policy-routing for this but I forgot to also apply it locally so that local traffic will go the correct path and not only transit traffic.

jamesp1983

reaper81 wrote: »

Retook one of the ASET TS labs since racks were booked anyway. Made sure I understood all of the solutions. The negative thing about ASET is that you get no SG, only a final configuration file. You don't get the initial configuration so I had to login to all 30 routers and do a show run, save that to a file. Then I did a diff with the final configs to compare what had changed.

It is easy to loose points, you really need to read and understand the tasks. One ticket was to make sure that traffic always went through one router. I used policy-routing for this but I forgot to also apply it locally so that local traffic will go the correct path and not only transit traffic.

it sounds like you're moving right along.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Retook one of the ASET TS labs since racks were booked anyway. Made sure I understood all of the solutions. The negative thing about ASET is that you get no SG, only a final configuration file. You don't get the initial configuration so I had to login to all 30 routers and do a show run, save that to a file. Then I did a diff with the final configs to compare what had changed.

It is easy to loose points, you really need to read and understand the tasks. One ticket was to make sure that traffic always went through one router. I used policy-routing for this but I forgot to also apply it locally so that local traffic will go the correct path and not only transit traffic.

hehehe..you boys are spoiled these days. Back in 2002 when I looked at a ccbootcamp labbook all we got was final config. No explanations at all! It makes you study harder

reaper81

Turgon wrote: »

hehehe..you boys are spoiled these days. Back in 2002 when I looked at a ccbootcamp labbook all we got was final config. No explanations at all! It makes you study harder

Yeah, I guess so. CCIE training material market has really evolved since then. The good thing is that there is a lot of high quality material out there. The bad thing is that people get lazy and lots of people passing that I would not call true CCIEs. CCIE is just a paper though although a very pretty one Knowledge and experience is the ultimate goal.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Yeah, I guess so. CCIE training material market has really evolved since then. The good thing is that there is a lot of high quality material out there. The bad thing is that people get lazy and lots of people passing that I would not call true CCIEs. CCIE is just a paper though although a very pretty one Knowledge and experience is the ultimate goal.

Correct. There is too much spoon feeding in my opinion. We just had one fail our technical interview at work. Imagine having a CCIE and not being hired because you dont know your stuff. The whole operations team is still talking about it. Epic fail.

Ryan82

It's interesting that you would mention this. I interviewed a double CCIE about a month ago and went into the interview thinking that this was all really just a formality considering his credentials. Nonetheless I pretty much gave him the same technical questions I gave to any of the candidates we were interviewing and noticed that any questions that were straight out of a textbook, he was very good at. However, if I presented a more scenario based question that someone would know because of 'eyes on glass' so to speak, or best practices, then he seemed to have a difficult time. Mind you, the scenario based questions I asked were relevent to what was listed in his job history and things that I'm sure you would encounter in a live network.

Turgon

Ryan82 wrote: »

It's interesting that you would mention this. I interviewed a double CCIE about a month ago and went into the interview thinking that this was all really just a formality considering his credentials. Nonetheless I pretty much gave him the same technical questions I gave to any of the candidates we were interviewing and noticed that any questions that were straight out of a textbook, he was very good at. However, if I presented a more scenario based question that someone would know because of 'eyes on glass' so to speak, or best practices, then he seemed to have a difficult time. Mind you, the scenario based questions I asked were relevent to what was listed in his job history and things that I'm sure you would encounter in a live network.

You hear stories of triple CCIE's that are instructors and singularly incapable of teaching even basic fundamentals. People **** the lab exam. At the end of the day you can have all the qualifications in the world, but that's not what people pay you for. It is your ability to find solutions to problems or to provision solutions for customers on sometimes complex commercial networks without screwing up that counts. You dont learn that in books or using home labs. Does anyone have a 6500 at home fully loaded with 300 customers flowing through it?

reaper81

Rack rentals finally open for sessions again. Have one schedule for tonight, will try to complete 2 INE TS labs. Next week I will start to focus on QoS and when I'm done with QoS I will probably take a mock lab to see where I am in my studies.

QoS is a big topic and the program I am following has 4 weeks of QoS. My only concern is that I don't want to stay away from routing&switching for 4 weeks so I might mix it up with some Vol3 labs.

NOC-Ninja

dual screen ubuntu on the VM

yeah. I might take you up on that offer. I'm having problems with Ubuntu seeing my switches. lol

reaper81

Are you doing the breakout switch or the quad port NIC setup? I've never done this myself but the way I understand it you connect routers to cloud which is actually NIC going to breakout switch or to switches. What does your .net look like?