New guy going for CCIE

reaper81

Long session...315 minutes of labbing, my longest session so far. Did not take a single break and was able to concentrate the whole time which means my stamina is OK for doing long labs. Felt OK, had some stuff I didn't know how to configure. I know they are weak areas so I need to improve there. Timewise it was OK, doing the lab feels doable timewise. Overall I think I am in a good position if I can keep on pushing. Need to practise on a regular basis and improve on my weak areas.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Long session...315 minutes of labbing, my longest session so far. Did not take a single break and was able to concentrate the whole time which means my stamina is OK for doing long labs. Felt OK, had some stuff I didn't know how to configure. I know they are weak areas so I need to improve there. Timewise it was OK, doing the lab feels doable timewise. Overall I think I am in a good position if I can keep on pushing. Need to practise on a regular basis and improve on my weak areas.

Excellent progress. Try and do one of those a week and then twice a week. You are at a stage now where you want to be building stamina. Concentrating for long periods is key but thats only possible once you know enough fundamentals to be able to handle a practice lab properly, which you do. Too many candidates try and work the long labs too early in their studies leading to frustration and disappointment because they don't know enough. 400 lab hours people, that's what you need to get into this phase of your learning. Metaphorically speaking you are high up the side of everest now and looking back you will see many people still climbing below, but others stranded permanently. They couldn't make 400, and never will. This is the blackbelt, a special forces certification that separates the men from the boys.

reaper81

Had a session booked yesterday but my son had problems sleeping. By the time he went to sleep I had no energy left for studying. Did one lab and that was it. Decided to call it a night and get some more sleep than I usually do and regroup for another session tonight. These nights happen when you are a parent, family comes first. I'm restarting Vol1 and doing the switching part.

reaper81

Big day...Lab has been booked...

Turgon

Good. Get some R&R. You are not working for Cisco lounging around all afternoon doing practice labs. You have an infrastructure to support.

reaper81

Good session tonight. Almost 5 hours of labs. Did Vol1 bridging&switching 1.2 to 1.32. Hopefully I can finish off bridging&switching on sunday. Weekend is familytime. I'm aiming for 500h before the end of October.

reaper81

New session booked for tonight. Will try to finish off bridging&switching, mostly MST and then some other stuff. Need to pretty much finish off one Vol1 section per week now to keep the pace. Is going to be very tough and we'll see if it is realistic. Some sections are short like FR but some are huge like BGP and QoS.

reaper81

Good session. Another 4 hours in the bank. Didn't finish all bridging like I wanted but only 2 labs left and I can do those in Dynamips tomorrow on my commute in. Good to go through the basics again like private VLANS and PAP, CHAP etc. Don't get to use that stuff too often.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Good session. Another 4 hours in the bank. Didn't finish all bridging like I wanted but only 2 labs left and I can do those in Dynamips tomorrow on my commute in. Good to go through the basics again like private VLANS and PAP, CHAP etc. Don't get to use that stuff too often.

Good stuff. I will be doing single Vol 1 sections myself this week. Just blitz through them to keep that config awareness and variations fresh!

reaper81

Tuesday was tough. Planned to do a lot of labbing but energy and motivation was not there. These days will happen, just look at my and Turgons threads. There will always be setbacks, it's how you handle them that makes you a winner. Yesterday was good, 3 hours of Vol1 labbing, finished all the frame relay labs in that time. Most labs were pretty easy, my FR is pretty good by now which is nice considering I knew nothing about it going in my CCIE studies.

Planning to do a Vol2 tonight.

reaper81

No rack sessions was available for thursday so doing Vol2 tonight instead. INE are having bootcamps so racks are booked for two full weeks now, bummer! Will have to fall back to Dynamips for now. Should be mostly fine since I'm doing Vol1 stuff and routing is up next which should be fine in Dynamips.

reaper81

Pretty good session yesterday, 3 hours in the bank. Had to revert to Dynamips since racks are all booked up for two weeks! It takes longer to get started with Dynamips but I was able to run all labs so far, it's routing so it should be fine. Next session will be OER/pfr which I'm pretty clueless about. Probably not heavily tested at lab but you need to know the concepts.

reaper81

Had a tough week. Have not had the right energy level for hitting the labs. Resuming studies today. Studying for CCIE is a marathon and sometimes you need to slow down to speed up later.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Had a tough week. Have not had the right energy level for hitting the labs. Resuming studies today. Studying for CCIE is a marathon and sometimes you need to slow down to speed up later.

Fatigue is a recurring problem for candidates. Rest up and find some momentum this week. I have been fully occupied with the kids this weekend so its been difficult to even get any quality reading in.

reaper81

Yeah, fatigue is a major factor at this stage of preparation. I find myself to be tired a lot of days. Pretty good session tonight, 2.5h of labbing. Tried to run OER on Dynamips and it worked somewhat after some tweaking. Routers need 256 MB RAM minimum to run OER, also you want to run sparsemem to not go past virtual memory limit. Some stuff is difficult to do in Dynamips like send a file over HTTP. I wasn't seeing same results as SG, not sure if it is due to config or Dynamips but will rerun these labs in rack rentals when slots open up. OER is cool but I'm not sure how useful it is in real life. Also ran ODR which is cool for very easy setups.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Yeah, fatigue is a major factor at this stage of preparation. I find myself to be tired a lot of days. Pretty good session tonight, 2.5h of labbing. Tried to run OER on Dynamips and it worked somewhat after some tweaking. Routers need 256 MB RAM minimum to run OER, also you want to run sparsemem to not go past virtual memory limit. Some stuff is difficult to do in Dynamips like send a file over HTTP. I wasn't seeing same results as SG, not sure if it is due to config or Dynamips but will rerun these labs in rack rentals when slots open up. OER is cool but I'm not sure how useful it is in real life. Also ran ODR which is cool for very easy setups.

Interesting. What is 'SG' Daniel?

reaper81

Oh, sorry. SG is Solution Guide. Will have a go with RIP tonight. Should not be any issues in Dynamips with that.

reaper81

Ended up messing around with Dynamips. I noticed that some of the settings for the frameswitch was wrong so needed to tweak that. Should be good to go tomorrow though. Can't remember if I used a different .net file last time around or why I didn't have everything correct. Rack rentals are so much easier... Costs a buck though.

reaper81

Had a good run yesterday. Finished all RIP labs in one night! Didn't rush it either. Pretty much knew all the stuff in there, needed to look at the SG for the conditional default which is kind of a neat trick, tied to a SLA probe

reaper81

Going out with my family tonight for dinner. We are celebrating my 30th birthday which was on 5th of Oct. I'm buying food for everyone, will cost a pretty penny Hoping to get some labtime in when I get back. Next weeks schedule is one Vol2 lab and lots of EIGRP.

jamesp1983

reaper81 wrote: »

Going out with my family tonight for dinner. We are celebrating my 30th birthday which was on 5th of Oct. I'm buying food for everyone, will cost a pretty penny Hoping to get some labtime in when I get back. Next weeks schedule is one Vol2 lab and lots of EIGRP.

Happy belated birthday! You're buying? I'm coming!

reaper81

Thanks! Dinner is over but if I complete my CCIE the dinner is on me in Brussels, lol Got a real nice watch from Michael Kors that I wanted. Have been feeling naked since my old watch broke a couple of months ago. Time to hit the racks!

reaper81

Got 2.5h in. Now hitting the sack. This Vol2 lab has a lot of BGP which is always fun. Conditional advertisement, filtering and regular expressions. All very cool and fun stuff

reaper81

450 labhours reached and closing in on 700h total. Completed the Vol2 I started yesterday. Positive thing is I recognized all the techniques used in the solutions. I still have trouble rembering all the variants of QoS etc but I'm making progress. Think I need another 3-400 lab hours to have a really good shot at the lab. That means almost 100h per month from now on which might be a bit tough. I will give it my best though.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

450 labhours reached and closing in on 700h total. Completed the Vol2 I started yesterday. Positive thing is I recognized all the techniques used in the solutions. I still have trouble rembering all the variants of QoS etc but I'm making progress. Think I need another 3-400 lab hours to have a really good shot at the lab. That means almost 100h per month from now on which might be a bit tough. I will give it my best though.

You have been at it for about a year now and gone really well. I know your weekends are busy with family matters and you have little or no time to study on works time. Hitting 450 lab hours makes you credible. With very few exceptions unless you amass that sort of figure you dont even have a foundation for a lab pass. Those 450 hours have given you that. Many candidates choke before this point. Now you just need to press on and fine tune for a few more hundred, but critically... soon. 100 hours of labtime a month takes some doing when you dont have much quality time to study.

reaper81

Yeah, it will be tough for sure. I have talked to my fiancee and I have given her the last couple of weekends off for studying and when she has taken her exam I will get a couple of weekends to do labs. Also I'm hoping to get a few hours in a work but at the moment I am 100% booked as a consultant. Feels good that I'm at least going to know what it is about after Feb and if I don't pass then I will take a few months to regroup and make it the 2nd time around.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Yeah, it will be tough for sure. I have talked to my fiancee and I have given her the last couple of weekends off for studying and when she has taken her exam I will get a couple of weekends to do labs. Also I'm hoping to get a few hours in a work but at the moment I am 100% booked as a consultant. Feels good that I'm at least going to know what it is about after Feb and if I don't pass then I will take a few months to regroup and make it the 2nd time around.

If you want to know what its about start doing mock exams every 4 weeks.

reaper81

Yeah I should try a mock soon. I try to do a Vol2 every week now and I treat it as a semi mock. I don't use the SG only the DOCCD but it still not like the real deal though. Need to load up with some more tokens if I am going to do mocks.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Yeah I should try a mock soon. I try to do a Vol2 every week now and I treat it as a semi mock. I don't use the SG only the DOCCD but it still not like the real deal though. Need to load up with some more tokens if I am going to do mocks.

Try a mock and get splattered. Just use DocCD and see how you do.

reaper81

Done for the night. 3.5h of EIGRP labs. Got about halfway through all the Vol1 EIGRP labs. Most stuff is very familiar of course but it is easy to forget details like how to calculate metric for unequal cost loadbalancing.