New guy going for CCIE

reaper81

Did two hours of labs yesterday. Unfortunately Graded Labs has now switched to their summer time schedule which means one hour less for me. I can only lab when my son is asleep and the S2 slot is from 17.00 pm to 22.30 pm. That means I have to make two reservations or start looking at Dynamips again.

hono

reaper81 wrote: »

That means I have to make two reservations or start looking at Dynamips again.

For Dynamips, I thinks it's a good deal,
I use it for my labs ( with four external switches plus one for the QinQ)
I didn't have any big problem with dynamips, juste fixe speed and duplex and "ip ospf mtu-ignore when it's necessary...
last week , i finished ine lab6 vol2,
This week i work with lab 3 and 4 vol 3 for speed...
Dynamips is good and I can spend more time for lab...

Daniel

reaper81

Hi,

Yes, Dynamips is definately good if you have external switches but I don't. I still have plenty of tokens and I have gotten used to the ease of renting not needing to remap interfaces and redo configs etc. I had a session going tonight but got disturbed since I'm on call and didn't that much done. New attempt tomorrow at labbing.

jason_lunde

reaper81 wrote: »

Hi,

Yes, Dynamips is definately good if you have external switches but I don't. I still have plenty of tokens and I have gotten used to the ease of renting not needing to remap interfaces and redo configs etc. I had a session going tonight but got disturbed since I'm on call and didn't that much done. New attempt tomorrow at labbing.

sounds like your doing good man. I am still chugging along 2-3 hours a night and 6+ hours/day on the w/e. Thank god my wife is understanding. I just switched jobs, so my studying on the dollar anymore is non-existent as I need to concentrate on the new duties and professional relationships. I have been hitting qos pretty hard, and have a mock-lab on saturday morning...5am..yipee. Glad to see you still blogging, I update mine about every other week still. Later reaper.

reaper81

Hi Jason,

Great to hear from you. I haven't made as much progress as I would have liked but still I'm reading and labbing at a regular basis which is what it is all about. You seem to be doing really great, congrats on the new job! I am hoping to get more time available at my job, I have a new boss and I have explained the need for her and as our partnership with Cisco is hanging on a thin thread right now she seems very understanding.

reaper81

Been on vacation the last week and went skiing, had a great time. No Cisco for a week. Back labbing tonight though. Got stuck on IRB because of a silly VTP issue, I was assuming pre config was working. Now I know to not trust configs

killuah72

reaper81 wrote: »

Hi,

Yes, Dynamips is definately good if you have external switches but I don't. I still have plenty of tokens and I have gotten used to the ease of renting not needing to remap interfaces and redo configs etc. I had a session going tonight but got disturbed since I'm on call and didn't that much done. New attempt tomorrow at labbing.

Hell yeah dude. My company has a lab available for lab prep but I stopped using it even though it's free because they don't have the INE's "easy mode" button to apply all the configs needed. INE's lab rocks.

PsychoFin

reaper81 wrote: »

Been on vacation the last week and went skiing, had a great time. No Cisco for a week. Back labbing tonight though. Got stuck on IRB because of a silly VTP issue, I was assuming pre config was working. Now I know to not trust configs

Nice on you to get some time off! Where did you go skiing?

Keep it up!

Cheers,
fin

reaper81

We went to a place called Branäs in Sweden. It's a very calm place with focus on the families, so not much after ski parties etc. Perfect for me and my family and my girlfriends parents have a house nearby only 10 minutes away. Been there two years in a row now and it's going to be an annual thing.

I wanted to do some labs tonight but no slots at graded labs. Will try tomorrow again.

PsychoFin

reaper81 wrote: »

We went to a place called Branäs in Sweden. It's a very calm place with focus on the families, so not much after ski parties etc. Perfect for me and my family and my girlfriends parents have a house nearby only 10 minutes away. Been there two years in a row now and it's going to be an annual thing.

I wanted to do some labs tonight but no slots at graded labs. Will try tomorrow again.

Sounds like a nice place. I've been to Åre and Härjedalen a couple times over the years, but haven't heard of Branäs.
Good luck getting some lab slots. I've got SWITCH scheduled for next week and then I'm done with the NP and I will decide if I have the time to go after the big #s!

Cheers,
Fin

reaper81

Did 3 hours of labbing tonight. I'm moving slowly through the vol2 labs, it's taking me a long time to complete them but I don't want to rush them. Closing in on 150 hours of labbing. All I can say is that this exam is a beast. Jason, did you feel it took a while to get the groove of the vol2 labs?

PsychoFin

Wow, I remember when I first saw your thread and you were starting written prep... and now you've already done 150 hours of lab prep! Gotta love your work ethic dude!

Keep it up!

Cheers,
Fin

reaper81

Thanks Fin!

I really do try to keep my studies a regular thing and I think that is the key to success. I have pretty much been studying non stop since I went to the university and I guess I just really like to learn new things.

The backside of it is I have no time to do novel reading etc but I can do that when I get old

jason_lunde

reaper81 wrote: »

Did 3 hours of labbing tonight. I'm moving slowly through the vol2 labs, it's taking me a long time to complete them but I don't want to rush them. Closing in on 150 hours of labbing. All I can say is that this exam is a beast. Jason, did you feel it took a while to get the groove of the vol2 labs?

Ya, at least 5 or 6 labs, and right when you think youve gotten the hang of it they show you something you have never seen before. I have done the majority of them now, and have done 4 mock labs..I feel pretty good and my latest scores have reflected that as well; so its all starting to come together. It is fun, but it is alot of work. You seem to be doing well though man! Keep it up and maybe we will graduate around the same time...

jason_lunde

Have you started doing any of the volume 2 troubleshooting labs yet? I kind of wish I had done them in sequence as I was doing the full-blown volume 2 configuration labs. They are pretty good little troubleshooting exercises..they have opened my eyes up to some of the stranger things that can happen in a network because of configuration mishaps.

reaper81

No, I haven't done them yet. Do you think it's better to run them in order? I was holding out on them because I'm spending so much time just getting through the config section. It takes more than a week for me right now to go through a vol2 lab. Hopefully I will improve on my speed soon, I did have quite a good session tonight. I'm starting to feel that I recognize a lot of stuff which is a first step. I think I will have try to squeeze in some more time for labs but it's difficult with a family. I would like to do some labbing at work but time is scarce right now since one of our CCIE's is quitting and I'm taking over his most important customer.

reaper81

Did some more vol2 labbing tonight. Doing regular labs is really the key to keep your config skills up. I'm now almost at 155 hours of lab preparation but there is still several hundreds of hours to go. I can easily understand how people get burned out preparing for the IE.

PsychoFin

Hey,

Check this post out on the INE blog by Petr. He details a great study plan for how to tackle the RS:

How to pass the CCIE R&S with INE’s 4.0 Training Program | CCIE Blog

reaper81

Hey Fin,

That is actually the program I am following I am doing the core training now, I'm almost finished with vol2 lab3. However I am having trouble completing a vol2 lab in a week but I hope I will pick up some pace after doing a few more of these. Petr is great, he writes great blog posts at INE and I recommend everyone to read his posts on OSPF, spanning-tree etc.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Hey Fin,

That is actually the program I am following I am doing the core training now, I'm almost finished with vol2 lab3. However I am having trouble completing a vol2 lab in a week but I hope I will pick up some pace after doing a few more of these. Petr is great, he writes great blog posts at INE and I recommend everyone to read his posts on OSPF, spanning-tree etc.

Are you doing your Vol2 labs on dynamips or remote racks? I found I needed multiple rack sessions spread across several days to get through a Vol2 lab end to end.

To what extent are you getting stuck and being forced to consult the solutions? Ideally as you get more practice and see more permutations of configurations in the labs you find that more of the stuff a lab asks you to do you can get right first time. Regularity is the key.

To those viewing this thread who are freaked out by the idea of a single lab taking a week of elapsed time to complete, this is quite normal. In the early days of lab prep, taking out an 8 hour lab in a couple of back to back rack sessions isn't practical as the candidate is confronted by far too many unfamilar tasks and traps in the workbook. At the same time the speed and recall of how to configure and verify is not at the required level. This comes with time. The important thing during your first pass of a workbook is to finish all the labs no matter how long it takes, and try and understand what the purpose of each exercise is. You will improve on pass no 2.

Your looking at 300+ hours to get through Vol 2 with substantially less time for pass no 2 and no 3.

reaper81

I am only using remote racks right now. I used Dynamips for vol1 but now I'm only using rentals. I just find it so much more comfortable. I know all features will be available and I know I won't get stuck on issues not related to my studies. I also like the feature that I can load the config on all devices that I saved last time and it even autosaves my configs when my session ends. I have almost 900 tokens left and I will use them and see how far that gets me and maybe shop some new ones when there is a deal.

I do not get stuck as often as first and I do recognize more and more features but if we look at lab3 I had never used IRB, I didn't how to manipulate OSPF LSA pacing or even what it was. I knew about conditional advertisement in BGP but was not sure of the configuration. I feel pretty comfortable with MPLS and MPLS VPN but sometimes forget something in the configuration. Multicast is OK but need more practise there as well. Did not have much experience with reflexice ACL's or TCP SYN intercept so need to look more at those. Had not configured GLBP in a long while but recognized most of it through knowledge of HSRP etc. QoS is a beast in itself and I definately need more practise there.

I am moving along without getting stuck on every task but I usually do 2.5-3h per rack session so it takes me at least 3 or 4 sessions to complete a vol2 lab.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

I am only using remote racks right now. I used Dynamips for vol1 but now I'm only using rentals. I just find it so much more comfortable. I know all features will be available and I know I won't get stuck on issues not related to my studies. I also like the feature that I can load the config on all devices that I saved last time and it even autosaves my configs when my session ends. I have almost 900 tokens left and I will use them and see how far that gets me and maybe shop some new ones when there is a deal.

I do not get stuck as often as first and I do recognize more and more features but if we look at lab3 I had never used IRB, I didn't how to manipulate OSPF LSA pacing or even what it was. I knew about conditional advertisement in BGP but was not sure of the configuration. I feel pretty comfortable with MPLS and MPLS VPN but sometimes forget something in the configuration. Multicast is OK but need more practise there as well. Did not have much experience with reflexice ACL's or TCP SYN intercept so need to look more at those. Had not configured GLBP in a long while but recognized most of it through knowledge of HSRP etc. QoS is a beast in itself and I definately need more practise there.

I am moving along without getting stuck on every task but I usually do 2.5-3h per rack session so it takes me at least 3 or 4 sessions to complete a vol2 lab.

Did you configure the parts you were clueless on by raiding the solutions or using the doccd? For my part I think its fine on the first pass to plunder the solution, get it built and have a look and then move along. You can make a note to yourself to find the stuff on documentation for future reference. You will come up against a lot of things in the workbooks that you have either never seen or had little exposure of but that's all to the good. Just get through the first pass of the workbook labs, pass no 2 and no 3 are the gamechanger!

reaper81

The things I am totally clueless on I copy from the SG and go back and practice vol1 and do reading about the topics. If I feel that I have a sense for what is right but need a bit help with config I check the DOCCD.

It's kind of annoying though that the PDF is protected so I either have to type things manually or "print" the document to a .XPS and copy from there but that gives me wonky formatting, still better than typing for hand though. Did you have the same problem?

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

The things I am totally clueless on I copy from the SG and go back and practice vol1 and do reading about the topics. If I feel that I have a sense for what is right but need a bit help with config I check the DOCCD.

It's kind of annoying though that the PDF is protected so I either have to type things manually or "print" the document to a .XPS and copy from there but that gives me wonky formatting, still better than typing for hand though. Did you have the same problem?

Not sure what you mean about the typing issue? My docs are protected as well so I couldn't copy and paste config from the workbook into mnemosyne. It was 40 hours of pure hell going through 2000 pages of labs and painstakingly typing anything I found of interest in the workbooks into my flash cards (which I haven't looked at in 3 months).

hono

If you want to copy the docs ine for taking notes, use linux
there is no protection,

Daniel

Turgon

hono wrote: »

If you want to copy the docs ine for taking notes, use linux
there is no protection,

Daniel

Helpful tip Daniel thanks. I imagine the vendors are cursing linux for their copyright protection. Mind you most of the workbooks are on rapidshares these days. Im suprised they make any money to be honest.

shodown

I'm good friends who works at one of the vendors and downloading is a big deal. However with that said people who are serious about getting there number will usually buy workbooks, tokens or videos and come to a bootcamp. They may not buy 100 percent of the stuff, but they buy a good portion. Also they have had guys/gals and stolen everything and they send money when they pass.

hono

Me, I was among those who bought the four volumes, (I was lucky that my employer has purchased them for me...)
And for the labs, he lent me five switches, and I use dynamips for routers.

Daniel

reaper81

I also have the four workbooks, got a good deal on them, a couple of hundred dollars is nothing when you look at the insane amount of time needed to produce material like that. I also think the all access pass is a good idea but not sure if I should get it. There is also a risk of having too much material and going through it won't be effective.

Forsaken_GA

shodown wrote: »

I'm good friends who works at one of the vendors and downloading is a big deal. However with that said people who are serious about getting there number will usually buy workbooks, tokens or videos and come to a bootcamp. They may not buy 100 percent of the stuff, but they buy a good portion. Also they have had guys/gals and stolen everything and they send money when they pass.

Well, the stuff ain't cheap. For me, any purchase over 300 bucks takes some talking myself into. So I can understand why folks may look for other methods to acquire.

Personally, I'd like to always be certain I have the most up to date stuff. I haven't actually purchased either INE or IPExperts stuff yet, I'm still wading through my rereads of the important tomes before I begin anything more than light lab work, but I'll need them soon, so I've got a pile of cash sitting back for the next time one of the vendors offers a hefty discount.