New guy going for CCIE

Turgon

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

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.

To be honest, the biggest expense for me over time is rackhire. I often find I dont have time to use a full 5 hour slot and only use an hour or two, so you end up going through multiple lab slots to complete a workbook exercise. I like using the remote racks but the cost sure adds up.

reaper81

I'm on a business trip to Stockholm. Did some reading on the train and a rack rental from my hotel Have to make use of all chances I get to study. Started a vol3 lab and got about halfway through it.

reaper81

Finished my first vol3 lab yesterday. Did the lab from a train lounge waiting for my train and then continued labbing from the train, worked really well except for the laggy connection

PsychoFin

Wow! Bra jobbat (good job)! That is for sure a unique place and way to study!

reaper81

Did a vol3 lab yesterday. Finished most assignments in half of the time alotted which is positive. I am gaining speed. Did the BGP in the lab with notepad only (about 15 sessions) and got everything right except I had a hyphen in bgp confederation identifier Notepad is definately the way to go to save time.

reaper81

Busy busy day at work today, had no gas left for full scale labs but did some labbing on frame-relay that I will put in a blogpost. I think I finally have it nailed down with LMI, inverse ARP and map statements etc.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Busy busy day at work today, had no gas left for full scale labs but did some labbing on frame-relay that I will put in a blogpost. I think I finally have it nailed down with LMI, inverse ARP and map statements etc.

Thats good work. For me at this stage of your learning you want to become proficient at what I call the major constructs in the topics. That essentially means all the interface level configurations and the global definitions such as VLANs, router instances, peerings and network statements. So you want to be able to build out Frame Relay fairly quickly. The more advanced frame stuff like keepalives, FrEEK, and all the neighbor, OSPF type and split horizon fun you will get down with practice.

reaper81

Yeah, I'm getting better and better on the core topics and I do remember a lot of the commands now compared to earlier. Still I feel like I have a long way to go but it's not easy seeing the goal when you're still not halfway on your run. Doing a lab session tonight hopefully, fiancee is having movie night with her friend.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Yeah, I'm getting better and better on the core topics and I do remember a lot of the commands now compared to earlier. Still I feel like I have a long way to go but it's not easy seeing the goal when you're still not halfway on your run. Doing a lab session tonight hopefully, fiancee is having movie night with her friend.

You're doing fine. At this rate you will have the big stuff down cold by 500 hours. Then its all the tedious minutia, filtering and tuning options that will take you over.

semangka

Just passed the written over 3 weeks ago and after a short break starting with lab preparations using ine material. Starting Januari, took me 3months to prepare using Odom for reference and sticking to the blueprint. Countless other documents (from cisco), used them too.

So I'll be following your thread (and blog) too for the road ahead

reaper81

Congrats on the written semangka. Good luck with your lab studies, will you use the workbooks from INE?

I'm thinking of getting a Cisco Live Virtual premier pass to get access to all the presentations. I heard there is a good one on CCIE studies and lot of other ones as well.

reaper81

Got in some hours in a rack rental tonight. Went OK, need to get more familiar with ZBF though. Never use it at work since we pretty much only use ASA for firewall needs.

jason_lunde

Its a hard subject...once it wraps around your mind a couple of times you will get it. Have you watched any of the older archived CoD's. Brian M. teaches the zbf one in the 10-day series and it is really good. I did a rack rental actually today too...didnt feel like messing with loading configs on my rack today so I used the INE "easy button".

reaper81

Hi Jason,

Unfortunately I don't have the ATC, I'm thinking about getting the new version though. The only problem is that I would like to watch the videos on my commute and they aren't downloadable yet and might be more costly to download them. We'll see what happens.

BTW Jason. I'm thinking about attending a Narbik bootcamp. You went there and liked it right? He has one in the UK at the 31st of October. I don't know if it's too late to take it then, I will probably just be a couple a months away from doing a lab attempt or is that good timing do you think?

jason_lunde

ya man, i would definitely recommend his course...even moreso if you will be coming up on a lab date. He will fill in some gaps for you, no matter where you are in your studies. Plus you get a free lab retake if you fail, and you will get a couple of mock labs and workbooks to do. If you purchase his class through the ccie flyer guys, you can save like 400 bucks or so I think. I would def. give it a run if you get the opportunity.

reaper81

Another session done. Encountered some things I've never seen before like the IOS menu. Really close to 200 hours of lab preparation now. Still learning something new every session hopefully after a couple of hundred more hours I should know most of the stuff that can get thrown at me in the lab.

jason_lunde

man, i remember that lab. I remember being like wtf is this...I showed it to a couple people at work the next day and nobody else know about it. I am on lab 17 in vol 2, and still learning something every lab. Its been really worthwhile regardless of what happens on lab day.

reaper81

Did my first troubleshooting session. Finished in about 70 minutes out of 120 alotted and that was while eating snacks at the same time, lol. I got 60% correct if I grade myself strictly. Some questions I solved the tickets but not in the same way as the solution guide, not really sure how to grade that. Troubleshooting is a lot of fun. I've been doing a lot of troubleshooting a work lately unfortunately the "tickets" at work are much more complex like intermittent packet loss which is not showing up in counters etc. Got myself a Cisco Live Virtual pass, not sure how much I will use it but there are some good presentations available there.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Did my first troubleshooting session. Finished in about 70 minutes out of 120 alotted and that was while eating snacks at the same time, lol. I got 60% correct if I grade myself strictly. Some questions I solved the tickets but not in the same way as the solution guide, not really sure how to grade that. Troubleshooting is a lot of fun. I've been doing a lot of troubleshooting a work lately unfortunately the "tickets" at work are much more complex like intermittent packet loss which is not showing up in counters etc. Got myself a Cisco Live Virtual pass, not sure how much I will use it but there are some good presentations available there.

How does the troubleshooting practice you are doing hang together? Are you using the INE workbooks and a remote rack?

reaper81

Yeah it's all remote racks for me right now. The vol2 labs have a configuration section and a troubleshooting section. I just load a config for the troubleshooting and then try to solve the tickets.

Haven't done that much troubleshooting yet because lack of time so I think I will come back to that when I've completed more of vol2 configurations.

My job is currently setting up a remote lab but I'm not sure it will be enough for the CCIE. I don't want to spend unnecessary time on remapping configs etc. I still have tokens that will last a couple of months and I'll probably refill when there is a 2 for 1 deal. It's not that much cash and the way things are looking now I will have to finish my CCIE so my company can retain it's silver partner status so they should be willing to chip in. Hopefully I can squeeze in a bootcamp later also.

reaper81

Did a session yesterday. L2 stuff was prett easy, L2 hasn't been very difficult so far on the labs. There were some tricky parts of the redistribution, redistribution is one of the most difficult topics for me so far. IPv6 went pretty smoothly and that was all I had time for.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Did a session yesterday. L2 stuff was prett easy, L2 hasn't been very difficult so far on the labs. There were some tricky parts of the redistribution, redistribution is one of the most difficult topics for me so far. IPv6 went pretty smoothly and that was all I had time for.

Congrats on 200 lab hours.

reaper81

Thanks. Next step is 500 hours total which should bring me somewhere halfway what is needed. This journey is so long so it feels good to reach some milestones to show you are doing progress.

reaper81

Did a session tonight. Found out some nifty techniques for filtering packets. VLAN filters (used those before) and policy routing. Never used policy routing to drop packets.

TesseracT

What's the way you're dropping policy routing packets? Are you routing to a next hop which is a static route to null0?

reaper81

TesseracT wrote: »

What's the way you're dropping policy routing packets? Are you routing to a next hop which is a static route to null0?

Almost. You can set the interface to Null0 directly in the route-map. I'm going to write a blogpost on it.

TesseracT

Cool. Never knew you could do it like that. I'll definately check out the blog post

reaper81

Wrote a blog post about lowering CPU load in Dynamips. Everyone using Dynamips should read it. It can do whonders for your CPU. You can find it at Drastically decreasing CPU load in Dynamips Daniels quest for CCIE.

reaper81

Did a 2 hour session labbing, all that I could muster out today. I learned how to setup CPPr and the transport preferred none command. Also learned some more about EEM. Some of these topics I will do blogposts about. Need to learn WCCP and do some more QoS, QoS is a huge topic.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Did a 2 hour session labbing, all that I could muster out today. I learned how to setup CPPr and the transport preferred none command. Also learned some more about EEM. Some of these topics I will do blogposts about. Need to learn WCCP and do some more QoS, QoS is a huge topic.

Yes its big. A difficulty is keeping topics fresh in your mind. The labwork is useful for this, its best to see by doing. But it's time consuming. I have put in a lot of labtime in over the years. I find now that revising my notes daily really helps. I tend to focus on one topic in my notes when I do have time to look at them for an hour. You can get around the whole blueprint in a couple of weeks that way while you continue to put everything together by doing a full lab a couple of times a week.