What's the hardest CCIE topic?

Just wondering what you all think the hardest 1 element of CCIE is? I'm guessing that route redistribution would get the most votes if I could post a poll here but I'm curious.

QoS is a pretty monster topic that I'm trying to slog through at the moment because it just seems neverending... MPLS could also be another sore spot. What are your thoughts?

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Ryan82

QoS for me. It just puts me to sleep.

reaper81

For me personally right now it's route redistribution and QoS over frame relay. I know the basics of route redistribution but I'm trying to focus a lot on it to become a real expert and since it is a very important topic for the lab. QoS as you said is a big part, I know the stuff over Ethernet pretty well but never touched frame relay before studying CCIE so need to learn the FRTS and so on.

I kind of see the training for the CCIE as if I were training as an athlete. It's not that difficult to get somewhat good something but you really need to push to reach that extra level and when you hit plateaus it takes an extraordinary effort to push past it.

Forsaken_GA

multicast is my weakest point, but I'm shoring that up pretty well. It's mostly due to a lack of experience.

QoS is just a huge pain in the ass, having to remember which parameters are in bits, which are in bytes, and the freaking math.

ehnde

Ryan82 wrote: »

QoS for me. It just puts me to sleep.

I couldn't imagine QoS putting me to sleep. At work I saw something horrific happen because of a misconfiguration with QoS that affected thousands of people. I'll never forget it.

And as far as multicasting goes, I've heard someone say you could play around with multicast by streaming to a multicast group with VLC.

jason_lunde

For me, it was multicast and FRTS. FRTS I had never done..and there are more caveats than you could ever imagine. Multicast for me, was something that one minute I thought that I had a good grasp on it, then I would realize that I knew nothing and had to start over. Then you add IPv6 multicast, msdp, etc...you really get turned around. Personally, the workbooks helped, but I asked Narbik for ALOT of clarification on multicast theory. This helped me clear up alot of my misunderstanding (he spends probably the least time on multicast in his 5-day class...its Friday's topic, from about 9-12).

jason_lunde

TesseracT wrote: »

MPLS could also be another sore spot. What are your thoughts?

If you do the CCIP, and actually spend the time to learn mpls and mpls vpn's; this wont be a problem. I can see it being a real pia for CCIE candidates who have to take a huge break in their studies to learn mpls. I think I spent like 6 months on BGP and mpls for the IP. It was time very well spent in my opinion.