Starting CCIE Written. Just had "the talk" with Mrs. Zartan.

Zartanasaurus

Good, not great week. Went through all of Multicast and IPv6 workbooks this week. This was my 2nd time completing multicast and it was way easier than the first time I did it. IPv6 was a piece of cake. Did 50% of MPLS. Hopefully will go through them all again this week so I can pick out the ones I want to repeat every so often to keep the knowledge fresh.

Completed Mock Lab 1 today. Just waiting for the grade.

Added End-to-End QoS Network Design to my 10 shelf library. Will get started on that tomorrow.

Signed up for Narbik's bootcamp.

Zartanasaurus

Got my grade back, that was pretty fast. Encouraging results, although it's only a difficulty 6 lab.

Zartanasaurus

Random bit of DocCD goodness. If you're looking for the "undocumented" selective packet discard commands, go to:
Cisco IOS XE S > Release 2 > Config Guides > IPv6 Config Guides > Implementing SPD

Just run them as ip instead of ipv6 commands and it works fine.

Zartanasaurus

What's up with the new versions of WBI they put out a few days ago? No bookmarks for the tasks and solutions. Looks like it was rushed.

jamesp1983

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

Got my grade back, that was pretty fast. Encouraging results, although it's only a difficulty 6 lab.

Excellent. You're making great progress! Have you started the 4 week long QoS journey yet?

Zartanasaurus

jamesp1983 wrote: »

Excellent. You're making great progress! Have you started the 4 week long QoS journey yet?

Yeah, this will go pretty fast for me. I've been doing topics in this WB since I started doing Vol II labs. QoS was usually one of the topics I got wrong, so I'd go through the recommended topics from the lab and add a few more that seemed related. I've already been through most of this WB and am pretty comfortable with most of the QoS they've thrown at me lately. The only topic I haven't really covered is the Catalyst QoS features.

Also, in the new WB they released 10/29, they moved all the legacy QoS topics to an Appendix, which cuts it down to 60 focused tasks, although I'm comfortable with the legacy ones too.

I was planning to be done with it this week, but we're building out some new infrastructure at work on Cisco UCS and I haven't had the time or desire to mess with it after work. It's fine though because I'm hoping after R&S to do Data Center. Cisco UCS seems worlds better than the HP C7000.

Zartanasaurus

I'm not liking this end to end QoS book at all after having already read two books on QoS. Just seems like more of the same. I skipped almost all of Part II and it looks like I will skip a significant portion of Part III also.

Ivanjam

Go Zartan! I follow your thread although I don't understand 80% of what you do and the other 20% is just familiar words.

Plazma

Keep up the good work!

Zartanasaurus

Sitting in Narbik's bootcamp right now. Having fun so far. Done the assessment lab and the homework so there's nothing to do until 7PM.

jamesp1983

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

Sitting in Narbik's bootcamp right now. Having fun so far. Done the assessment lab and the homework so there's nothing to do until 7PM.

Lucky! Let us know how it goes.

Zartanasaurus

Day 1 in the books. The first assessment lab is pretty easy. He rated it a 3/10. A bunch of us finished early so he gave us the homework for tonight. After we finished that he gave us the homework for tomorrow night too, which I finished before the lecture started at 7PM.

The lecture was all about Layer-2 security. He makes you think about things in an algorithmic fashion. He also tries to break things down in a way that makes the problem seem very easy. I didn't take many notes since it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before.

Interesting note for the day. In the beginning when he asks people about their weaknesses (multicast and MPLS being the most common), the subject of PfR being in the lab came up. When it was mentioned, one of the guys there who is a Cisco employee and has attempted the lab twice emphatically stated "its definitely on there". Narbik said that since 12.4T doesn't support PfR properly, there's only so many things they can really test you on and even commented that the R&S program manager said to him previously that PfR might be on your particular lab, but it won't be more than a couple tasks and at least one of them should be very basic. The guy I mentioned previously disagreed and even stated that he was familiar with the 12.4T PfR bugs and he didn't think the things he was asked on the lab was possible with the version of code that was being run. I read before from other lab takers who generically described getting a high-point value task that they didn't think was supported on the version of IOS that was running. I remember one even stated that if you get that version of the lab it's probably a guaranteed fail. It made me wonder if it was the same thing.

Zartanasaurus

Narbik is hilarious. Cost is almost worth it just for the humor.

rakem

I'm so Jealous... He was in Sydney last month and I couldn't take time off work so i missed out. Would have been perfect timing for my studies.

Enjoy it buddy, I'm sure it will be worth every penny

Zartanasaurus

Narbik brought the proctor in here at RTP and we had 30-45 mins to ask him questions and hear him speak. I'll summarize what I think was the most interesting.

The passing score is actually under 80% for both sections. TS is 22 points and since you can't get 17.6 points, you can actually pass with a 17. That means you need a minimum 78% (rounded) to pass TS. The passing % for config is actually lower than TS.

On a bell curve, the average passing attempts is 3-5. Anything less than 3 attempts or more than 5 and that is likely going to be a fail.

The tests are refreshed periodically, and there's no test more than 15 months old. He considers the most recent refresh of the exam to be the hardest, and if it's your first attempt he's going to give you that one. No two test takers will have the exact TS & config, although it's possible that you might take the same version of one as someone else, but the combination will be unique.

The grading script pretty much uses verification commands (show, ping, whatever) and is results oriented to give you points. As long as it can make the verification and you didn't break a restriction, you get the points. If you don't have enough points to pass, he does a manual review of only questions you didn't get points for to see if you solved it in a way the grader didn't expect until you either make the cut score or he runs out of missed questions.

We're going to get a tour of the lab tomorrow.

QHalo

I was not aware that the proctor determined which test you got. That sounds like a great session though just from the info. +1 for posting it.

Edit: or not because I've already bumped you recently.

networker050184

Thanks for sharing. Good info.

Zartanasaurus

QHalo wrote: »

I was not aware that the proctor determined which test you got. That sounds like a great session though just from the info. +1 for posting it.

Edit: or not because I've already bumped you recently.

When you are sitting for a test, they can see all of the tests you've taken for that track. They aren't supposed to give you the same one twice, but mistakes happen.

Zartanasaurus

If you have any questions I'll see if we have time for more tomorrow when we visit the lab.

Zartanasaurus

We didn't take the tour, but I did remember a couple of other things he said.

The record for most attempts to get a pass is 31!
He's had people in that he suspects cheated, but if he can't prove anything there's nothing he can do. He said they get put on a "watch list" but he meant his own personal list. It doesn't appear that Cisco is doing much in that area, at least that they are saying in public.
The Network Optimization section for R&S is like QoS for the Voice track. He sees people bomb those sections all the time and walk out with a pass. The biggest surprise is that QoS is such a small part of Voice.
One more thing on PfR. It's not a Network Optimization task, it's considered core.

Sitting in the airport now with a few hours left before my flight. Gonna read a bit since there's nothing else to do.

spiderjericho

One of the things that doesn't motivate me for CCIE is the rampant cheating, especially now with IOU..

I'd rather train for a marathon. You can't **** on that. But hopefully, these "CCIE" get found out in their performance.

So what was your opinion of the course? Was it worth the investment? I've heard about Narbik's penchant for just using a board versus ppt, his amazing technical knowledge, etc. But it's hard to know if these courses are worth the investment except for having the opportunity to train with an excellent trainer and test taker.

Zartanasaurus

spiderjericho wrote: »

So what was your opinion of the course? Was it worth the investment? I've heard about Narbik's penchant for just using a board versus ppt, his amazing technical knowledge, etc. But it's hard to know if these courses are worth the investment except for having the opportunity to train with an excellent trainer and test taker.

I feel like I got my money's worth. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who had only been studying for 3 months though. You also get to talk to a lot of people who are going through the same process and make a few contacts in the process. He really stresses fundamentals, and comes up with some clever labs that require you to just use the basic tools at your disposal, not obscure commands. The only downside for someone who is later on in the process is you can only cover so many things in 5 days. I won't have time to go through his Bootcamp workbooks for some time, but I definitely plan on it before I take my lab.

jamesp1983

Sounds like it was well worth it. I was hoping to be in that class in RTP, but the baby changed my plans a bit. Thanks for the heads up about PfR.

Zartanasaurus

Whew. Finally finished INE's material. Well technically I haven't done ML4 yet, but I skipped it in favor of ML5 in early January. Not that I'm afraid of the challenge of a difficulty 9 lab, but I was looking over the format of labs 5-8 and they seem newer and more updated. Broken down into 5 or 6 sections that mirror the breakdown in the actual lab. I just have a hunch those are more accurate. We'll see. Also scheduled the 2nd TS graded lab as well. 200 tokens left, so I will be doing at least ML6 as well unless they come out with a bunch more TS labs.

I plan on doing at least one of the Cisco 360 Performance Assessment labs as well. $440 bucks a pop, so I hope it's worth it. One thing that kind of sucks about INE and especially 7206's in GNS3, is you get used to different interface type/number combinations. And the switches are set up completely different in the 360 topology which I assume tracks the real lab. Narbik's material is close to the Cisco 360 version, although he uses different ports for the inter-switch links. You get so used to the one vendor that you know the topology without having to really study any diagrams. Cisco should just publish the physical topology like they did for the TSHOOT exam.

Lab 20 is another, mostly straightforward core lab. No crazy redistribution or filtering. Yet another in a long line of labs where they try to trick you by having you assign policies to interfaces that belong on a BVI or VT instead of the actual physical interface. They fooled me once on that. Never again.

If you're using all 3560s in your lab like me, your initial configs are going to be wrong for the Layer 2 stuff. They assume 3550s on SW3 and SW4 which means dynamic desirable instead of auto. You're supposed to do some L2 engineering, but it doesn't make sense if you have 3560s. Just find the interfaces that aren't in no shut and configure them as desirable.

They get a little goofy with those non-contiguous ACL wildcard masks.

There's a pretty big debate on the forums about the proper solution to 8.3. I configured it the way most people on the forums did, but the SG has something completely different. No explanation of course. The 2nd half of their VOL2 material seems a little neglected as far as accuracy and updates are concerned.

20 full scale INE labs = 160 hours.
10 WB3 mini labs = 40 hours.
3 mock labs = 34 hours.
14 VOLI WBs = countless hours. Probably 200 just going through that.

So INE's total material takes about 400 hours. They say 12 hours a week for 48 weeks, which is 576 hours. I guess that means the WBI material is closer to 350 hours. With all the repetitions, I guess that's probably right.

Zartanasaurus

OER is such a PITA.


I just built a custom OER lab from scratch in GNS3 to play around with all the options. There's not much to the INE tasks in WBI. Too many times you're sitting there with a config that should work, that doesn't. Shutting down or restarting process doesn't fix it. Reboot routers and it magically works.

Zartanasaurus

Going through Narbik's Advanced R&S workbooks now. Mostly just doing the config in my head then reading the answers unless it's a topic I don't feel 100% on. About 35% through it right now. Also bought a month's worth of rack time. Any of their students get a month's worth of rack time for $400. $400 at INE gets you ~80 hours of rack time and it has to be scheduled. With Narbik the rack is YOURS for the entire month. I also wanted to get some more time in on a topology that is closer to the real lab.

jamesp1983

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

Going through Narbik's Advanced R&S workbooks now. Mostly just doing the config in my head then reading the answers unless it's a topic I don't feel 100% on. About 35% through it right now. Also bought a month's worth of rack time. Any of their students get a month's worth of rack time for $400. $400 at INE gets you ~80 hours of rack time and it has to be scheduled. With Narbik the rack is YOURS for the entire month. I also wanted to get some more time in on a topology that is closer to the real lab.

That is a good deal. Narbik seems to really take care of his students.

Zartanasaurus

Just finished up TS mock lab 2. What an ordeal. I've been scheduling my mock labs for 9am instead of noon so I can get used to being up early like the real lab. I laid in bed a little longer than I wanted, but I thought I was still okay. Take a shower, get ready and sit down at the computer. **** it's already after 9!! Hurriedly log into the interface and see I have about 30 seconds to click start or the mock lab is canceled. Don't have my paper and pencil ready, telnet session not ready to go. So I just click start and scramble to get going. Confused by the first TS ticket. Waste 10 mins on it. Ticket #2 same thing. Well crap this isn't going well at all. Get ticket #3 and have 1:30 left on the clock. Start knocking the tickets out one by one, faster each time. By the time I finish #10 I still have :50 left on the clock. Go back to #1. Finally get it then get #2. Verification time. Notice I missed something on ticket #1 and fix that. Go through all the tickets and I'm looking good. Hit stop with :20 left.

Waiting for the grader and when it refreshes it says 0/22. WTF! I had to have gotten at least 1 right. Refresh my browser and the score updates to 20/22.

I was about to go nuts. Missed one small little thing on a ticket. When they say match the output, they really mean match the contents of the output. Function AND form matter.

Iristheangel

Way to go, Zartanasaurus! I've been following your thread on and off. Any idea on when you think you'll be "ready?" If anyone can ever be 100% ready for the CCIE

Zartanasaurus

Iristheangel wrote: »

Way to go, Zartanasaurus! I've been following your thread on and off. Any idea on when you think you'll be "ready?" If anyone can ever be 100% ready for the CCIE

Not something I like to talk about. It's a superstition thing.