RouteMyWorld's CCIE Journey Begins

aragoen_celtdra

Well it's been a couple of months. I'm still at it although the amount of time I've been able to devote to studying has diminished considerably. Looking at my time logs, the month of August was not very productive. For that month I only logged 12 days for a total of 26 hours of studying. Contrast that to July where I logged about 58 hours.

From August until about the first week of September was extremely busy for me. I had Change Management almost every other night which totally screwed up my study schedule. For the last few weeks I have been able to resume a more consistent study schedule. However, I'm lucky to get even over an hour of studying. I still wake up at 5am nearly every day to study. However, It's often interrupted by 6am when the family wakes to get ready for the day. Studying during work hours have been non-existent because of new projects we've been inundated with.

The past few weeks, I've been prepping Juniper switches, downgrading them to our approved code, visiting sites to rack and stack and measure distances for cabling. We have about 150 mix of EX4200 and EX2200s. After they've been prepped and racked, they will be turned up and configured for production. Which also means, studying at night is devoted to learning Junos.

No doubt there will be tons of after hours CMs for the next month when we start putting these switches to production. Add to that all the last minute project deadlines that everyone wants to complete before the end of the year. Which for us essentially means just after Thanksgiving when all production changes stops and a freeze is imposed on non-emergency changes. I'm hoping when that time rolls around, i'll have plenty of free time to use at work to put in more studying. One can hope.

Despite all these hurdles, my goal is consistency; not to let my studying fall into the cracks, and try to shoot for studying at least one hour a day. So far I've been able to stick pretty closely to that goal.

The last week has been reviewing BGP in Routing TCP/IP II. I will be on this topic for another two weeks.

64:61:6e

Great to hear your still going down the path. I took a short break from Cisco studies about 6-7 months ago and went down the Juniper path. I was never on a Juniper device but was interested so went towards getting my JNCIA cert. What I found was I only had to learn the different commands. So even though you may need to study a bit to learn Junos, it's the same technology, just different command sets.

I'm in the same boat as you with getting up at 5am then only getting about 45 minutes of study time in before everyone else wakes up. Then I help get everyone ready for school and out the door. Then I get back to my studies. I'm able to spend a good amount of time during the day as long as my work doesn't slip. Then, I'm back at it again at night after the kids are in bed until I feel like I'm not making any progress which usually ends up being until about 10pm.

Not sure if you have it but another great book for BGP if you wanted to read more on that topic is Internet Routing Architectures by Sam Halabi. I read most of the book and thought it was great. I skimmed through the first 4 chapters but read the rest of the book (chapters 5-12).

-dan

aragoen_celtdra

Thanks for the tip Dan! I do have Halabi's book (from work) and heard great things about it. I plan to read the book as well when I'm done with the Doyle section on BGP. BGP is going really slowly because I'm labbing up every single scenario he presents. So far I've recreated 21 individual GNS3 topologies from over 100 pages of illustrations from the book. I'm actually kinda getting pretty tired of it. So far it's pretty fun but it's very time consuming.

I'm actually thinking of taking JNCIA maybe sometime in the near future. I thought I might as well try if I'm studying it a lot. I actually did read the routing book a couple of years ago and found it very [very] similar to IOS-XR, which we've been using a lot at work for the past year. I also had XR training for work so going through Junos feels a lot like review. Now I'm just getting mixed up with which command goes with what OS because all the comands are jumbled up in my head. lol.

Well good luck with your studies and keep at it.

aragoen_celtdra

Quick update: I've been slammed with work the last couple of months. So studying has taken a back seat. I have been travelling all over Southern California visiting some of our over 100 sites and installing and configuring Juniper switches. I've also been learning a little bit about Cisco ONS devices (15454 M6s and M12s). This project will probably push through to the end of the year. I'm having a great time though, learning new stuff and finally putting to practice some Junos stuff I learned a while back.

I'm still studying though. I average between 30 to 45 minutes a day. I've been doing BGP for the past month. Just labbing up different scenarios based on Doyle II book. I've compiled quite a collection of GNS 3 lab scenarios I built based on the examples and case studies discussed in the book.

I was planning on taking the written by end of December. I think it's still possible but I won't schedule the test yet as my work is pretty draining physically.

aragoen_celtdra

Took me nearly a month to finish BGP on Doyle;s book. I was reading about 10 pages a day while creating mini lab scenarios on GNS3. All in all a good refresher. I started re-reading MPLS again two days ago. I must say recalling information and connection concepts is much faster after the 3rd run through.
Company is almost coming up to our month long network blackout. So hopefully all the craziness will stop and finally have some time to study some during work hours and also have more energy to study after hours.

I still wake up 5am everyday to study for about an hour.

aragoen_celtdra

I just updated my study counter to 309 hrs. The last count before that was 168 hrs, so needless to say, I've been busy. Which also explains my prolonged absence.

Tell you the truth, I didn't think I'd be able to reach this milestone at this juncture. What with all the busy work and projects I had the last 3 months and juggling life with a wife and 3 kids. I just completed the first phase of a month long project of racking/stacking/configuring Juniper switches throughout our footprint. And in between that, lots and lots of after-hour CMs such as: turning up new IPv6 services using ISIS, updating region-wide CoPP policies, reclamation of hundreds of 7600 linecards, etc. But my original goals were to reach 250hrs by this time and take the written either late December or early January. However, although I feel that I'm ready for the written, I changed my strategy in light of the new blueprint. Instead I plan to take the written sometime in May 2014. This way my 18-month window to take the new lab blueprint is extended a few months longer than if I passed the written today.

Anyway, here's a synopsis of topics I covered this past month:

11/21 - 12/1: Read MPLS Fundamentals Ch 1-4, 6-7. Read MPLS section of CCIE OECG (Odom) twice
12/2 - 12/06: Review IPv6 section of Odoms OECG. Also read a little bit of IPv6 Fundamentals (Rick Graziani)
12/7 - 12/19: Read Cisco QoS by Odom - the whole book.

Most of the work I did was reading and note taking. I did small GNS3 labs just to reinforce some things I didn't understand or do some "show" commands. But for all intents and purposes, all my studying was reading and note-taking.

I have been going back and forth with INE customer service to purchase their workbooks so I can at least get started on WB1 and get more hands on now.

aragoen_celtdra

Well it's been many months since I last updated this thread. I'm happy to report that I passed my CCIE written exam a month ago.

It was very hard preparing for the exam because work has been crazy. In the span since my last update, I have been involved with several CRS-3 B2B conversions, POP router conversion from 3+1 to 5+1 multichassis upgrades, a bunch of CRS upgrades, edge network upgrades involving ASR9922s, and on-call rotation every month. I also regularly do 2-3 after hours maintenance windows per week - which totally mess up my internal clock.

But I'm having a blast. A lot of the things I learn in my studies I'm able to apply to my job. Sure I work mostly 70-80% on IOS-XR platform. But protocols are protocols. The design and ideas behind them are standards based so the only thing that differ are command syntax.

This week I just finished a 3-dau Juniper/Junos class. And now I'm thinking about getting JNCIA certified. Working is an SP environment we do have lots of Junipers - although they are not part of my day to day responsibilities. Last year I was involved in a small deployment of 150 EX4200 switches across our footprint. We just bought a few hundred more EX4300 for future deployments.

The ultimate goal is still CCIE and I won't let up even though I pursue the JNCIA. I'm still in the process of building my INE v5 lab so I can get cracking on the new workbooks. In the meantime, I'm on video #13 of the new ATC that is currently being recorded as we speak.

Anyway, that's all for now.

snadam

Im late to the game, but I just subscribed to this thread. Good luck on your journey and thanks for sharing. Looking forward to reading about your experience.