One week til d-day.... studying like there is tomorrow

routergods

I have my second attempt on Thursday Dec 5th. Some of you may be interested in the preparation steps from my first attempt on October 14th to now, so here's a quick synopsis.

After failing, I wrote down all the topics that tripped me up during the lab. I bought the Cisco 360 Practice lab workbook which has 35 practice labs... labs 29-35 are updated for version 4.

Within RouterGods, I formed a sub-group of five people who had upcoming lab dates in December and January. We started labbing up each practice lab. At first it was pretty tough and it would take several hours to complete a lab, but things became faster.

I went crazy with rack rentals and plunked down $160-ish for a bunch of sessions from cconline. I would have gone with Narbik, but all his racks are full. For the past month, I've had an early session for east coast guys and a late session for Pacific time zone. I did each lab three times.. once in the afternoon, once at night and in GNS3 after the rack rental session died out.

It's pretty amazing how fast you get after putting in all that time labbing. I time every section to see if I'm getting faster/slower and one lab I got up to redistribution in 25 minutes which is pretty nuts and no it wasn't one of those labs where everything was preconfigured.

I grabbed Daniel's awesome Anki card set and add a bunch of my own (mainly ip services trivia stuff). Been going through those like a madman.

For the next five days I will do at least two practice labs a day and then rest the day before the exam.

amb1s1

When I wake up today, the first thing I did was I checked this post.