My CCIE Journey Has Officially Begun.

jamesp1983

I have decided that it is time to pursue the first goal I had when I entered IT, the CCIE. I know its going to be an EXTREME challenge, but I'm just pushing forward and trying to stay confident. I'm going to use this thread for tracking my progress throughout my CCIE journey. I purchased the INE Ultimate bundle last week and have been studying and labbing ever since. I'm still trying to figure out what the right balance of lab vs study is at this point, but I'm just reviewing all of the ATVOD material now (over 80 hours), to refresh myself. I'm open for any suggestions on how I should balance lab vs study time. I've been running Dynamips and working with my home switches while watching the videos as a way to get more hands on. I passed BCMSN, BSCI, and ISCW back in 2008, and wrapped up ONT in August of 2010. I have been working with the equipment at my job so that has kept me fresh on a lot of the info, but I'm still studying like I'm just starting out. I research topics in the videos that I don't really remember and that seems to be really helping. I will keep this updated as a motivator and also as a way to keep track of all that I have studied when it comes time for my final review. It feels great to finally get started on this path. My wife and I worked out a schedule and I'm going to try to hit 30-36 hours a week.

My resources:
-INE Virtual Lab
-The INE workbooks
-INE Written VOD
-Routing TCP/IP, vol I.
-Home lab (a few routers and some 3550s.)
-Cisco LAN Switching by Ken Clark
-Routing and Switching, Time of Convergence?
-My CCNP Library.
-Dynamips
-Cisco.com
-INE ATVOD 4.5

Should I buy Odom's exam guide? I think the Boson Exsim for CCIE will be the next addition.

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Comments

unclerico

Lookin' good my man. Sounds like you have it all going for you right now; CCIE Studies moving along well, new and exciting job, new baby, new house...you must feel like you're on top of the world!! Keep it up, you're doing awesome.

jamesp1983

Having a hard time getting rid of this "martian next hop" error. Here is some more info that I found on it:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3704.txt
GroupStudy.com - CCIE, CCNA, CCNP and other Cisco Certifications

jamesp1983

unclerico wrote: »

Lookin' good my man. Sounds like you have it all going for you right now; CCIE Studies moving along well, new and exciting job, new baby, new house...you must feel like you're on top of the world!! Keep it up, you're doing awesome.

Thanks! There is a lot to do, but its been fun thus far. I really appreciate the kind words!

jamesp1983

Cisco dual stack CE BGP configuration suggestions | nsp | ipv6 - shows you how to fix the Martian Hop issues...

and36y

Great article on Multicast..... thanks

jamesp1983

and36y wrote: »

Great article on Multicast..... thanks

which one specifically?

jamesp1983

Don't know if many of you have used this or not, but if you have "ip domain-lookup" on your device, and you're tired of having the "Translating <mistypedCommand>" delay, issue the following and you'll no longer have this problem. (You will have to specify the telnet <address> command in the future, rather than just the IP/hostname...):

line con 0
transport preferred none
end

http://etherealmind.com/cisco-ios-translating-domain-server/

jamesp1983

I'm liking the VOLII workbooks a lot more now. I just wrapped up 3 hours of lab time, and I plan to finish WBII Lab 5 by tomorrow night (then research weak spots over the weekend). We are going to look at another house tonight so I might be able to get a few more hours in this evening once we get home.

jamesp1983

5 hours today. I will try to get some more in by the end of the day. I've moved into VOL2 Lab 6. I'm on 2.6.

jamesp1983

We had an impromptu trip to the hospital this morning because my wife wanted to make sure she wasn't having early contractions so I got in about 2 hours of reading, and have logged about 5 hours of labbing so far today. I'm on WBII, Lab 6, 7.1.

jamesp1983

I play with this site occasionally when I have a few minutes to kill:
subnettingquestions.com - Free Subnetting Questions and Answers Randomly Generated Online

Do them in your head.

Subnetting IPv6:
https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-17232

jamesp1983

Burned quite a bit of time this evening resourcing quirky QoS issues...
QoS Frequently Asked Questions - Cisco Systems

I read for an hour, and labbed for 2. I had to spend 3.5 hours today at the hospital having some tests ran which required me to be sedated so I was out of it for much of the day. Tomorrow will be better.

jamesp1983

I just ordered this guy off of Amazon:
Amazon.com: Your CCIE Lab Success Strategy: The Non-Technical Guidebook (9781470103163): Mr. Dean Bahizad, Mr. Vivek Tiwari: Books

jamesp1983

I just finished Internet Routing Architectures. I've been reading it intermittently throughout my labbing and really enjoyed the last 2 chapters. They were extremely helpful. I read a ton of Cisco docs on BGP (like the case studies) and MPLS when I was prepping for the Written. Appendix D is on MPBGP so I will read that tomorrow.

spiderjericho

jamesp1983 wrote: »

I just ordered this guy off of Amazon:
Amazon.com: Your CCIE Lab Success Strategy: The Non-Technical Guidebook (9781470103163): Mr. Dean Bahizad, Mr. Vivek Tiwari: Books

I read this two or three weeks ago. Good read, and it can apply to any goals in your life.

jamesp1983

spiderjericho wrote: »

I read this two or three weeks ago. Good read, and it can apply to any goals in your life.

That's what I've heard so I figured why not.

jamesp1983

Anybody have any reviews on this?:

Amazon.com: Network Design Cookbook: Architecting Cisco Networks (9781257750245): Ccie #6778, Michel Thomatis: Books

PsychoFin

Top Down Network Design is good. Haven't read that cookbook, so can't say.

jamesp1983

PsychoFin wrote: »

Top Down Network Design is good. Haven't read that cookbook, so can't say.

Okay, I have TDND, but haven't read it yet.

jamesp1983

spiderjericho wrote: »

I read this two or three weeks ago. Good read, and it can apply to any goals in your life.

I just got home from a friend's wedding about 3 hours away to find "Your CCIE Lab Success Strategy" in my mailbox. It took about 2 hours, but I was able to read the entire book cover to cover. This book contains a lot of great information on all aspects of the CCIE journey. I really liked the timeline at the end.

Zartanasaurus

jamesp1983 wrote: »

Came up with a new way to remember the EIGRP K value order in the "metric weights" command:
Big Llamas Don't Run Much
K1=Bw K2=Load K3=Dly K4=Reliability K5=MTU

Thanks for this!

jamesp1983

No problem! I'm glad I could help.

jamesp1983

I just wrapped up Troubleshooting Lab 1 of WBII. It wasn't that bad. KISS principle was key...

jamesp1983

I'm 2 days into the new gig. Its a lot shorter of a commute than my previous job and my responsibilities are much greater here. I've already been given 2 pretty large projects. My boss is a pretty laid back guy, but I can already tell he demands a lot. This is the type of environment I was looking for and the money is excellent so I'm happy.

TLeTourneau

Good for you! I'm glad it's what you want, enjoy it!

jamesp1983

TLeTourneau wrote: »

Good for you! I'm glad it's what you want, enjoy it!

Thanks! How have you been?

TLeTourneau

Thanks for asking! Like a lot of members here, busy as all get out.

It's a good busy though so I'm not complaining, plugging away on the degree and so on. I’m trying to decide what to do when that's done. I am leaning towards a Masters in Education. My company has three colleges so a degree in education is always appreciated but we'll see, that's a couple of years away. I think I'm done with certs for a while, N2IT and I had a good converstation about it and given what I do MCM would be my next logical step but between work and school and home there is only so much time.

I'm glad to see that you are making good progress on your lab studies, you'll be testing before you know it!

jamesp1983

That's great to hear. It sounds like you will be a busy guy no matter what you choose. Good luck! I'm hoping to test by January at the latest, but we shall see.

jamesp1983

I'm trying to catch my WBII troubleshooting labs up to where I am in the WBII config labs. I'm half way there. I think the troubleshooting WB has been one of my favorite parts so far.

I was assigned a project 2 days in to my new job to redesign a large portion of our network. The new network has to be in the implementation phase by mid August. It was a multifloor network that wasn't designed, but was pieced together over time by storage engineers as access was needed. My job is to make something scalable, redundant, and that offers plenty of speed. They have about 750 devices (servers/pcs/network appliances/storage/etc) in 8 different /24 subnets with no VLANing. Its all in the same broadcast domain. Performance and stability have been issues in the past so it needs to be done. I'm hoping to knock this out of the park since its my first project and I have already interviewed 3 stakeholders with another set for this afternoon.

jamesp1983

SDM templates for the 3560...

Catalyst 3560 Software Configuration Guide, Release 12.2(52)SE - Configuring SDM Templates [Cisco Catalyst 3560 Series Switches] - Cisco Systems