Captains Log - Destination: CCIE 2012

In the year 2012... on a planet far far away... where the trees were made of UTP cables and had lush seas of binary... there existed a treasure that glistened as bright as looking straight into SFP. This treasure shrouded in mystery, only gave a clue by it's 4 letters... CCIE.

Anyway.. I'm making this as a lab diary type thing.. I wasn't going to bother, but I'm tired of having post it notes cover my monitor and keyboards.

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jamesp1983

Plazma wrote: »

Woa.. been a while since i've updated.

Gotten through Vol 2, lab 9 today.. and learning and absorbing as much as I can. I'm hoping to have lab 10 & 11 done by this week if at all possible.. and the next weekend try my first INE mock lab to get a good baseline of where I need the most work. After that, I'll begin doing a very comprehensive review as well as continuing through the INE vol 2 labs.

Sounds like you're making good progress. Is it all clicking for you now?

Plazma

Had a bit of a busy week.. had to fix my car Friday/saturday and around Wed when I finished lab 10 I seemed to really kinda get a bit spacey.. as if my brain couldn't make sense of anything and fit anymore in. Due to that and my car repairs i had to do, I took a few days rest.. and it seemed to help.

I just finished vol 2, lab 11 (difficulty 9) and while I didn't do that great on it.. things didn't seem to be that far out of my realm of comprehension.. a good 70-80% of the tasks I missed only small things or forgot.. The only main thing I totally spaced out on was the multicast section...

I'm hoping that this weekend at some point I'm going to take an INE mock lab.. I just bought 500 tokens so If i do it wisely that should give me enough for 2 x Mock Labs as well as 1-2 lab rack rentals.

Plazma

So.. been labbing still.. I've got 12/20 INE Vol 2 labs under my belt and I just took an INE Mock lab yesterday.. the results were pretty depressing.

I was hoping to get at least a 40 on the damn thing and have enough data to help me narrowly focus on my review, but according to my poor results, it appears I need to review EVERYTHING.

Not really sure how to continue from here, I guess the only thing I can do is do INE Volume 1 again to the best of my ability and keep reading.. I was just hoping I could focus a bit more on truly weak areas... but it looks like my weakness is with EVERYTHING.

rakem

Plazma wrote: »

Not really sure how to continue from here, I guess the only thing I can do is do INE Volume 1 again to the best of my ability and keep reading.. I was just hoping I could focus a bit more on truly weak areas... but it looks like my weakness is with EVERYTHING.

Keep at it buddy. Everyone goes through those moments.

ipSpace

Plazma wrote: »

Not really sure how to continue from here, I guess the only thing I can do is do INE Volume 1 again to the best of my ability and keep reading.. I was just hoping I could focus a bit more on truly weak areas... but it looks like my weakness is with EVERYTHING.

Plazma, i am pretty sure everybody goes through this. None of the CCIEs had the knowledge from the begging, so do not get upset dude.
It will help you get a second look at this.

jamesp1983

Plazma wrote: »

Not really sure how to continue from here, I guess the only thing I can do is do INE Volume 1 again to the best of my ability and keep reading.. I was just hoping I could focus a bit more on truly weak areas... but it looks like my weakness is with EVERYTHING.

Keep your head up man and keep plugging. This is extremely common.

Plazma

Well after last weeks depressing mock lab.. i took a day or 2 to get back up to speed. I spent the week going through Vol 1 stuff again and marking down what I felt really weak on.. and after being completely honest with myself.. I've got a lot of work to do. I spent the majority of this week reviewing some basic routing stuff and a lot of the switching/layer 2 things.. so far it seems like it's been beneficial. I also just finished up INE Vol2 lab 13 today.. didn't do that badly considering it was a Difficulty 9 lab, but I didn't grade myself really either.. I just gave my best shot and compared my stuff to the solutions guide.

Plazma

Been studying some at work when I get the chance.. finished up a really good layer2 review.. the only thing I feel uncomfortable with is Bridging (failback bridging, IRB/CRB) and PPPoE (I hate dialers!).

Going to try an INE rack rental this Saturday since my plans got canceled...

Plazma

Past week or 2 been doing a huge mega-ultimate review of EVERYTHING and so far so good. I'm starting to find some time at work to do more studying/review as well (since I work with this stuff daily.. it's easier to pawn off

). I also managed to get INE Vol 2, Lab 14 done yesterday.. I just got done 'grading' it and I did better than I expected, especially on some of the harder ones.

I still totally blow at multicast.. my brain hits it and like shuts off immediately.

Plazma

Not a bad study week considering things with the job have been changing a bit, plus a few other companies wanted to interview me.. I'm not the happiest in my current role but at the same time I don't know if I really want to change jobs right now before my lab soon...

I managed to get up to OSPF in my review this week and finish up vol 2 , lab 15. I graded this one myself and I actually didn't do as bad as I thought .. consider the past 2 days I've been busy with home stuff and couldn't really study. It was a level 9 and being generous I got around 65% correct.. but in reality that's probably about 50% or so.. which is still quite a bit better for the difficulty of the lab. I actually enjoyed this one a bit as it had a lot of everything involved and was pretty heavy on the services and local security.. which I also need work on.

Did far better on multicast this time around, granted the last 1-2 tasks were pretty intense so I didn't get those.

Hopefully will finish the OSPF review and get halfway through the BGP review this week and then hit lab 16 on Saturday (and potentially lab 17 on Sunday)

Plazma

I finished up my OSPF review and barely started my BGP review on Thursday/Friday. I actually got an indirect review of BGP and MPLS VPN's on Friday at work.. had a customer circuit that we finally got turned up and I actually forgot to build the ipv4 address-family for them on our equipment. Once I did that things worked pretty seamlessly.

I also decided to intensify my studies a bit on the weekends, and I did INE Vol 2 Lab 16 & 17 this weekend. I did fairly well on lab 16 albeit I didn't get enough points to pass.. the only thing that really tripped me up was multcast. I found myself knowing more or less what the task wanted, and messed up on a lot of the syntax of things.. also I need to really work on verification of stuff a bit better to ensure I get the accurate result (my review process is helping quite a bit with that). I did the math and if I would have not messed up some little things in the "core" stuff (IGP, IPv6..etc) I would have had enough points to pass!

I just finished up lab 17 a bit ago and graded it.. didn't do as good as I hoped point wise, but topic wise I thought I did fairly well.. again the majority of it I was able to give a really good effort and though I came up short, I wasn't that short.. especially not in comparison to the past weeks and when I first started. Previously on the level 8 and level 9 labs, I was getting 30-40 points.. now I'm getting 46-51 points ..

I'm hoping to finish my BGP review this week ( need to put Routing TCP/IP vol II on my kindle) and then do Lab's 18 & 19 this weekend. The following week I'll probably go through MPLS and start Multicast.. and will finish off with Lab 20. I'll be taking a week off to see family the first week of June, so I probably wont' get any labbing in, but hopefully I can get a bit of reading in.

Plazma

This week I finished up a really good BGP review.. few things I'm a bit unsure on theoretically (mostly as-set..etc) but I think I got an ok grip on it.. in fact I had to do it during a lab today.

I did Lab 18 yesterday and it went REALLY well.. unfortunately I did run out of time, but I finished what I could, and then psuedo-finished the rest of the lab on paper. The main reason I ran out of time was because my rack rental was 4 hours, but really it's 3.5 hours as the last 30 minutes you get kicked out so their script can clean up the routers. I was using ****.com .. really cheap and great rentals. There are only really 2 downsides to it..

1) You have to change your config interface names to match is, but he's kept it so close it's pretty trivial
2) You have to put the configs in yourself, which can be a tad time consuming and take away from your lab time (usually first 10-20 minutes for the first few times before I got used to his rack).

Today was a total bust for a lab.. I did Lab 19 on his racks and it was scheduled at 8:00am PDT, but I totally forgot to set my alarm, and when I woke up, it was 8:02am :O. I busted my tail to brew a quick pot of coffee and ran and logged into the rack. Unfortunately being so groggy I spent more time than I wanted to on pre-loading and making sure configs were good (I wrote a script to convert the initial configs and it missed a few things). All in All.. I managed to get through all but the last section, but I don't think I did that great on a few things.. but that's alright.. I review everything the session is over and make sure I understand it.. and if I don't I read / lab all I can.

Moving forward, I'm going to probably start my MPLS review today, and potentially finish it so I can keep on track with my deadlines I've set for myself, also I've got to work late tomorrow helping a moronic customer , so I'm planning for the worst. I'll prob do Lab 20 on Saturday and leave Sun - Thursday for reviewing as well as getting some things done around the house. That Friday - next Friday I'll be on vacation and probably won't do much labbing/studying.

Plazma

This week was totally a disaster.. so much work stress i about gave myself a heart attack.. I'm not even joking

Mostly because idiot customers and their idiot IT firms seem to not understand a T1. They max out their 1.54Mbps circuit and they experience internet drops (yes, T1 is used for both internet and voice).. you give them pretty diagrams/charts showing the problem.. but they don't like that.. and they go to your managers/sales nerds and threaten to quit because they think something else is wrong... and then I'm left with repeating myself over, and over again. I really, really need a new job.. and fast.

As for studies, they've been good.. I was hoping to have multicast wrapped up earlier in the week but I"m almost done, ill be finishing my review of it today. I just got done doing a rack rental for INE Lab 20. I actually scheduled it for 5/26 but really i wanted it today, but fortunately Tony over at **** was online and helped me out.. and gave me the timeslot I was already prepared for.

Now that I'm through all 20 labs.. I've got a good feeling about other areas i'm weak in.. so I'm going to add that to my things to review and also probably look at some other vendors workbooks.. perhaps do a lab or 2 out of them if I can.

Weak areas

PPPoE - Need to review 3rd time
Bridging - Need to review 3rd time

Dynamic , Reflexive ACLs - haven't reviewed yet
Multicast - Doing much better, reviewing currently
Route redistribution / loop prevention - need to review 3rd time

Custom Views, AAA, rmon, eem - haven't reviewed 2nd time yet or need to review 3rd time
QoS - Need to review constantly

Plazma

Managed to get some stuff done this week, despite having to work a ton before/after hours half the week. I'm up to QoS in my big review and have been doing some other labs and making my own to really help me with some stuff.

Next week is a short week for me, I'll only work Tue-Thursday then Friday I start my vacation for 1 week.. so little to no studies during that time. I might do some flashcards and reading but that's about it.

Plazma

Hey everyone.. wow.. it's been over a month since I've posted an update.

Been really busy with stuff.. I was on vacation the first week of June and didn't get much done, and had a bit of a slow time ramping up my studies again.. far harder than I anticipated. Also lately at work I've been super, super busy.. which sucks "Im literally 1/5 people at my company that can support some of the complicated data stuff.. and 3/5 of them aren't really operations guys". I did about 50+ hours this past weekend , a datacenter move for a big customer and then this other customer who I redesigned their entire WAN and security infrastructure. Unfortunately for me, their previous provider did a bunch of the work and would not surrender what they actually did. The customer did some stuff on their PIX , but their previous provider apparently did a lot of complicated NAT/DMZ and DNS doctoring for them that I didn't know about .. so I was essentially flying blind. All in all it sucked pretty bad, but it was good experience .. and as far as I can tell, the worst is hopefully over.

Now then, as for my studies.. since getting back on the horse, I've completed INE volume I a 2nd time, and am currently just going through their Vol 2 labs and the DOCCD to help isolate topics I need to continue to work on. I also took a 2nd MOCK lab with INE and while my score was pretty bad, I nailed every single troubleshooting ticket, with 30 minutes to spare... so if anything that's a small victory for me. The last mock lab I took I missed 7/10 tickets. Was for what I missed on the config, it was mostly little stuff that I was feeling to exhausted to really focus on.. so I partially blame the rough weekend I've had, but at the same time, i learned a way more this time around.

As for my continuing plans.. I did a few hours of labbing and reviewing earlier so now I think I'm going to take a break and pick it up tomorrow evening when I get home from work.

Plazma

Wow.. it's been forever since I've posted a status on here.. I apologize.

Long story short, I took my first lab attempt at the end of July and wasn't successful. So I took a few weeks off and have been really studying as hard as I possibly can.. and I've scheduled my 2nd attempt for Nov 12, 2012.

Plazma

Well it's finally over.. I passed my lab the other day.. after 2 tries.

spiderjericho

Congratulations on your amazing accomplishment. Yours is like one of the shortest threads on obtaining the coveted title.

MrBrian

Congratulations on obtaining your CCIE!!! Hats off to you

Kaii

great diary mate..

keep it up .. for us to be inspired

YFZblu

Plazma wrote: »

Well it's finally over.. I passed my lab the other day.. after 2 tries.

Congratulations!

Plazma

So.. I wanted to give a few tips and things that really helped me on my lab:

0 - NEVER GIVE UP ON YOURSELF AND ALWAYS TELL YOURSELF YOU CAN DO IT. For months I meditated and visualized what it would be like to have a CCIE plaque on my wall.. I even sketched one and hung it on my wall with a random CCIE # on it.. seeing it every day while I studied reassured me I was going to get it.

1 - USE EARPLUGS EVEN DURING YOUR MOCK LABS! - I learned this tip from reaper81 and when i tried this, my focus improved to levels that I can't even describe.. I'm attributing this to what happens when a person goes blind and their hearing gets super good

2 - Use notepad and do all of your configurations in it first (as well as create your ping scripts). I had many separate notepad sessions .. 1 dedicated to my scripts and notes.. the rest for the sections .. just my preference.

3 - Draw your own diagrams! - I'm old fashioned.. so I like pencil and paper. There is something about drawing your own diagrams that helps you really learn the network and remember it.. also it's much faster to glance down at your diagram than to the diagram they provide. Make sure to also do a layer 2 diagram with vlan assignments.. I pretty much copied what they provided me as I found it to be the clearest .. and just wrote the vlan numbers on the links.

4 - Don't worry about checking initial connectivity.. even if they do break it chances are pretty likely you'll run into it and fix it along the way.. again your preference

5 - For OSPF , unless it tells you otherwise, configure it with the interface level commands. When used in conjunction with notepad, this allows you to copy/paste configurations and you have far less to re-configure. Obviously use your own judgement.. but having "ip ospf 1 area 0" vs re-typing "network x.x.x.x y.y.y.y area 0" really saves time in the end.

6 - Verify everything after each task you put in - You should know what to expect by the commands and technologies you configure .. verify every ospf neighbor, bgp neighbor.. etc.

7 - Use route-tags when redistributing into protocols and filter with them (unless otherwise stated) - also it doesn't hurt to match and re-tag for each protocol.

8 - For MPLS - remember LDP follows the path your IGP takes

9 - Save after every completed section of the task - once you verify it works as you expect it.. save.

10 - Manually set router-ids unless it tells you not too..

11 - Read the entire lab lightly! I didn't think this was important and on my first attempt I didn't do it.. and it bite me in the ass pretty hard. This will help you 'group' similar tasks .. some folks do not like this approach, but it seemed to work well for me.

11a - The lab is an organic beast, not so much a linear one. In addition to #11 above.. looking ahead to see what else you may need to do..

reaper81

Congrats buddy!

Very sound advice as well. Anyone taking the lab soon should read through this for sure

f0rgiv3n

Amazing, this truly inspires me. Huge congratulations! Now take down that fake plaque in prep for the real one

jamesp1983

Plazma wrote: »

Well it's finally over.. I passed my lab the other day.. after 2 tries.

I don't know how I missed this, but congratulations! Great work!

Thanks for the tips!

NOC-Ninja

Congrats!!! I guess it will take me 2 to 3x before i pass.

Essendon

NOC-Ninja wrote: »

Congrats!!! I guess it will take me 2 to 3x before i pass.

NEVER say that Ninja. We all know it's a tough beast to get past, but if you say you'll take 2/3 times to pass - you are not prepared enough, IMO. It's too late for you to reschedule probably, but man you got to get that number in your first attempt. Why blow $1400? I can give you my bank details, send the money my way

Lol man, I do hope you pass the first time!

Plazma

So one thing also I wanted to share.. my schedule

It has evolved and changed over the course of 1.4 years.. but here we go

-- AFter passing the written --

Did INE vol 1 entirely .. for several months .. at the end of each VOL I section I did the respect section in VOL II lab 1

Started INE Vol 2 .. ran through everything during the week I only had 1-2 hours a day to spare , so I did sections of a VOL II lab, then on the weekend I just ran through that lab fully.

After a while.. i started doing INE Vol III stuff during the week.. they were quick 1-3 hours labs.. and it kept my speed and precision up.

Several times, i took an analysis of my weak areas and tried to work on them with VOL I again.. as it turns out I was really weak on nearly everything so I ended up doing VOL I twice over.

.. I then took my first attempt and.. got my ass handed to me..

--- After first failure of lab ---

- I took 2 weeks off, then hit it back up again slowly.. I once again took an inventory of how weak i was (using my score report as a rough guide).. I also seeked out guidance from a few mentors.. and they really helped keep my spirits up.

When doing my skill inventory.. I really had to come to terms with some very hard things.. I really was weak in many crucial layer 2 and layer 3 things. I bought a steno 2 column notebook and wrote down everything on the left, and then 'scored' myself 1-5 on the right. This was very painful... having to put something like "OSPF virtual links " as a weak area or even OSPF LSA's.. etc .. I nearly broke down into tears.. I was so hurt. I eventually got my bearings and told myself .. "this is the only way.. and it's ok"

I then proceeded to work VOL I again on those weak areas, but I also incorporated Narbik's free "Soup to nuts" workbook... this in itself really got me to verify every single thing I did and opened my eyes to how the lab is really an organic beast.. not a mechanical linear one..

After about 2 months of really drilling that.. and making my own labs up (like 2-3 routers, switches) .. I moved on to doing full scale labs again. During the week , I would break them down into sections and do them.. ( i also used a timer.. studied for 1 hour , then took a break for 5-10 minutes).

I then found about Dan's Network - Home and his WONDERFUL mini TS labs. All I had to do was load them up in GNS3 and get to work on them.. and it really helped out a lot.

About 1 - 1.5 months prior to my 2nd attempt, i started going into my work in the morning and studying 4-5 hours a day.. just to see if I got more done.. and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made. It as during this time I also read reaper81's blog post about earplugs.. and started incorporating them into my training. I continued to use my timer strategy as well.. went for about an hour, then took a break.. gabbed coffee, soda.. did a few pushups.. then got right back to it. (Ok , I only did the pushups a few times, I wussed out the rest).

At this stage, my schedule was similar to this:

Monday , Wed - Study 2-3 hours
Tue , Thursday - Study 2-3 hours
Friday - Off
Saturday - 4-6 hours
Sunday - 4-6 hours

One thing I did that was very important.. about 3 weeks prior ..was every night recite my "positive mantras" .. yes yes I know.. kinda woo-woo and spiritual.. but it got me results. I would basically tell myself " I am a CCIE" over and over again.. nothing more.. nothing less. Oddly enough within about 3 days of doing this, I was far more motivated to study and spend more time studying and going far deeper.. no longer afraid to try new things and get things wrong.. kinda happened on it's own.

.. then you know the rest

This things is far more taxing emotionally and mentally than it is on your intellect and skillset. (but those are important too

)

Also one last thing to mention.. I recall seeing on the forums some folks 'doing the math' on the amount of hours it takes to pass the CCIE lab .. like it's a magic number. At first I thought it was complete and utter garbage.... but I did the math and in the 1.4 years, I totaled about 1520 study hours .. (i recall the 'magic number' floating around being roughly 1500ish). I'm not saying it's completely changed my mind about it, but at the same time its an interesting coincidence .. take it how you wish

Thank you everyone.. take care and keep at it.. remember.. you cannot recognize success without failure, the same way a shadow cannot exist without light.

jovan88

Thanks Plazma for sharing your story, congratulations!

MrBrian

Yes thanks for sharing your experience. Some good advice in there!