CCIE wannabees

Well I thought I would put up a thread that may be a sticky. Essentially anyone with a written pass who is fully engaged in lab prep please let yourself be known here. This can be a good thread for those actively working on lab prep and to swap notes on workbooks, resources and general banter on lab preparations. It will also be useful for observers with CCIE aspirations. I encourage everyone to keep their own CCIE lab thread/blogs going. This will be an officers mess to exchange ideas, keep people motivated and workgroup.

I can swap ICQ number to students if they send me a PM.

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Plazma

RouteMyPacket wrote: »

BOOM! Awesome! A fresh CCIE, legit CCIE at that! You are now a God amongst men/women! lulz

Wow.. lulz.. a legit CCIE? What is the definition of a NON legit CCIE ?

Zartanasaurus

Congrats Plazma. I think that's two members of TE this year?

spiderjericho

Plazma wrote: »

Wow.. lulz.. a legit CCIE? What is the definition of a NON legit CCIE ?

Well not to spoil the mood or CCIE reverence but I've seen study groups, vendors and message boards dedicated to those who memorize lab solutions, just saying...

but I give props to the ones who honestly pursue the title, stay dedicated despite multiple lab failures and reach the zenith.

Routerronin

non-legit baseball players make more money than legit. sad but true.

darkplayer

Seems like the board is falling asleep, let me chime in. I just passed my CCNP TShoot earlier this morning and I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty with CCIE.

gorebrush

Not asleep - busy labbing...

6 full months left for me before my first lab attempt in October. Feeling quietly confident at the moment but I still have a very long way to go for sure. Lots more labbing to be done. Need to see more v5 practice labs though to see what I am up against. Will be very interesting to see though.

darkplayer

gorebrush wrote: »

Not asleep - busy labbing...

6 full months left for me before my first lab attempt in October. Feeling quietly confident at the moment but I still have a very long way to go for sure. Lots more labbing to be done. Need to see more v5 practice labs though to see what I am up against. Will be very interesting to see though.

OCT is just around the corner. I decided to go Hybrid (GNS3 + Cisco equip) and started budgeting for new VMware server and inventorying all of my cisco routers/switches. But had to pull back, I was so close to hitting the purchase button. I'm tasked on a BIG project, retrofitting our entire network infrastructure and transferring all of our servers to VMware.

gorebrush

Yeah, 6 full months away now. Not far away from starting the multiprotocol labs. Need to start putting my time in heavily at the command line now

ram1101

I all i just took my CCIE written and pass, im waiting on my company to see if they are going to pay for my CCIE lab bootcamp and lab test...
any advice? im going for R&S at the beggining og agoust

keenon

I passed the written yesterday again after 5 years

jamesp1983

keenon wrote: »

I passed the written yesterday again after 5 years

Congrats! Good luck with the rest of your studies.

BroadcastStorm

Hi guys, I'm officially studying for CCIEv5 R&S and a few other certifications, my ultimate goal is to learn as much as I can and be good at it then passing the exam would be something nice I'll blog all my studies here - Certworld.net | A tale of a wild packet if you're interested chatting or labbing feel free to drop me a message.

egrizzly

Me too. I heard same from multiple sources that the written exam wasn't too distant from the CCNP in difficulty. I happen to be using INE.com videos now. They were kind enough to pass me a study plan using their material. Very nice of those folks, lol.

d4nz1g

Getting my gear ready for CCIE Lab on 2016

Starting next month (when i get all the books) the prep for the written exam.

Btw, R&S guy here.

gorebrush

5 and a bit months left - ramping up now.

joelsfood

CCIE-DC written a couple of weeks ago. Lab scheduled for 4/17 (first spot I could get). That might be more properly first attempt scheduled.

lostindaylight

Hello!

Just joined the site, happy to be here.

Made one attempt at v4, didn't pass. New job, moved, yada yada. Requalified on v5 written in August, have a lab date in April.

Currently wrapping up the last few INE ATC labs, should be finished within the next week. Took my time and tried not to rush through the material like I did the first time, stopping to read books, RFCs and whatnot whenever I had questions about why something worked a certain way.

Thanks for reading and happy labbing.

-lid

Bardlebee

Good luck man. It's good to hear you're nearing the end of the track.

jamesp1983

Good to hear you're nearly there. Good luck!

Iristheangel

I know lostindaylight from another forum. He is very very very close indeed. I would say he's probably in the top two strongest R&S folks we have.

lostindaylight

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone. Much appreciated.

BeAsT_HuStle

I'm also preparing for lab test and i thinking of taking it before the end of this year but i haven't schedule it yet, Ordered couple of recommended books after getting that info from Cisco and various ccie blogs. Starting to build machine to run ccie labs with cisco CSR1000v and couple of catalyst switch so not yet in full swing but getting there

lostindaylight

t-minus 80 something days

Been doing foundation/full scale/troublehooting labs for maybe three weeks now.

Initially I was hella slow and I was a bit concerned about it. It was an adjustment going from months of tech focused labs. The speed is already way up so Shouldn't be an issue come lab day.

Troubleshooting, definitely my weakest area. intend to spend a good 30% of my labbing time on TS between now and the day.

Using the johnny bass stupid ccie tricks books for quick review, and extracting some of the more interesting bits into supermemo. Just like any book author, he's only human and his books do have errors. Always lab it up to verify if something doesn't sound right.

ok, that's it for now.

bests,

-lid

bender000

troubleshooting is what makes or breaks you in my opinion.

Have your methodology down pat for all the major technologies (DMVPN, MPLS-VPN, RIP/OSPF/EIGRP/BGP etc.) so you can autopilot straight into it - check control plane, check data plane etc., don't spend more than say 30 seconds staring at the show run hoping to catch an obvious error (and if its there you should be able to see it within 30 seconds - whats that ACL/RM/etc. doing, typos in names - really f--king dirty if you ask me but it is what it is, etc.).

lostindaylight

Thanks for the feedback bender.

I've got some work to do.

-lid

joelsfood

Troubleshooting (the specific section in R&S, and the skill in genearl), is what separates a CCIE from a CCNP (or a dumper). A CCNP can follow a config guide, set something up from defaults, and put it into production. A CCIE can take something that has already been configured to some extent, isn't working, and has the necessarily knowledge and experience to troubleshoot the issue and get it working.

Well, to be fair, troubleshooting makes the difference between an expert and a professional. Troubleshooting and the ability to read which of 3-8 different workable solutions a particular CCIE lab question is actually asking for so you get the points makes you a CCIE.

gorebrush

I am in a position at work where I sit next to a CCNP who thinks he can just read some books and do some labs and bam he's a CCIE. Then he looks at me like I have two heads when I pass him the reading list I had when I went through the CCIE, and the fact that I spent close to 1750 hours total studying for it.

At this point I just give him the info and let him get on with it.

lostindaylight

joelsfood wrote: »

Troubleshooting (the specific section in R&S, and the skill in genearl), is what separates a CCIE from a CCNP (or a dumper). A CCNP can follow a config guide, set something up from defaults, and put it into production. A CCIE can take something that has already been configured to some extent, isn't working, and has the necessarily knowledge and experience to troubleshoot the issue and get it working.

Well, to be fair, troubleshooting makes the difference between an expert and a professional. Troubleshooting and the ability to read which of 3-8 different workable solutions a particular CCIE lab question is actually asking for so you get the points makes you a CCIE.

Joelsfood,

With all respect, I believe that's oversimpifying. There is a massive gulf between CCIE level and CCNP level knowledge and configuration skills.

A typical CCNP cannot build up a MPLS network with route leaking and attribute manipulation for multiple customers across a core network running multiple IGPs, add DMVPN network, then traffic engineer everything over the dual backbones to spec, throwing in some extra like QoS and and multicast, and have it all working a few hours.

Regarding troubleshooting speed being the final piece of the puzzle, that I completely agree with.

joelsfood

Sure, any single statement is going to be oversimplified. But I do feel that a large part of the difference between a professionl and an expert is the knowledge and experience encompassed (Though not defined) by the troubleshooting parts of each lab. For instance, I setup my first UCS domain from scratch several years ago, and basically just followed the Flexpod document (which I still recommend as the best single source for setting up a full UCS/storage/hypervisor stack) step by step, just adjusting Junos setup vs NXOS, and Nimble vs Netapp. Now, several years downt he road, I might make most of the same decisions if I setup that same stack, but I have a much better understanding of how it all works together, why the authors made the decisions that they did, and how they all effect each other, all of which goes into my current level of skill at troubleshooting. I didn't have CCNP then, and don't haev CCIE now, but that's about the level of skilla nd experience I had at each of those times.

bender000

lostindaylight wrote: »

Joelsfood,

With all respect, I believe that's oversimpifying. There is a massive gulf between CCIE level and CCNP level knowledge and configuration skills.

A typical CCNP cannot build up a MPLS network with route leaking and attribute manipulation for multiple customers across a core network running multiple IGPs, add DMVPN network, then traffic engineer everything over the dual backbones to spec, throwing in some extra like QoS and and multicast, and have it all working a few hours.

Regarding troubleshooting speed being the final piece of the puzzle, that I completely agree with.

lostindaylight don't stress too much, there's no traffic engineering

I can only reiterate again: TS IS THE KEY. Read this for an example of what I'm talking about. (and yes you will need to do this, or there goes your points on the MPLS-VPN TS question you may or may not get) How else do you think you're going to solve ten tickets on a massive, contrived, half-broken topology in two hours?

http://brbccie.blogspot.com/2014/04/an-exhaustive-approach-to-debugging.html

People who passed told me this repeatedly and I'm telling you repeatedly to pass on the favour

gorebrush wrote: »

I am in a position at work where I sit next to a CCNP who thinks he can just read some books and do some labs and bam he's a CCIE. Then he looks at me like I have two heads when I pass him the reading list I had when I went through the CCIE, and the fact that I spent close to 1750 hours total studying for it.

At this point I just give him the info and let him get on with it.

People like that I put in the same category as people who bag the CCIE because of [its irrelevant because of SDN overlords / jelly / using former to justify latter]. I just let them keep believing what they want, its not worth the effort of arguing with them and its no skin off my nose if they wish to be deluded.