Bootcamp scheduled

Once I passed the written, I decided I was probably going to attend a CCIE bootcamp. I got a heck of a lot of studying done so far this year and it's tough to keep dedicated with a 6 week old son and graduate school going on at the same time. I just so happened to get a marketing email from IPexpert this week and decided to follow up on it. The date, location, and price was right, so I went ahead and signed up. Apparently I get to actually take the class twice for the price of one, so I'm going the first time the end of September. Now I just have to work hard the next two weeks on my home rack before class starts to make sure I'm adequately prepared.


Unfortunately, studying didn't happen tonight.



On the left is my car which got hit while parked. My wife was standing on the passenger side and literally had to dive out of the way to avoid serious injury. Thankfully, everyone's fine.

Lab Date Scheduled

The backlog was a little longer than I expected, so a lab date of January does not look possible. I have instead scheduled my lab date for February 22nd. Which basically means I have until January 22nd to commit to that date or push it back further.

I'm currently in talks with a few bootcamp providers to decide what to take. I'm leaning toward IPexpert's 5 day bootcamp in December, but I haven't committed to anything yet.

No rack time yet this week :(

Getting back in the groove

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted. I've had a few distractions to studying. For starters, my son, Kyle, was born in July. That alone has made rack time all but impossible for the past month.

So instead I focused my studying on the Written exam, which expired a couple of years back so I needed to retake it. There was one new section in particular, MPLS. I knocked out the written on Friday after about a month of studying (thanks ccbootcamp and netmasterclass!!!). An interesting note on ccbootcamp's material: there are a LOT of errors. Strangely, I think this helped me. Because of my distrust of the material, I was forced to hunt for resources on every questionable item. I ended up spending as much time on univercd as I did studying the material.

Now I'm all out of excuses to continue my studies. As it stands, I have:

Completed the IE Advanced Technologies Class-on-demand
Completed the first 4 IE workbook 2 labs
Completed the first 3 IE core labs

My intentions are to take the Lab at the end of January. In order to accomplish this, I'd like to complete all of the IE core labs and half of the IE workbook 2 labs by the end of the year. I'm also intending on taking a bootcamp in early January. The question is, which one? I'm considering IPexpert, IE, NetmasterClass, Unitek, or Global Knowledge. I've got a few months to figure it out.

IE Lab 4 complete

I completed IE lab 4 today. The remaining parts consisted of BGP, IPv6, QoS, and other miscellaneous stuff. Unfortunately, the router that I needed to run IPv6 OSPF wouldn't handle it (2501 running 12.3 IP Plus). So, I implemented it on another router but wasn't able to watch it peer with the border router. I also reviewed the configuration guide heavily to ensure I didn't miss anything.

There were a couple of shockers at the end. I never knew there was a menu command in IOS. I also had no idea about the "ip alias" and busy/refuse message commands.

All in all, I felt pretty comfortable once again with most of the lab. I still need to work on my understanding of QoS and multicast, and I need to get more comfortable with IPv6.

Now that Lab 4 is complete, per the guidelines I'm going to (re)do the core workbooks labs 1-3 before continuing on to Lab 5. I actually did the core labs 1-3 a few months back because I felt so overwhelmed by the workbook 1 labs. Thanfully, around workbook lab 2, combined with what I learned from the core and the class on demand, I finally got route redistribution (mostly) figured out and haven't had much trouble with it since. I just hope that stays.

Before I continue on with Lab 5, I'm also intending on doing the technology labs for Multicast, QoS, and the peering portion of BGP. With a little more experience with those I should really start tearing through the rest of the labs.

Daily Update

Okay, so it's been a few days since I've studied. I actually had to take a break for my own health. You see, over the years I've gotten a case of tech neck. Back in January I purchased a sleep number bed and I haven't had a single incident since.

That was until last Tuesday night. I like a sleep number of about 65. My cat apparently does not. On that night, he preferred a sleep number of 0. In the middle of the night he managed to hold the remote down to deflate my bed completely. I woke up effectively sleeping on the floor. About two hours into work, my neck popped and I knew what was coming. Throughout the day my neck got progressively more sore, to the point that when I awoke the next morning I couldn't move my head at all. One day off work and countless Ibuprofen later and I'm almost back to normal.

I hope to be back to studying Monday night, if more important matters don't come up. It's hard enough to study for my CCIE when life doesn't interfere. But as bad as I want it, some things just make it pale in comparison.

Daily Update

I finished IE lab 4 up to IGP tonight. Things certainly get more comfortable and faster every day. There were only three issues I ran into.

First, I showed I need to reread udld, specifically the spanning tree loop guard functionality.

Secondly, I need to make sure to read every single subtask. This is a trend that I continually see. I intend to put more effort into ensuring I complete every task once I complete lab 4, where it is recommended that I start seriously timing myself and preparing as if it were the real lab.

Finally, I fat fingered an IP address on a tunnel interface, which ate up about 20 minutes of troubleshooting. Then, to top it off, one of my frame-relay interfaces was acting up and, even though the show frame-relay maps were fine. I still needed to do a mass reboot to get everything responding fine. I wasted way too much time troubleshooting before I initiated the reboot, eating up another 20 minutes.

All in all though, I was happy with the results. I caught on to all the trickery and had no issues knowing what needed to be done, but some mistakes hurt me in the time to execute.

I'm looking forward to hitting the BGP and other portions tomorrow night.

Daily Update

I didn't do a whole lot today. I wiped the configs on all of my equipment and loaded the IE lab 4 base configs. There was very little studying completed over the weekend as well. I was having some work done on my house and studying would have been nearly impossible with all of the noise.

So, I thought this would be a great chance to explain a little about what the CCIE means to me. In a nutshell, the CCIE is the most demanding IT certification. It requires not only the passage of a computerized exam, but also one must pay Cisco a visit to demonstrate his or her knowledge. In this eight hour lab, Cisco requires you to set up an extraordinarily complex network that would probably never be seen in the real world. They throw the book at you and give you very little time. On top of that, each attempt costs over $1000 and the average person to pass--and many never do pass--takes three attempts.

The typical estimate is that an individual who is already a professional network engineer takes about 2000 more hours of studying to pass the CCIE. This does not mean a year of work. This means 2000 hours of weekends and time after work spent dedicated directly toward CCIE material. Unless perhaps your job description precisely matches the CCIE blueprint. Since mine does not, it means a lot of time studying.

I've achieved a number of computer certifications over the years. The MCSE took me about a year to complete back in 1998. The CCNA, MCDBA, and CCNP were also completed with little effort--perhaps a month of studying for each exam. But, I have been working toward the CCIE off and on since about 2004. The first year was spent just reading every related book I could get my hands on. I needed to learn topics such as IPv6, Multicast, BGP, OSPF, and others much, much deeper than what was required to slide through the CCNP exams.

Last December I was in the fortunate position where I had a little extra money to spend and InternetworkExpert was throwing in a PS3 to boot, so I couldn't pass up the deal. Since I purchased the end-to-end training package, I have been, for perhaps the first time, consistently dedicated to the CCIE. I'm not nearly as afraid of many of the topics as I used to be, but I still have a lot to learn. I'm optimistic I can take a stab at the CCIE lab this year, if I can stay focused.

And that brings me to why I started this blog. I figure if I imagine others out there are reading my progress, I'll have to be accountable to somebody. I know this can be done. It really isn't brain surgery. It's just a matter of coming to terms with the large volume of information that's out there. I'm determined to pass the CCIE this year. Perhaps another time I'll explain why.