Mid-July Update…

Well, I’ve been doing all Cisco for the last two weeks and boy has it been a confidence roller-coaster. Some days, I feel like I can conquer this beast, but others I get shoved deep into the depths of humility. Some days my soul prays for a test where I am solid with all the topics so that the torture will cease, others I pray to have it all thrown at me to keep the validity of the prize, regardless of the outcome of my personal battle against it.

From what I have read on other CCIE candidate blogs, this IS the nature of the beast. It’s a tough one to conquer. I’m starting to think that dedicated CCIE candidates are sick in the head. So much sacrifice is given deep in the trenches to understand networking’s inner crevices and be able to apply this knowledge in an insane display of performance to hopefully appease the beast’s desires that day. Often, it seems that the beast can chew you up, even while you are thinking you have the upper hand, but in reality the digestion process has already taken place before you hit its gut.

OK, I needed to use the creative side of the brain for a bit. My logic part of my brain is just plain shot. It has been tough though. For a confidence level, I feel like I am at a 7 out of a 10 scale (10 being able to walk in, slap the beast silly and have it on the roasting fire for din-din minutes later). OK, with that scale and description, I feel I’m at a 5 (see what I mean about the confidence roller-coaster?)

I have been concentrating on mostly level 8 and 9 practice labs this week. I have learned a bunch about smaller topics and some deeper things on the bigger ones. I have been also formulating my “attack” plan as I have been going along. When doing research on the Internet, I have found some who have elaborate checklists and procedures for taking this exam. Others I find a bit more simple. I was impressed with Brian Dennis’ approach to taking this test.

R&S Attack Plan – Pt I

It is a simple, but quick and effective approach. I will probably use most of his ideas, but will be doing a deeper look at the lab document before starting. I want to know the redistribution points and other IGP issues I will be up against like backup links, etc. I never have been one for remembering detailed procedures and this sure isn’t the place for me to do so, when I have hundreds of other things I have to recall.

I got the results back from my last two mock labs and they aren’t too impressive. On IE Mock Lab #3 I got a 48 and IE Mock Lab #5 I got a 29; disheartening to say the least. These were some of the downer times.

I did IE Mock Lab #6 yesterday and did about the same I think. I really got stuck on a redistribution question that had an error in it. It was telling me to redistribute two protocols, but one of the didn’t exist on the router at all. At first I thought it was an error, but assuming not, I used a tunnel to get the non-existent protocol to the router and redistributed there. That created all sorts of havoc that I didn’t anticipate. After pulling my hair out and feeling like quitting the lab, something told me to just get end-to-end reachability and move on. I burned a lot of time, but I tried to scramble to get remaining points with the time I had left. Later in the evening I read this from Brian Dennis in the IE blog about a complex redistribution task:

First off this task is only worth 3 points but will take most people 45 minutes to 1 hour to complete due to the fact the requirements create a routing loop. This means that it’s really not worth 3 points in the real lab due to the fact you’re giving away 1 hour of your 8 hours for just 3 points. In the real lab most people would be better off just getting full IP reachability and moving on. Think about it like this. If you could give up 3 points in every lab and implement you own solution to obtain full IP reachability would you be better off?

InternetworkExpert Blog – Advanced Route Redistribution by Brian Dennis

In the real world, you can’t just let an issue go. You have to fix it, since the pressure is on. This might be one of those things that causes experienced network engineers to not do so well on this test sometimes. It’s a way different mentality. If I would have done Brian’s advice, I feel I would have completed the mock lab and done respectably. Man, that was a hard lesson to learn.

Well, I have four days to go. My family will be home in two days and I will leave for San Jose the next. I have missed them terribly and phone calls are not enough. I especially miss my wife’s hugs when things are especially going rough. I miss my kids, especially since their birthdays are today and another in two more days. I will be so happy to see them again at the airport.

My uncle, who is the only sane one on my father’s side of the family has offered to fly and meet me in San Jose to go do something the day before the exam. This way I can get my mind off of anything technical, so it will be fresh for the battle arena the next day.

As others that have experienced this trek, I can tell you that this is a lonely uphill road to forge. No matter what they say, of the people who you talk to about this process, very few understand. Those who do understand, live in a virtual community that exists in the very networks that we are trying to conquer. I have had the privilege of meeting IE’s Brian Dennis and Brian McGahan, but other greats like Scott Morris, Narbik, Ethen Banks, Keith Tokash, and others I have come to admire in this process are and have been “virtual” study partners, even if they haven’t known it. I feel like I especially relate to Keith, since he seems to think like I think. I can be a lonely crusade.

On the other side, people who don’t understand really don’t “get” how great it is when you pass. Some think, it’s just another vendor certification, but let me tell you… it’s far beyond that. You’re not only learning networking, you gain determination, persistence, self-confidence from nothing, tenacity, self-discipline, faith and most of all you learn what you abilities are and how to exceed them.

This is my rant for this week. By this time next week I will know whether I have killed the beast or my practice and training for another battle in the war continues. Thanks you everyone for everyting you’ve done thus far…

Early July Update…

OK, MJ. I was a bit over-zealous… I do get up between 7:30 and 8:00AM to exercise. Staying up until 1:30AM to read over the DocCD has a bit to do with that…

Just so everyone knows, MJ is a buddy of mine who works in IT infrastructure at my company (who I wouldn’t mind working with someday, at my present company or otherwise). One of the emails I got from him lately has been some flack about my proposed schedule for my time off, mostly getting up at 7AM to exercise. So that’s what prompted that above comment.

My “vacation” has officialy started. I am now in full-time study mode. I took my wife and son to the airport on July 1st to go to Denver to stay with the mother-in-law. My daughter has already been there a week. I just have myself and the dog to take care of (my dog, Maezy is easier to take care of than myself ). The house is quiet, but a wierd quiet without the sounds of kids; I really miss that. Well, I’ve determined that if I keep busy and studying, I won’t have much time to miss them. I think I still will though…

This week was rough to let work things go. One of my projects had a “blow up” right before I left. It’s a long story, but I was on a long conf call on Thursday to mitigate the situation and come up with answers for my management, which were out of the office at the time, luckily on thier boats on the lake or goofing off wherever. The issue wasn’t on me, but a misjudgement and miscommunication between my project manager and the support teams who we provide training for. Plus, the support teams had a new training liason, who didn’t know how things work, so he got higher level management involved, etc. Kind of an embarrassing moment for our dept., but I helped the resolution as much as possible. There’s only so much you can do from the bottom rung. After this, I promptly turned on my Out-of-Office e-mail notification and left work (and hopefully all the worries behind as well).

Well, it nice to have time to dedicate to just studying and practicing labs. I’m getting to the point where I am finishing end-to-end connectivity at around 4 to 5 hours on level 6 and some level 7 IEWB Vol2 labs. I feel good about this, since I have had this goal a lot. I got the results from my mack lab (#3) last weekend and got a 48%, an improvement from last time. This time and last time, both mock labs were level 7. As I went through the results and the proctor comments, I counted 30-35 points that I could have gotten if I was able to take a step back periodically and look at the whole picture. Some of the items that I missed are below:

• Tasks 1.5 & 1.6 Redundancy – I don’t know why I didn’t go back and fiinish this one. It was using a backup interface and end-to-end keepalives to maintain the FR circuit. After looking at the solution, it was an easy one.
• Task 1.6 PPP – Man, I just couldn’t get this to work. I later figured out that I was using the wrong authentication method on the wrong ends. The task asks for PAP on one end and CHAP on the other, but I was putting the same method for requesting and answering on the same side. Duh..
• Task 2.1 Trunking – I had the VLAN that the task stated that needed to be the native VLAN as tagged on the trunk links. I’m going to have to lab this one up and see if you can have a VLAN native and tagged on the same trunk link.
• Task 2.6 STP – This was a simple STP traffic flow task. I was adjusting the port priority instead of the root cost on this one. I need to look at the wording of the task better on this one.
• Task 3.2 OSPF – This is a classic example of one task affecting others. This task asks for authentication in all links in area 0. I totally forgot about including the tunnel link connecting a non-zero area through a transit area into this authentication requirement. This led to missing task 3.1 (two neighbors not adjacent) and 3.10 (redistribution – incomplete reachability). Arrrg… That was 9 points right there from not doing a 3 point question correctly. This is what I mean by taking a few seconds and looking back at the whole scenario, making sure all is covered.
• Tasks 4.1 & 4.2 Multicast – This is also another area where looking at it from a step back would have been needed. I missed a RPF check that needed a static mroute and also to configure broadcast-to-multicast-to-broadcast transmission.
• Task 5.2 IPv6 Tunneling – I just forgot to set the tunnel mode to IPv6IP. Uggg…
• Task 7.1 Traffic Filtering – This was a continuation of QoS. It was using rate limiting to mitigate a DoS attack – slick one guys. Use another technology in a section that seems like nothing to do with it.
• Task 8.1 SNMP – I thought I had this one in the bag. I find SNMP tasks fairly easy, since there isn’t too much to them, but I forgot to enable SNMP trapping. I could kick myself for this one.
• Task 8.2 RMON – OK this one royally pissed me off. The command wouldn’t take the description string. No matter what I did, if the string was not a connected string (all continuous chracters), it barfed at me. I ended putting in the string with underscores between the words, hoping that would be sufficient, but no… I will look this one up and see if it’s one of those questions that needs a specific order of the subcommands.
• Task 9.1 DHCP – I thought this would be a no-brainer too, but a few things I didn’t think about. I would have gotten this in a real situation, but again I needed to take a step back and look at it from a higher level. I needed to add a helper command to the remote router so the DHCP server I was configuring could service the remote network. I also forgot to specify exclusions for the router IP addresses in those subnets that DHCP would be used on. Lessons learned…
• Tasks 10.2 – 10.4 BGP – I sacrificed some of these points to get other easier tasks. It was a decision I had to make since I had about 1 1/2 hours left.

My plan is to do quite a few more labs, especially focusing on getting my core as fast as possible and finding stuff in the DocCD (Cisco Documentation) very quickly. I want to be able to do as much as I can from memory, but I still want to use the resources as much as possible.

So, in order to focus, I have taken the advice of many others when they went through the final preparations. I have:

• turned off all email and messenger, including the Groupstudy list (this has been the hardest)
• turned off all TV (except for those satellite music channels that I can chill-out to)
• committed to no extraneous web surfing, just direct study related (like www.cisco.com, etc.)
• committed and started to exercise everyday with taking extra vitamins
• simplified my life to keep focus on the task at hand
• been asking the higher power, several times a day even, for help and answers (which I have received!)

Basically, I have checked out from the world for three weeks or so (with the exception of this blog).

I have visions of what it will be like when this process is complete and I have achieved my goal of obtaining CCIE. I hold onto those visions as a motivator. i know there is something out there waiting for me and my family, but I just have to get this big step accomplished first!