Late July Update…

Well, it’s been a whole week since I sat in the CCIE lab in San Jose. I was so spent both mentally and emotionally that I needed a week to recover from the lab and the three weeks of dedication prior.

I went into the lab on Friday ready to do my best. If it was good enough, then it was. If it wasn’t, I would walk out knowing that I did everything I could do. I guess you could say that I was OK with either outcome.

The lab environment was almost exactly the same as it was the last time I was there, except I sat one seat over from where I was last year. I was able to take in my colored pencils without an issue. I really didn’t even ask, I just had them in my hand the whole time during the introduction speech by the proctor and just carried them with me to the desk. It seemed like the proctor wasn’t too concerned.

The lab started at 8:25AM and stopped for lunch at 11:00AM. This threw me off a bit, because I wanted to have all of my IGP done by lunch and I was just starting my redistribution tasks. I felt like I was behind. Half way threw lunch I realized that I had over 5 hours left, so I felt better about where I was. I completed IGP after lunch and then hit all the “low-hanging fruit” after lunch, including the switching non-core tasks. After completing BGP and multicast, I went for QoS, which seemed overly difficult for me at the time for some reason.

At 3:30PM, I was mostly done with all my tasks, except for a few IOS Features that I needed to look up in the DocCD. I was kinda stoked at this point because I very rarely finished IEWB Vol2 labs within 8 hours.

When the proctor came around and gave up the 10 minute finish-up warning, I felt pretty good about where I was at. I did leave the 3 tasks unattempted; they were 2 Security tasks and 1 IOS Feature task that I never heard of in my life, totally 8 points. I felt like this gave me a 12 point buffer to pass.

After leaving Cisco’s campus, the waiting game started. The proctor told us to not expect our results until 48 hours later, but I checked the web site around 10PM before going to sleep. The results weren’t posted by then. I went to bed with the thoughts that the results were out of my hands, otherwise I would have never gotten any sleep.

When I awoke at 5AM to get ready to go and catch my 8AM flight, I thought I would check and see if the results were there. After I logged in, I saw the FAIL and just closed my laptop. It really didn’t sink in until on the flight on the way home. My wishes were to be finished more than anything else. I was tired and exhausted. Three weeks before the lab exam, all of my time was consumed with studying and doing practice labs from morning to late night. I just wanted to be done.

When I got home to my very supportive family, I looked up the details of the sections in the score report. After averaging out all the sections, I got a 74% overall. I was OK with that score as I had hardly ever gotten such a score in my practice labs. It’s hard to believe that I theorectically only needed 6 points to pass. I felt pretty good about my score and now knew that I could pass this test. I know I will nail this test on the next attempt. Below is the breakdown.

Attempt #2 Scores

With blazing colors in multicast and switching, the QoS really creamed me. I also knew that Security would be low, since I didn’t do 2 of those tasks. I figured that I would leave them unattempted as to not break anything else on my topology.

Areas that I need to work on:

• QoS – especially on the Catalyst 3560
• Verifying connectivity to backbone routes with IGP and BGP
• Implementing security in a configured network
• Making the DoCD my very best friend

Now I know I won’t get the same test again and I should expect different everything, but if I first work on the above things, it will help solidify the areas that I felt week in on this attempt.

I did have a scare about 30 minutes from the end, though. I was missing one route in all my routers, preventing end-to-end connectivity when I ran my final ping scripts. I verified that the routing protocol was configured correctly for this particular interface, I verified VLAN assignments and trunking, and verified that the interface was up and running, all still a nogo. After killing 15 minutes and with 15 minutes to go, I was sweating it. Something told me to just shut/no shut the interface, so I did it. Low and behold, it was being advertised again. I have no idea what was wrong and why that worked, but it did. Whew! What a scare…

All in all, I feel good about my progress. I really would have liked to be done with all the studying, especially for my family. I am taking 2-3 weeks off to recuperate and reconnect with my family before I go at it again.

Thanks to all who have been supportive and understand this process. I especially am grateful for a wife who sacrifices so much to help me accomplish this. She is a diamond in my eyes.

Hey MJ… I got your note on my whiteboard. Thanks for the encouragement. Most of all, thanks for not taking all of the switches from under my desk!