Intro

Let me start off appropriately with some form of introduction….

My name is Paul. I’m 27, Aussie, and going bald.

I decided to start this site in order to serve as journal for my studies towards obtaining CCIE for Cisco’s routing and switching track. If I document my progress and findings I figure I can use the site as a review prior to my labb exam, and at the same time hope that the information (or random dribble) contained can also assist others with their studies.

For the last 8 or so years up until two months ago I worked in Melbourne at an ISP doing support and implementation with mostly Cisco equipment for small to medium businesses. I’m now living in London on a 2 year working holiday visa hoping to get some good work experience, do some travelling, and of course, get my CCIE. I have been looking for work, but apart from a short two week contract I’ve been unemployed.

In the last two years I really focused on furthering myself and worked my way up the certification ladder. I currently hold a CCDA, CCNP, CCIP, IPTX (Callmanager Express), and I passed my written exam in April.

I decided to get my CCIE for a lot of reasons. The main one being that I actually do enjoy studying, plus all the jobs that catch my eye stipulate that a CCIE qualification is an ‘advantage’ or ‘highly desirable’ :)

So my lab date is on the 11th of December, I’m in London, a bum with no job, what better time to study. I had my Cisco press books sent over and hopped right into it.

What I’m using

I don’t have a rack of equipment so Dynamips is my primary form of practical study. I’ll also be purchasing rack time for 3550/3560 practice, and mock labs. To run Dynamips I purchased a dedicated machine which included a 22″ LCD screen that I use for dual display on my laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 530 with an Intel 2.4ghz Quad Core processor and 3GB of RAM running Vista. I can run a full IE lab in Dynamips without a hitch.

For study material I’m going with Internetwork Expert for basically everything. Purchasing Volume I,II,III workbooks, their Class-On-Demand videos, and I’m booked to attend the 12 day bootcamp from October 13th to the 24th which I am very much looking forward to.

As reference material I also have the following books:

- Internetworking with TCP/IP
- TCP/IP Illustrated Volume I
- Interconnections, Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking protocols
- Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 & 2
- Cisco BCMSN Exam Certification Guide
- Cisco QoS Exam Certification Guide
- Internet Routing Architectures
- Developing IP Multicast Networks
- Cisco Router Firewall Security

The Guide

Some would call it a plan, I’m calling it a guide. Most of which is based on the content of this page here and the class on demand video’s. I’ll follow this method for as long as I think I’m benefiting from it and then reassess if its not working out. But the general idea is to understand all the technologies, complete all the labs at least once, take some mock labs and Cisco assessor labs to gauge my progress, and read the DocCD from back to front for 12.4 mainline router IOS, and 12.2(25)SEE switch IOS.

Progress So Far…

Studying for the written exam took me about 6 weeks, and since I arrived in London I’ve been studying for a about six more. The average day for me consists of getting up at about 10:00am, cooking poached eggs on muffins, with spinach, mushrooms, and tomatoes, accompanied by a strong coffee. I’ll then study anywhere between 6 to 10 hours a day depending on whether I do theory or lab work. Weekends do encompass some form of study but I’m more or less treating this as a full time job job so that I can still enjoy my weekends to an extent.

I started my lab study by watching the Class-on-demand videos from start to finish making notes all the way through, and I have to say that these are by far the best learning investment I’ve ever made. I’m a big fan of class based training and watched quite a lot of Jeremy’s CBT Nugget videos during my CCNP / CCIP studies. Internetwork Expert also recently revealed that updates to these videos are coming soon and the content will grow from 80 to around the 120 hours.

After watching the videos and doing some additional research on the topics I had a tough time understanding, I started the Volume I version 5 labs, beginning with frame relay and then using some rack time to do the bridging and switching. Once I was done with these I had a glance at the remaining version 4 technology labs, but they just didn’t compare to the newer ones. The version 4 labs dont have any detailed explanations, breakdowns, comprehensive verifications, or preconfigurations. Because if this, I decided to wait for the new ones – I think I’ll get a lot more out of them.

As I understand Internetwork Expert are working hard to finishing the remaining ones, and only a week or two later they released the RIP and EIGRP versions, both of which I completed. But I’m especially looking forward to the multicast one as its probably my weakest area.

So in the meantime I decided to start doing some labs.

Beginning with lab 1 and working my way through to lab 4 I took the approach of reading an entire section, completing it, and then checking my work with the solutions guide. This made sure that any mistakes I made were corrected before trying to solve the next section. I struggled with the first two labs as the wording of the questions was really throwing me off. My score and completion time wasn’t important for these, but I wanted to make sure I understood exactly what I was doing. So if I came across a question or a technology that I didn’t understand, then I’d read up on it until I did.

The structure of these initial labs are great. They teach you a lot valuable lessons, methods, and techniques in a progressive approach that I think is easy to understand.

By this point I was getting pretty comfortable with question wording, how labs are structured, the importantance of thinking something through before implementing it, and how crucial verification is. My weak areas were definitely multicast, some security, IP services, oh…and of course human error.

Moving on to lab 5 and 6 I completed these fully before checking the solutions guide. I scored 62 & 68 but still made quite a lot of silly mistakes because I wasn’t checking my work or pinging every possible destination from every possible source. Also there were a few things that I knew required the DocCD but had trouble locating the answers. Completion time was just under 8 hours but obviously that’s not fast enough.

Next I went on to Volume III and did labs 1 to 3. In order to set these up I had to run a search and replace the initial configurations because they’re built for real hardware, so interface names and numbers differ from the diagrams and questions which takes some getting used to, but I managed to get over it.

Obviously speed and accuracy were what these are all about so I used a stopwatch and started it before I begun to read the questions. I actually lost the score sheets for these but I completed them in around 3 hours with great accuracy on two, but on the other I dropped 8 points by doing stuff and not checking it. It’s pure laziness, or overconfidence, and I just need be more thourough.