Success!

Had my interview today and walked away with a job starting next Tuesday. Basically I’m doing technical project management for an investment bank who’s primarily based in London. Essentially they are moving branch locations in the US, and at the same time taking the opportunity to upgrade their routers, switches, firewalls, and phone system to Cisco kit.

It’s four days a week until mid October which fits perfectly in with the IE bootcamp that starts the following Monday. After that its 6 – 7 weeks of seriously long days packed full of labs, reading, and review….

Apart from that I just plodded through some more of the 3550/3560 documentation. I tried to watch some class-on-demand videos but the the IE site was running pretty slow and had to give it a miss.

This weekend I’ll probably do a fair bit of study now that I wont have as much time during the week. I was also thinking of doing a mock lab on Monday but our street is currently having the underground water pipes replaced and jackhammers outside your window don’t really help when you need to concentrate….

Study, and the job front….

Went through day 2 of the class-on-demand videos today but didn’t really come across anything new (which is definitely a good thing). On top of that I started reading through the documentation for the 3550/3560 switches and started making some notes in the same way i’ve been doing for the routing documentation. Its actually a pretty good doc, everything is under its own category making it easy to find, and its not as lengthy as I originally thought.

Also had a breakthrough with the employment side of things today. I’ve got an interview tomorrow at a bank in the city. Fingers crossed, it sounds like it could be good.

Update (3 months and 14 days unil lab)

With the huuge weekend now behind me (which was an awful lot of fun) I woke up this morning feeling refreshed, relaxed, and a thousand times better than last week.

As I mentioned in my last post study was rather difficult after returning from holidays. Wednesday and Thursday were much better days, taking it easy with some class-on-demand videos and audio books. I’m definitely going to watch all the videos again since after watching the first day I came across some important information I missed the first time around.

Today I completed Volume I labs for IP routing and OSPF (Alpha). Overall they were both pretty easy going, although I did take a while to do the “Reliable Policy Routing” using CDP, and had to look up “OSPF path selection with Non-Backbone transit areas” using OSPF capability commands.

Tomorrow I think I’ll watch some videos and read the DocCD.

Study woes

First day back into study and it wasn’t the stellar day I hoped it would be. I found myself doing lab 1 very half arsed, taking configuration by face value, not verifying, not thinking ahead, and overall not really caring. There are some other things that are bothering me which are definitely contributing to this mindset. Hopefully I can sort it out in the next few days…

I guess on the plus side of things, I did finish the lab in 4 1/2 hours but obviously this came at a price; dropping 12 points which could have been recovered by going over my answers again.

I might just do some light reading or watch some of the class-on-demand videos tomorrow, its definitely less strenuous and doesn’t require a lot of preparation.

Lets hope tommorow is a better day!

Time off….time on!

Just got back from two weeks holiday throughout eastern Europe, visiting Prague, Vienna, parts of Croatia, and Budapest. The weather was unreal and there were plenty of fun times. Back in London now just getting my bearings, answering emails, looking for some work, and forming a bit of a routine. I’ve got one more big weekend coming up (Southwest Four festival and Notting hill carnival) before its full steam ahead with studies until D-Day. I’ve got 3 months and 23 days before my lab date.

I think a bit of rest has done me some good but I wont know until I start with some labs. Hopefully the info is all still there and can be recalled in a reasonable amount of time :)

I’m going go back and do Lab 1 from Volume II tomorrow. It’s easy and should ease me back into the regime quite well. By rights’s I should get 90+ because all the tasks from memory were pretty easy, if I screw up it will be because of stupid mistakes.

After going through all my RSS feeds I noticed that the IE guys have updated all of the Volume I version 5 labs and released an IP routing one. They also mentioned that the others are not very far away. I’m definitely going to work through Bridging & Switching and Frame Relay again, while browsing through the EIGRP and RIP ones for additions/changes. But IP routing will be first. With any luck the rest will be released very soon so that I can really nail down on all the technologies.

Nothing yet on the new Cod videos, but I’d rather they spend time on developing the the Volume I labs.

Michale Zuo’s Notes

Based on the comments of Antonie over at ‘Last 40 Days‘ I decided to pay for Michaels Zuo’s CCIE notes. Just reading through a few sections, they are filled with all kinds of important facts and tidbits pertaining to the technologies in the lab.

I think they will come in handy for some light review every week or so and leading up to the exam. Check them out here.

IEWB – Volume II – Lab 8

Difficulty 8, Score 85

A pass I guess! Finished in 7hr and 30 minutes. Put a lot of emphasis on verification and going a little bit slower in order to make fewer mistakes. I even did fairly well in the multicast section.

4.4 – Didn’t meet all the requirements by forgetting to set no-export on the routes.
5.5 – Not sure if this was working or not. My solution was the same as the guide but for some reason R2 wasn’t receiving the UDP packets from the R6’s SLA. The other thing I noticed was the the IP SLA on R6 said “broadcast disabled”, and because I needed broadcast traffic to verify I couldn’t confirm.
8.1 – Made a stupid mistake here and forgot two ACL lines.
8.2 – Knew that policy maps were probably the answer here but didn’t know how to set them up properly.
8.3 – Same as above.
9.2 – Implemented WCCP correctly but not the same as the solution guide.

So overall I’m pretty happy with this one. I think I’ll give the full labs a rest for a day or two and do some reading or have a go at the Volume III labs.