My experience with the lab

Leading Up
For the last few days of preparation before the day, my main goal was to get plenty of rest, adjust my body clock for an early start, and do as much review as possible without overdoing it. This meant no booze (at all!) for the last 5 days, getting to bed no later than 10pm, and getting up at about 8 o’clock.

For review, I went through the entire configuration documentation for the 3560 and 12.4 Mainline IOS. Not to the point of reading every single word though, just light skimming. Obviously at this stage I already knew what a lot of things did and where they could be found. But for some of the more little obscure things, I just read the introduction which tells you exactly what each technology is used for. Along with this I read the entire command reference for BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, RIP, and Multicast.

I also walked through the two practice labs in this digital shortcut from cisco press. I’d highly recommend this if you haven’t taken an assessor lab, just so you can get an idea as to how the questions are asked and solved. But don’t be shaken about by how difficult the two labs are, both of them (especially the first one) are off the mark.

Finally I read through all of Michael Zuo’s CCIE notes. These are great. Nothing too heavy, just a recap on a ton of things you can do with each technology, their nuances, and examples of when to use a particular technology for a particular question. You can definitely tell he studied with Internetwork Expert :)

As far as not overdoing it, I did short sessions of 1 or 2 hours for no more than 6 – 7 hours (total) a day. In between I’d just be watching TV or reading CCIE success stories for hints and inspiration.

One last thing worth mentioning. Exercise. For me it was crucial to my study as it helps me think properly and stay alert. Most importantly was in the last few days, without getting a 30 – 45 minute run in of a night, it was near impossible to sleep when I wanted to sleep. If I didnt do something physical,  I’d end up staying awake til 2am thinking about OSPF adjacency’s, BGP peerings, and VLANS that I forgot to create!!

The day before
On Thursday I woke up and didnt really do much at all. Just packed my things, had breakfast, watched TV and waited for my ride to the tube station that takes me to heathrow, my flight was at 2pm. On the flight I just listened to some relaxing tunes and skimmed through Michael Zuo’s notes.

At Brussels airport there was supposed to be a free shuttle service that runs to NH hotel. What’s stupid is that this doesnt run between 10am and 5:15pm. So instead of waiting an hour I got a taxi to the hotel which cost me 12 euro.

After I checking in, the hotel was nice btw, I walked out the front door, turned right, then turned right again….then turned right again, and walked up the hill to Cisco. The first building is 7B, that’s not the right one, but the receptionist was hot. You actually walk straight past it until you get to the next Cisco building that looks identical (6B). I went to the reception area and just confirmed that I was in the right place. The security guard said they start at 8am in the morning. It takes no time at all to get there.

With reconnaissance out of the way, I went back to the hotel and used the gym to go for a run before my dinner.

The hotel was pretty good, but it was also expensive. For 24 hours of private Internet access was like 20 euro, and downstairs the Internet was something like 35 cents a minute…Ripoff.

Meals weren’t cheap either, the average main was about 25 – 30 euro. I just went with the buffet and stuffed my face with all three courses (still cost me 30 euro though).

After dinner I just went back to my room, watched some TV and read over Michael’s notes until I was tired. I was in bed by 9pm and asleep by about 11. It wasn’t the greatest sleep though, I still woke up twice which then took me about 20 minutes each time to fall asleep again. But that was kind of expected….

The Lab
My alarm went off Friday morning at 5:45, I got dressed and and went downstairs for a 30 minute run before a shower and buffet breakfast which included all the usual kind of tasty stuff. After that I went back up to my room, packed my things, and headed downstairs to checkout. By 7:30 I was at the reception area of Cisco. I signed in and took a seat in the waiting area where there were about 8 other hopefuls. I just sat there and gathered my thoughts…

‘Wow’ I thought. Months of preparation for this one day where you need to be on your best game. If you fall short of the mark, you’ve lost a large wad of cash, without improving you’re chances of getting a job and having money before Christmas, which also means you have no idea when you’re going to be able to afford a second shot at the title. That was the way I looked at it anyway. Not to put any pressure on myself or anything….

Was I nervous? No. Excited? No. Anxious? Not really. To me it was just another day doing another lab. I’ll elaborate on this later.

At 7:50 we were greeted by Bruno (the proctor) who escorted us upstairs. He showed us where the facilities were, outlined the rules, start/finish times, and gave us a few small tips.

We started at 8:15. It took me 1 hour and 15 minutes before I started configuring ANYTHING. Which i’ll admit was a little slower than expected. In that time I did the following:

• Drew up a grid that included columns for: Task Number, core / easy questions, notes, whether I had done (configured) it, whether I had checked it, and point values.
• Read every question in the lab, even to the point of working out what the solution was, making a quick note on my notes column, and marking if it was a core question or easy question.
• Drew my L2 diagram, this was done in conjunction with reading the switching section.
• Drew my L3 diagram, this included DLCI’s so you dont have to reference the DLCI page anymore, and which routing protocols were running on which interfaces. Also done during my reading.
• Checked the initial configs and IP addresses.

After reading the exam I was very surprised at how short it was, and how easy it appeared to be when you compare it to the IE labs. But the difficulty part made me a little wary that I was maybe missing something….

I started with frame-relay, moved onto my core switching tasks, and then went straight into IGP. I took my time on each task, making sure I read the question twice and fully verified each one. Amongst them there were about 2 tasks that got me really thinking. For these I simply made a quick note, did something else, and by the time I came back I knew what the solution was. It’s like your mind is thinking about it even when you’re not concentrating on it.

With 30 minutes before lunch I had finished my IGP (apart from one task that wasn’t core related) and had full reachability withing the domain with my TCL scripts. The last half hour was spent picking up some quick points in various sections. Just before lunch, I saved and rebooted all my equipment.

Lunch was pretty ordinary. I played it safe with some chicken, chips, and a coke.

My initial plan at this stage was to use my lunch break for working through any really tough questions so that when I got back, I wouldn’t have waste much time on them….but I kinda forgot. I just sat quietly waiting for round 2!

It was 12:45, I had 4 hours to go and I was about 2/3 through the exam. I quickly checked that  reachability was still there and all my neighbors were up before doing the rest of the easy tasks.

After the quick easy ones BGP was next, nothing too difficult, but the Cisco way did throw me off a little bit in terms of how I was able to verify it. It may vary from lab to lab, so I’ll just say that you should clarify with the proctor how they grade it. But when he gave me the answer it left me with the impression they are all like that. Interesting…

Last up was multicast & QoS. The first QoS question was slightly tricky but only because of the wording. Reading it I started thinking, but what if this?? and what if that?? I asked the proctor and he could see why I was confused and simply said, “just do what it says”. Without dwelling on it anymore, I did my configuration and moved on to the next one. For this, all I’ll say is thank you Michael Zuo! Had I not read his notes I would never have figured this out in time.

With one question left from IGP, I decided that I wanted to secure all my other points. I grabbed a drink and started verifying every task word for word. During this I referenced my notes with the question and my solution to see if it matched and I hadn’t missed anything. This is where I started getting a little paranoid….

I think I changed two solutions to better suit the questions, and added extra configuration to another two to make entirely sure that I was definitely going to meet the requirements regardless of how strict they were going to be with the answers.

Its hard to explain, but when you see the questions you will notice all the key words that are just begging for a certain command to be used. Most of the time everything you needed to do was explicitly asked, but there were a couple of times where they do expect configuration even though its not directly specified. For these you should be able to reference the configuration guides, look at the table that explains each command (optional or not) and derive the complete and correct answere from that.

Verification took me 90 minutes which pretty much brought me to 15 minutes remaining. As I mentioned in the last post, I accidentally forgot about one question and my quick solution didn’t work, so I scrapped it. Finally I saved all my configs and begun the wait knowing that I gave it all I could.