CCIE TO BE

In the spirit of this holiday I thought I'd make a list of things that make labbing, studying and the overall process of preparing for the CCIE Lab exam a lot easier. In no particular order:

- Vendor Wars. Great deals are among us!

- Groupstudy. It's taken some criticism lately, but it still remains the best place to brainstorm with fellow CCIE candidates and those that have already passed. And don't forget the archives!

-Ebay. Couldn't have built my lab without it!

- Debug ip packet + ACL. Excellent when you need to debug ip packet but you've got sub-second ospf hello timers. Believe me, I found out the hard way!

- Show access-lists. Easy way to see if you get a hit on an ACL

- Static routes. Just for workarounds while you get reachability in place. I had a ppp task where the router needed an address via dhcp (proxy) but the server couldn't respond unicast to the destination subnet (no route) and no routing protocols were in place yet. Remember to remove them after!

- Colored pencils for each routing protocol. I prefer light green for OSPF, dark green for EIGRP, orange for BGP, black for RIP. I only have 4 colored pencils in my apartment and I put them to good use.

- Regular expressions for parsing show commands with the include, exclude and section arguments.

- Route tagging. Really makes route redistribution a whole lot easier to deal with.

- Master Command index on the DocCD. Nothing short of a life saver sometimes :)

- Trees. A whole lot of scratch paper going on around here...

- And last but not least...Blogrolls!

Well that's my list for now. What are you thankful for?

I just got back from California last night. I was there for about 5 days, the highlight of course was the Dodgers game 3 win over the Cubs, clinching the series win. It was the most exciting sporting event I have ever been to and was well worth it whatever I spent (I stopped counting).

In LA, people are notorious for arriving in the 3rd inning and leaving in the 7th. They were still arriving late (traffic was horrible as usual), but 20 minutes after the game, people were still in the stands as the players celebrated with everyone. It was an awesome experience I never will forget.

That being said, it's time to get back to the lab. For now, here is where I stand:

I have completed Volume 1 of IPexper'ts blended learning solution. I have gone back and labbed the multicast and qos sections again, and plan on doing them a third time. I will also review the security and ACL sections and probably a few others.

I have now started Volume 2 and will start Section 4, once I get rack time scheduled. I also plan on doing some graded mock labs (volume 3) in between the volume 2 labs. I still have more than 5 months away (which I may move up depending on how I feel) from taking the lab but confidence is pretty high.

back to the lab...

Well some of you may have noticed that I haven't posting a lot, or as much as I usually do, lately. Don't worry, I will get back in the swing of things soon enough =) I have been in about a month-long job hunt which looks to have finally ended today. I don't want to go into details because I like my anonymity, but I was interviewed by a group which included a couple CCIEs for a team lead position for a small team of network engineers working on Cisco gear in a NOC environment. Shortly after I pulled in my driveway after the interview I had the offer. =)

I was pretty overtaken with how impressed they were of me, because I was more impressed with their network and their skills. They have a CCIE lab!! I have been working in IT for about 5 years from the very bottom, fixing PC's and help desk to now what is a pretty sweet position for a great company. The key for me in this interview and my advice for anyone is to show some enthusiasm. Show some life. Show how much you care about the job you want. Don't be afraid to smile and let your passion show! Good things will happen!!

A wise man once said (Tom Petty!) that the waiting is the hardest part. Well I am determined not to make it too difficult. I finally scheduled my lab over the weekend, giving myself more than a few months more time to prepare. I feel very confident right now with what they call the "core" topics. This includes sections I, II and III of the blueprint.

My only real problem I have is making stupid mistakes. Over the last couple weeks I have been documenting them so I do not repeat them. Below are some of them.

Switching and Frame relay:

- Not trimming vlans off all the proper trunks. I did it for two trunks, but missed on another one.
- Did not disable DTP with "nonegotiate", I just used "switchport mode trunk." I have made this mistake multiple times.
- Incorrectly using MST instance 0 for a set of vlans, instead of using a new instance number
- Calculated the burst size wrong on FRTS. I know how to do this, just made a bonehead move.

Routing:

- Putting networks in wrong OSPF area (they were supposed to be "intra-area" but I read too fast and thought it said "inter-area"). I have made this mistake more than once.
- Forgot to disable auto-summary in EIGRP. Don't know if I would have been marked down. it did not affect my reachability. But I think I should remember to turn it off.
- Forgot send-community on BGP neighbor.
- Applied multicast commands to physical LAN interface when there was a subinterface. I do this with WAN interfaces occasionally too. This is a matter of paying attention where you are in the topology and what the goal of the task is. Had I used proper verification commands I would have noticed this.
-Wrong subnet mask on BGP aggregate. I needed to make it /17 instead of 16. No excuse for this at this stage of the game.

These are some common mistakes that I categorize as "bonehead" because I should never get them wrong. Yet, in every lab I do, they are there. In one case I lost 17 points because of these! I do grade myself hard because there no sense in given yourself credit for something you didn't pass yet :).

Anyways, I hope this list does not grow to big. We all learn in school that those who fail to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. So my advice is to document and learn why you made the error. The reasons are usually carelessness or reading the task too fast. Sometimes I am just so anxious to move on, I configure something and don't verify it adequately.

So, what does your list look like? :)

Not gonna say much here just that this teeny lab kicked my butt. I must say I fell pretty comfortable when it comes time do anything with BGP, OSPF, EIGRP and routing. Even multicast and IPv6 I feel comfortable now. QoS, I am getting there. I thought l2tunneling was cake until I started this lab. That was Sunday. Today is Wednesday and I finally hammered it out. Two online rack sessions and a bunch of researching in between. I didn't just follow the proctor guide on this!

I tried it my own way - didn't work.
Tried to fix it - didn't work.
Saved configs
I copied the final configs to the switches just to make sure the solution worked - it worked.
Recopied my configs over and progressed from their.

Repeat about a dozen times.

Troubleshooting, debugging, I learned a lot along the way.

I even found out a lot about how LACP works, by exchanging your mac and the partner mac - a lot like the OSPF adjacency INIT stage.

Also, the solution doesn't quite follow what you read in the DocCD, another reason it is good to get a taste of more than one vendor, because there are many ways of doing everything.

I swear I know this lab inside-out. It's got me searching for different scenarios. Hopefully come lab time, I am well prepared for anything.

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