Ah it feels great! Now I will take one night off and belated celebrate my Birthday. Then it is on to preparing for the lab.
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Well 2009 is coming to a close. I am very happy with the progress I made toward my CCIE this year. Next year it will be mine. I did end up rescheduling my written, but only until Tuesday. I finished all 250 questions in the Boson test that came with the v3.0 exam certification guide. I got a stellar 42%. It’s not as bad as it sounds though. The test is so riddled with errors and also has many questions where I simply didn’t understand thier wording even though I understood the subject matter. Objectively I would say I probably deserved a 65%-70%. Still not great. It did show me which areas I need further review and suprise, suprise it’s QOS, Multicast, and IPv6. I plan to study the Quick Reference Sheets some more, and possibly reread those 3 chapters in the exam cert guide. I also plan to go over all the chapter review questions in the exam cert guide. Happy New Year to you all! I have signed up to take my written on Dec 31st. This is pretty aggressive but one of my goals for the year was to take the written and it would be pretty nice to say that I achieved it. It will depend on how the week goes. I have taken vacation (that I had to use or lose) for the next week so I can fully commit to studying. I do have a potential moonlight contract to setup a network that is relocating from out of town. If that happens I will more than likely have to push my date. I do feel close though. I am currently studying PFR which is my last topic. I desperately need to review every topic. I am using the Quick Reference Sheets and my IPExpert bootcamp slide book for this. I also have the boson practice exam that I need to go through again. To this point I have studied the following materials.
That totals out somewhere around 3500 pages of reading, 100 hours or so of video or instructor led training, and probably 120 hours of labbing. Over the course of my studies I have read many many CCIE blogs and the same wisdom always seems to come up. “When studying for the CCIE you can’t have ANY social life. Say goodbye to your friends and family for the next 18-24 months.” Up until this point that has been pretty much what I have done. Aside from the occasional birthday, or Longhorn football game I have kept my nose in the books. It’s starting to feel like a recipe for burnout. I don’t think the CCIE is something you can do casually but I am not so sure you can’t make a little bit of time for your own mental sanity. In light of my new revelation I am saying “Screw conventional wisdom” and I am going to let my Geek Flag Fly. Inspired by reading about Gabe’s (from penny arcade) Dungeons and Dragons exploits I am jonesing to play again. I haven’t played DND in over 10 years but I think its time to get a game going. The problem now is finding a willing group, I have a couple friends who I am pretty confident will play 1 night a week but a good game takes 4-5. Anyone in Austin TX feel like gaming? Last week I attended IPExpert’s Routing and Switching boot camp with instructor Joe Astorino. I highly recommend it to anyone pursuing their CCIE. I started out a little leary since Joe is still fairly new to the instructor stage but leading up to the class I read some of the post’s he has written and some of the responses he gives on Online Study List and started to get more excited. He has a knack for explaining things so that they make sense. I don’t have a frame of reference in the CCIE world to compare or contrast him to other instructors, but I have taken other IT training classes and he stacked up favorably to any of them. Despite being sick he was engaging. I have heard people rave about Narbik in that he doesn’t use any power point slides. Well this course did use them, we covered 800 slides in 4 days, but Joe never hesitated to go to the whiteboard or the command line to demonstrate a point. I personally didn’t mind the slides but was glad he was willing to depart from them as well. Joe does not know everything, and occasionally is incorrect. This to me was actually encouraging. I remember thinking, “OK I don’t have to know every command line switch to become a CCIE”. What Joe did do when there was doubt is the true key to obtaining CCIE in my opinion. He showed us exactly how to find things on the DOCCD and how to test them on the command line. I think you can only get out what you put in from any class you take. There was a gentleman there that only seem peripherally engaged, I sat behind him and noticed on a couple occasions he was reading a PDF of a novel. I just don’t understand this, I guess it probably wasn’t his money that paid for the class. If you are engaged though I think the class offers you plenty to take away. I know I felt like I got my money’s worth. Every day we went from about 9:00am-7:00 or 7:30 and then I would have 3-4 hours of homework each night. By Thursday evening I was a little fried and decided to save that bit of homework for when I got home. The class is not to teach you the blueprint, 5 days is not nearly enough time for that. You will get the most out of the class if you have already covered the topics and are just getting clarification on the intricacies. I went in feeling about 70% prepared. I had completed 2/3rd of the volume 1 labs from IPX. I think I was average in relation to the rest of the class. I had an ok understanding of some of the core topics but some of them were still pretty foreign to me. One of the best things I got out of class was a 10x better understanding of MPLS. The class covers 2 brand new labs, 1 which you work on through the week, building on each day. The second is a mock exam on Friday. Joe had warned us to not get discouraged by the Friday lab, that it was much harder than the actual CCIE test. I found it to be quite hard indeed and was only about to complete a few sections. Both labs are fantastic however and really teach you, and warn you against gotcha’s. Both labs also include troubleshooting sections which is an area I need much practice with. In the end I left the class very invigorated to continue this quest. It is beginning to feel attainable. I am starting to feel like I have seen the information on the blueprint and know roughly how it goes together. I am still quite a distance away and I really need to much more practice, but I can see marked progress. Doing some QOS labs. Yeah my last post where I said I get QOS….scratch that. The past three weeks I have really kicked my studies into gear. I was running out of time to complete IP Expert workbook 1 in advance of my class and knew the only way I had a chance to get it all done would be to lab during the weekday evenings. I changed my schedule at work so I could go in and get off earlier. Now I’m out by 4:30, home and on the racks at about 5:00. The proctor labs schedule run 3:00-11:00 CST so I do lose a couple hours of my rack sessions but it can’t be helped. A while back they blogged that they were going to make the racks available in smaller chunks, but that still hasn’t happened. I wish they would get on with it. Anyway this new schedule has really been helping, things are starting to come together and I feel like I am making tangible daily progress. I have really immersed myself in the blueprint to the point where it is the last thing I think about as I fall asleep and the first thing I think about when I wake up. It really dawned on me this morning as I was contemplating QOS while I washed the sleep from eyes. I spent yesterday going back over QOS which as I had mentioned in my last blog seemed like I had nearly entirely forgotten. Anyway after going over it yesterday and then I guess letting it roll around in my brain while I slept, when I woke up this morning my brain went instantly to it, I could almost feel the details firm up in my mind and for the first time possibly ever I feel like “I get it”. I still have some more details to learn but I feel like I understand the core of it now. The weirdest part is I even occasionally dream about routing and switching. I can see that in order to obtain my CCIE this is the pace and the kind of immersion I am going to need to maintain. It will be tough to keep this up for the long hall but if I want to finish this by next spring or summer than this is what it is going to take. I just hope my wife can remain supportive as it leaves her even more of the responsibilities of taking care of our son. I am getting really excited about the class next week. From the reviews I have read Joe Astorino is an excellent teacher. It will be interesting to see where I feel like I am at after the class. Actually that’s not true. I spent a three day weekend at Austin City Limits festival this past weekend, But it has been a long time since I posted. I’m still pluggin away. I am 99% finished with Routing TCP/IP volume 1 and my copy of volume 2 just arrived. Vol 1 was excellent and so I assume vol 2 will be as well. I have been taking some stabs at practice questions for the written on Boson but only getting about 50%. The huge gaping obvious holes are QOS and Multicast. When I get questions on those I think to myself, I sort of heard about this one time, but seriously draw a blank. Multicast is covered in Routing TCP/IP vol 2 so hopefully that will help but I am pretty sure my next book after that is going to be on QOS. I had quit doing the weekend rack rentals in order to focus on reading for a while but I have now started back up. I am headed to Ohio for an IPexpert boot camp at the end of the month so I need try to complete the vol 1 labs. It is going to be tough to get it all in. I just need about 12 more hours in every day. That or not have a full time job and side-work consulting clients. I’ll post again before my trip and then of course do a full write up when I get back. Oh yeah, a belated Congratulations to Dana way to go! I am jealous (not of your swine flu though). Last week the world conspired against my study plans. I had a consulting client have a major network failure that took all the hours outside of my day job, and then I had family in from out of town for the weekend. Despite all that in the past couple days I’ve gotten back on track and I finished the CCIE R&S official exam guide (Odom). I also started Routing TCP/IP vol 1 (Doyle). It was sort of a bittersweet moment. On one hand it feels really good to be done with Odom and I feel like I now have a base level of knowledge on all the technologies. I still have a ways to go to have the “expert” level of knowledge but at least now I know that I have seen all the technologies, there won’t be anything new, I just need to get more intimate with them. On the other hand it is a little daunting. I just finished one 800 page monster of a book and now am starting on another 800 page monster. To make matters worse the books look nearly identical from the outside. Then there is Routing TCP/IP volume 2 which is roughly the same size. When I think that my first 1/3 of my reading took me nearly 6 months to finish I get a little discouraged. My only hope is that reading these volumes will be faster because the stuff won’t be new and maybe I can read it faster. Also for the first reading I also spent my time watching the IPexpert videos and some of my CCNP videos again. I’ve nearly finished all my videos so that will free up more study time so that it can all be either reading or labing. I’m still moving along although I keep pushing the written back farther and farther. I don’t feel bad about this though because it isn’t from lack of studying, it is just that there is more to learn and I don’t want to skimp on any of the technologies. I originally thought that the Odom book would be all I would need but now I think I want to read Routing TCP/IP vol 1 + 2 as well. Obviously that is going to push my date back. I think now I want to be ready for the written by the end of September. I booked my IPexpert boot camp for late October, I think this will workout well because I can study for the written and keep labbing as I go. Once I clear the written I can dedicate myself to labbing. Then I scheduled my 1 week lab experience for mid January. I’ll spend the time between the bootcamp and the lab experience doing tons of labs. Then hopefully the lab experience week will be a good litmus test of whether I am ready to schedule an attempt at the lab. Getting this plan together makes me feel pretty good, obviously any plan for study is a plan of the unknown and my plans will have to adapt as I go. Just having a plan that seems realistic and with a time frame I am comfortable with gives me inspiration. It feels like a light at the end of the tunnel, a goal to work towards. |
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