Tolulope aka amplebrain in Twitter has passed the CCIE Security lab earlier this week.   After following his day-to-day tweets of studying, there was no doubt in my mind he wouldn’t achieve a passing mark.  This is his 2nd CCIE at a young age, so send him your congrats or tweets and maybe he’ll reveal whether he’s up for the challenge of a 3rd one.

Swap passed his 2nd CCIE, SP, earlier this week.  He has already posted his recommendations for the OEQs and his overall lab experiences.  If you’ve already sat through the lab yourself then you’ll notice the subtle hints buried deep within his words; they could prove useful to you in the future so make a mental note of it all.  Anyways, send him your congrats.

A few weeks ago I received an offer to attend Juniper’s 2 Day SRX Bootcamp for free.  My division had been hit hard by this recession and so building Cisco end-to-end wasn’t a viable solution for senior management anymore.  We were in the midst of upgrading each of our 100Mbps Internet circuits to gig links and needed an edge devices to terminate the link.  Unfortunately, obtainingfunds for acquiring either a Cisco ASR1002 (fixed) or Catalyst 6509 with FWSM proved to be difficult and was too time consuming.  At the end of the capex process and based on my tech requirements, I ended up proposing Juniper’s SSG550M Netscreen firewall (sorry Cisco).  The Netscreen firewall has the ability to NAT, terminate BGP, and could support throughput levels over 1Gbps.  The moment I started spec’ing out costs Juniper sales reps heard from my resellers and seized the moment to come on-site and woo me.

The class the reps had offered to help persuade me was hosted by Proteus Networks.  During the training portion of the class, the proctor kept referring to Cisco as ‘Brand C’ and would refuse to say the word out loud in a humorous, guilty kind of way; his loyalty to Juniper products was obvious.  The class was very informative at the JNCIA/CCNA level; I could easily recommend taking advantage of this offer to anyone.  If you want to try and capitilize on the free training, now’s the time.  Just find yourself a reseller and make a request to purchase a Juniper device.

I had learned during the class that there was a conversion process for the Netscreen SSG550M.  With the installation of a compact flash card that you could purchase for < $200, I could convert the firewall to a router appliance (i.e. J6350).  Juniper’s J6350 router would allow for secured virtual routing similar to Cisco’s Zone Based Firewall feature where I can securely terminate my gig link and have the management control for routing data in/out of the zones.  In the next few weeks, I’ll be converting my firewall and plan on writing about the experience.

Aside from receiving the in-class JUNOS knowledge, I was presented with a voucher at the end of the 2 days for 100% off all Juniper certifications (excluding JCNIE-ER and JCNIE-M).  Since then I’ve been busy reading all the free materials offered on Juniper’s website and have been renewing/retaking all my certs.  I haven’t exactly diverted from my SP studies entirely.  All of the Juniper learned knowledge (i.e. RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, multicast, IPv6),  serves as a refresher for my CCIE SP Lab and should help complement my reading for the dreaded OEQs.  Recently, I heard on Twitter that the OEQs were going away only for the R&S and Voice labs, so in the meantime, I’ll still have to continue reading each of the technologies until Cisco announces otherwise.  I’ve rebooked my 2nd SP attempt for 10/15/2010, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the OEQs will hopefully be dropped by mid-summer.

Paul passed his 2nd CCIE, Security, last week.  He has yet to write about his latest adventure; in the meantime, head on over to his site and send him your congrats.