First and foremost, I’d like to thank Sally, my wife, for her many prayers. She was very patient and supportive of me these last few months and for that I am forever grateful. She never let me quit on myself and kept me focused when things got difficult.
I’d also like to thank my dear friends and family, Sean, Rae, Rob, Jill, Alan, Marianne, Jason and Johanna, for all their support. They’ve been with me since the beginning of my journey and managed to see this story’s happy ending.
Many thanks to all the bloggers and readers out there. When motivation was low and doubt poured over me, I referenced all the blogs on my blogroll. Just to know that there were others out there sharing the pain was comforting enough.
Alexandre, thanks for default-information originate tip. It was very, very helpful.
Ethan, thanks for all the great info off of your site. Your NMC perspective helped me solidify my understanding with some of technologies.
Carl, thanks for NAT breakdown. As simple as this topic may be at times, I needed an occasional reminder and your link did the trick.
CCIEpursuit, thanks for the strategy ideas and your macro ping notes for the switches. I needed to reference your site several times before I actually memorized the correct macro syntax. Your studying strategy actually helped me formulate my original game plan.
Shiran, thanks for the QoS DSCP precedence values. I couldn’t find the information off the DocCD and just jumped over to your site.
Victor, thanks for the Multicast posts. Once I labbed up your examples, I was able to make sense of things.
I decided to spare you my long journey story and just jump right into the crap you really want to read.
As we all know you need to invest a certain amount of time in your life to achieve this certification. From the point when I returned from my honeymoon in August until now, I’ve dedicated as much time as a married man could possibly allow. Luckily for me, work was very understanding and I could study throughout the day as long as projects were maintained. I usually studied in the mornings before everyone arrived and would complete the work in the afternoon. When I arrived home in the evening, I managed to leave some quality time for Sally and myself. After dinner and some down time, I would resume to studying about 9PM until midnight or so. To maintain my sanity and stress levels, I tried to play basketball every Sunday morning. Unfortunately, these were the things I had to sacrifice as my lab date drew near. It wasn’t easy for me to sacrifice the quality time and basketball, but it had to be done. At this stage in the game, I had to re-train my study habits. I could still study at work during the day, but upon returning home for the evening, I had to jump into the studies, which was difficult at first.
Now if you are concerned with money and a lot of these expenses are out of your pocket, here’s probably the only things you really need to study for this exam:
1) Doyle’s book 1 & 2 –> Everything about the core is in here. During my practice labs, I referred to these books more than ever to help verify my understanding and found that I could’ve just used the case studies to practice with. If you feel these books are outdated, they aren’t. This should be your foundation moving forward.
2) Access to the DocCD –> Everything else outside the core is in here. One of the sections I stated I was going to skip was QoS. After my mock lab results, I came to my senses and realized I couldn’t give up all the QoS points. While I still have a difficult time with QoS, I managed to understand what was being asked of me in the practice labs and knew where to look for the answers.
3) A P4 PC with 1GB of memory –> I have 2 laptops that I used to study with. The first laptop is an IBM X40 ThinkPad with 1.4Ghz and 1GB of RAM. The second laptop is a Sony VAIO with 1.7Ghz and 1GB of RAM. I stuck with using dynamips v2.7 because it worked well with my 3660 12.4 advanced enterprise image. I am running Fedora Core v7.0 on both laptops. Each laptop is running in runlevel 3 mode. Within runlevel 3, I’ve disabled some of the other services I don’t really need. After boot up, total memory used is 50K on each laptop. With just one laptop, I can run 13 routers plus the Ethernet and Frame switches. Even after turning on Frame Relay, OSPF, RIP, EIGRP, and BGP, I was only running at 93% on one CPU. To distribute the load, I ran 7 instances on the ThinkPad and 8 instances on the Vaio. By the time I got further into practice labs, I didn’t need that many devices. I ended up just labbing up the sections here and there.
Now if money isn’t a concern, then go nuts:
1) Steps 1-3 above.
2) Purchase a vendor workbook –> When I first started I just used IE’s v4.0 workbook. When I was taking IE’s mock lab, I noticed that the wording never changed. My mock lab pretty much felt like another workbook lab at that point. Before my 1st lab attempt last year, I was using IPExpert’s v8.0 workbook and proctor guide. I purchased the $150 upgrade to v9.0 in early September, but didn’t bother to take them out of the box. I figured it was time to get a different perspective. The vague wording, which you hear about all the time, is duplicated in the IPExpert workbook. If you can afford to purchase 2 vendor products, then I would go ahead and do so. After reading Ethan’s blog, I really like the NMC material and may use it in the future for another track.
3) Build a home lab or rent rack time –> Personally, I was glad I had my own rack at home. I set up dynamips on a new server at work (i.e. Quad Core with 4GB of RAM) and opened up the ports on the firewall, but had issues keeping a connection across the Internet. I’d be halfway through a practice lab and my SSH connections were disconnected. Having a home lab helped me nail down some things in the core. Also, I got mixed results too from running 12.2 on my home routers since I don’t have enough memory. These problems helped me build up my troubleshooting and DocCD research abilities. At work, I would retest everything I covered the night before in dynamips running 12.4 and would see the correct output and made a mental note of the differences (if any).
4) Purchase 1 or 2 switches –> If you have deep pockets, then buying 4 of these won’t be a problem. Last year, I had to sell 2 3550s and 2 3750s to help cover the cost of my wifes engagement ring. Luckily enough for me I still had 1 3550 and 1 3750 for my own. I also had 2 x 4-port etherswitches, which I used on 1 of my routers, but all I could do was create 802.1q trunks across them. Each of the switches helped tremendously though. Since some of the commands are different on a 3560, I just had to verify the correct commands off the DocCD.
5) Take a mock lab –> Each of the vendors is doing one. I’ve heard great things about Cisco’s CCIE Assessor. If I had to do it again though, I’d probably go with NMC’s mock lab. I’ve heard that IE has new mock labs created, so maybe they’ve addressed everyone’s requests. Either way, do the research, try it out, and validate where you stand. But at the same time, don’t get discouraged from any poor results. Build off of it. If I let the 47 percent get to me from my mock lab, I would have never passed my lab.
Believe it or not, that’s all you need from this point forward.
Here are some words of wisdom:
1) Read the entire lab –> For you first timers, as nervous as you are, read all of the questions. The 20 minutes it takes you to look it over isn’t going to doom you.
2) Redraw the diagram –> This is optional for some. Personally, it gives me a sanity check on the layout. My 4-color Bic pen came in handy. By the time I left the lab, my scrap sheet had colored arrows and marks all over the place.
3) Alternate methods –> If you happen to practice just one method of accomplishing a task, try and figure out if there is another way. For example, if you can do something with an access-list, then know how to do it with a prefix-list.
4) Eat, sleep, and drink the IOS –> I spent all of November walking around like a zombie. The only thing on my brain was IOS and learning to think like a router. I also had dreams of solutions for some of the problems in my practice labs. It’s weird, but by the time I sat my lab, I was breaking everything down like Neo in the Matrix. It all just made sense.
5) Keep your answers simple –> Yes, we are led to believe that the lab is designed to fail us. That part is true, if you don’t know what you are doing. As creative as you want to be with your methods, don’t bother. It doesn’t get you any extra points and could probably hurt you later. Just figure out the simplest way of doing it. Have you ever logged into a router or switch configured by someone else and didn’t understand why it was configured that way? Keep it simple, enough for someone to follow your method.
6) Cleanup –> If you decide to use a tclsh script, remember to just type tclquit to get out. Or if you happen to use a macro on the switches for a ping test, remember to remove the macro name and description. I kept notepad open on the desktop and wrote down, ‘remove macros from switches’. When it hit 5PM, since I was pretty much done verifying my configurations, I started cleaning off the devices.
7) Get some rest (if you can) or clear your mind –> Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I love stuffing my face with turkey, but this year I couldn’t do so. Wednesday to Saturday was spent studying all day and night. I managed to step away for some grub, but it wasn’t the same. By the time Sunday rolled around, Sally’s relatives were planning on coming over to hang out. I could either hang out with everyone or sit in the study room cramping up my fingers and melting my brain some more. If I didn’t know the material at that point, then I wasn’t ready. I felt ready and chose to hang out. Played some Nintendo Wii, watched TV, talked, and just relaxed. I arrived in San Jose at 10PM, drove to the hotel, and just read some of the QoS sections on the DocCD until midnight. You would think that would put anyone to sleep, but there was some anxiousness stirring about in my system. I forced myself into bed and set my alarm for 7AM. I only slept until 5AM because my sleep was restless. I had cranked up the heat before going to bed and it just blew through the night. My room was a freakin sauna by the time I got out of bed. Rather than force myself back to sleep, I just got up and read some of my notes. Jumped in the shower at 6:30AM. Checked out out of the hotel and headed up the road to a Starbuck’s near the testing facility. Bought a Venti bold which was extremely hot. Checked in at the testing center and sat down in the lobby by 8AM. Just sat and enjoyed my coffee until it was time to enter the lab. Want to know why everyone tells us to get some rest the night before? After eating lunch, I started to feel that warm and fuzzy feeling once the food hit my stomach. By the time I sat back down at my rack, I was mentally and physically exhausted. I had to get up, go to the bathroom, and drink some aspirin I had in my pocket. Lucky for me the aspirin had enough caffeine to keep my awake until the end of the day.
Good luck to everyone pursuing the R&S track.
