CCIE Downunder

Blog Moved

2009-01-06T19:25:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I decided to move my blog.

If you don't get redirected automatically then the URL for my new blog is;

www.cciedownunder.wordpress.com

Strategy for Voice

2008-12-29T14:20:00.001-08:00

I need to come up with a game plan now that I have my study material. I bit the bullet, with the dollar dropping down here and stuff now costing almost double I took advantage of the half price deal from IPExpert. I'm sure they would have competitions later in the year and I could keep hitting and see if I could have won something for free, but I figured I would just buy it now. That way I can give my honest opinion on what "I" think of there product.

So thinking about what I could have done differently to make R&S more efficient, I've come up with a new strategy. I'd like to go through the CCVP exams but I don't have the time to go sit the exams. So I've decided to get the knowledge.

To come up with a strategy I had to figure out how I learn best. Thinking back to R&S, I really started learning when I was doing hands on labs. That's when things really started falling into place. So with Voice that what I'm going to start doing. I'm going to work backwards a little. I'm going to take the Voice lab blueprint and explore each technology one and a time. I'm going to dig deep into these technologies and leave no stone unturned.

I'm going to use the books on the CCIE reading list, which seems to match the books on the CCVP reading list. This means I will cover the CCVP stuff at the same time. I'm not just going to read the books cover to cover, but read the bits that cover the voice blueprint. I'm going to make notes and post them up here and that way at least my notes will be in once place and organised. When I was doing R&S my notes weren't organised. I have so much paper and books filled with notes that it started to get difficult looking stuff up.

I would like to give the lab a crack early 2010 though, so I have a goal to work towards, however I'm not going to put time pressures on myself. I rather learn everything slowly, instead of rushing through things and finding myself having a hard time with the full scale practice labs.

So here's a break down of what I'm going to do.

Work through the written and lab blueprints making notes on each topic using the books I have.
Watch the IPExpert video on demands and use IPExpert technology labs to get the hands on with the technologies. This will give me an opportunity to expand my notes further.
Watch the IPExpert Video on demands again once through.
Go through the technology labs again. This time, just on the stuff I don't understand fully.
Start going through full 8 hour practice labs. Doing 1 practice lab on a Saturday and using the rest of the week to really explore the stuff I didn't get.
Hopefully by now, I'm good with the technologies and can just practice strategy and speed.
Go take a crack at the lab.

Hopefully not rushing things will be the key to passing this thing quicker. I found as I started to rush things with R&S I got frustrated and the whole process took longer.

NEW Track?

2008-12-27T23:17:00.000-08:00

First off all. Thanks for all the congratulation messages and the posts on other blogger blogs directing traffic my way :).

I went a head and ordered some training material for the Voice track. I'm just waiting for stuff to arrive in the mail and then I'll get cracking. I think the first thing I need to do is once stuff arrives is come up with a schedule and think about the mistakes I made with R&S.

The main thing I need to look at is how to efficiently get through the Voice track and how I can I learn the technologies.

I guess I have time to think about these things until stuff arrives.

I also need to refresh on the basics, so I was taking a look at the new Cisco Press book for CCNA Voice. Surprisingly I knew most of the stuff in that book, so at least that's a positive start.

I don't think I'm going to sit these lower level certs. I'm just going to try and get the knowledge I need to fill in the gaps and crack on with CCIE Voice.

I might make some basic Voice notes and post them here and then get into the CCIE Voice blueprint and work the technologies, make notes and note any pitfalls as I work through everything. With R&S everything was all over the place and I found it hard to reorganise things after 6 months worth of study. Stuff got duplicated and it became a nightmare to find stuff. I think I'll use this blog to organise my notes, ideas and stuff.

Ah well, I'm going to go enjoy the rest of the holidays and wait till the Voice stuff arrives.

Voice Lab Blueprint

2008-12-27T23:01:00.001-08:00

Over the duration of my studies I'm going to try and create an expanded lab blueprint for the voice track. I'm going to link the technologies to posts that they are related too. So for now this is under construction.

Here's the blueprint from the Cisco website. Again, topics will be linked to my notes on each part of the blueprint.

1.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Campus Infrastructure and Services
1.01 VLAN
1.02 DHCP
1.03 TFTP
1.04 NTP

2.00 Implement and Troubleshoot CUCM Endpoints
2.01 CUCM SCCP Endpoints
2.02 CUCM SIP Endpoints

3.00 Implement and Troubleshoot CUCME Endpoints
3.01 CUCME SCCP Endpoints
3.02 CUCME SIP Endpoints

4.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Voice Gateways
4.01 T1/E1 PRI
4.02 T1/E1 CAS
4.03 H.323
4.04 MGCP
4.05 SIP
4.06 H.323 RAS
4.07 IP-IP Gateway/CUBE

5.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Call Routing Policies
5.01 Route Patterns and Dial-peers
5.02 Digit Manipulations and Translations
5.03 Class of Services
5.04 Route Selection Preference and Redundancy
5.05 Mobility and Single Number Reach

6.00 Implement and Troubleshoot High Availability Features
6.01 SRST
6.02 AAR

7.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Media Resources
7.01 CODEC Selection and Flexibility
7.02 Conference Bridges
7.03 Transcoder
7.04 Music-on-hold
7.05 Media Resources Preference and Redundancy
7.06 Other CUCM Media Resources

8.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Supplementary Services
8.01 Call Park
8.02 Call Pickup
8.03 Barge
8.04 Callback
8.05 Other Supplementary Services

9.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Other CUCM Voice Applications
9.01 Extension Mobility
9.02 IPMA
9.03 Other CUCM Voice Applications

10.00 Implement and Troubleshoot QoS and CAC
10.01 L2/L3 Traffic Classifications and Policing
10.02 L2/L3 Queuing Mechanisms
10.03 L2 LFI
10.04 RSVP
10.05 Call Admission Control

11.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Messaging
11.01 Cisco Unity Connection
11.02 Cisco Unity Express
11.03 Call Handling and Routing

12.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Cisco Unified Contact Center Express
12.01 Advanced Configuration
12.02 Script Customization
12.03 Redundancy

13.00 Implement and Troubleshoot Cisco Unified Presence
13.01 CUCM Presence
13.02 Cisco Unified Presence Server Integration

Voice Written Blueprint

2008-12-27T22:57:00.000-08:00

This is the current written blueprint for the voice track taken from the Cisco website. I'm going to try and knock each technology off one and a time and thought it would help me archieve things better by creating links to my notes on each of these technologies.

1. CallManager

Codecs/Regions
Redundancy (CM Groups/Device Pool)
Dial Plan: Gatekeeper, SIP Proxy, Route Patterns, Route Groups, Route Lists, Digit Manipulation and Digit Analysis
Music On Hold
Conferencing (Audio and Video)
Transcoding
Media Termination Points
CM Features: Extension Mobility, IPMA, Attendant Console, Call Park, Pickup
Phone Settings
CTI, TAPI and JTAPI Interface

2. QoS

Link Efficiency: LFI, MLPPP, FRF.12, cRTP, VAD
Classification and Marking
Congestion Management: Queuing
CAC: RSVP, GK
Traffic Policing and Shaping
LAN QoS
CM CAC and GK. Hub and Spoke/Fully Meshed MPLS

3. Telephony Protocols

SCCP
RTP & cRTP
MGCP
SIP
H323
Analog and TDM Signaling

4. Unity

Integration
MWI, SMDI
DPA
Call Handlers
Unified Messaging
VPIM

5. IOS IP Telephony Skills

SRST
CME
CUE

6. IP IVR/IPCC Express

Speech Recognition
ICD Functions
Database Lookups
VXML

7. Security

DHCP Snooping
MCS OS Hardening
Phone Authentication and Encryption
TCP/UDP Port List
Firewalls and Application Layer Gateways (ALG)
NAT

8. Infrastructure Protocol

DNS
TFTP
NTP
Inline Power: Cisco and 802.3af

9. Application Protocols

1. IP Multicast
2. Video
3. Fax and Modem

10. Operations and Network Management

My story on how I passed the CCIE Lab

2008-12-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

I definitely enjoyed reading peoples journey towards CCIE. I was interested to see what they did to pass, what challenges they faced and it was actually a form of motivation to know that others are going through the same thing and made it out the other end alive. No one in my normal life understood or understand what a CCIE is and what it takes to get one.

Its not like a university degree its something different. CCIE seems to have a universal meaning for people that do networking. When I got my Engineering degree some 4-5 years ago now, at the end I was glad it was all over. Never went to graduation and just started work as a Network Engineer for a small company. I learnt a lot, since all the senior engineers left and I was there to try and figure things out for myself. They did eventually hire more engineers, but by then I was able to stand on my own 2 feet. Did my CCNA while I was there.

After an 8 month stint, I moved on to bigger and better things. Got a job with a large Australian ISP and now I consult.

So now why I decided to go for CCIE? I got my CCNP and really didn't feel like that offers job security, more interesting projects and so on. So I decided to go for CCIE. I’m glad I did, because as we all know, the bubble has finally popped.

So the journey started over the Christmas break 2 years ago. I was working over the Christmas break but as we all know, nothing happens. Our network is pretty stable and all I was there for was just incase something went wrong. No changes were being made to the network and I had nothing to do but wait for alerts. So I decided to study for the written. I read a bunch of books from Nov 2006 till March 2007. I sat the written in early to mid 2007 and passed. I think your lab prep will come back to what you learnt for the written portion. Having a solid background makes things fall into place a lot quicker.

I remember this time last year or it could have been a little earlier I was following bitbucketblog. It was really good to read someone else’s way to CCIE. The way he was studying in the midst of getting married and how he was going about it was very interesting. That’s when I decided to start my blog. A way to give back and help others stay motivated.

From April 07 till sometime late in 2007 it was just off and on study. I was trying to get used to doing IE labs, but wasn't getting them done in the 8 hours. It was taking me the whole weekend just to get a single lab done. It didn't help that I left Google chat on while I was studying and was talking to friends. Most of my friends are spread over Australia, everyone left after University. So I talk to them on Google chat every now and then. Not so much over the past 6 or so months, though I did catch up with some of them in Sydney when I sat my lab however :). Another thing was on-call. I was working like crazy in 2007. Long hours and also being on call and getting called throughout the night didn't help the concentration. I was generally tired when studying. So I'd suggest that time is the most important thing when studying for the CCIE. You'll make the money back once you pass :)

In late 2007 I decided doing full 8 hour IE labs wasn't going to work for me. Why? Because when I get through BGP and into the non-core stuff, I was 1. Tired, 2. And out of study time.

This is where I made a decision to contact Narbik. I saw his workbook online and wrote to him, organised payment for his Advanced Technology workbook and got a box at my doorstep in a couple of days. This is the best thing I could have done. These set of books are really good. They go through the technologies in mini labs, and I could really dig deep into individual technologies and not worry about time constraints. So in late 2007 and over the Christmas break I really got serious about doing these labs. It took me from Nov-Feb to get all these labs done. I decided to sit Narbiks bootcamp. This was very last minute, and I mean very last minute and it meant juggling a lot of stuff in a short space of time. This was another thing that really helped my prep. I sat there, listened to his lectures and it really cemented most of the concepts. I did some of the labs again in the bootcamp. Some things I knew, but the way narbik went through things it made it a lot easier to understand. At the end of the bootcamp, Narbik said I'd pass the lab and was ready. I left thinking (one of Narbiks famous sayings) - "he's on the grass". I really didn't feel like I knew everything and had a lot of other crap on my mind.

I was really loosing motivation around April. I didn't want to think about CCIE and didn't bother reading blogs or studying. I needed a break. Then in July I decided to start studying again. This is where I have to thank Ethan Banks and the guys that write on his blog. I was going through Ethans blog and realised he passed. Then I read Keith's story and saw he was blogging and passed the lab. This is where I got my second wind from. The motivation was back. I started with Narbiks books again. This time it took me a month to finish the labs in all 5 volumes. That was my third pass through them. Then I went through Narbiks books again, this time looking all the non-core stuff up on the Doc-cd. I had everything up to BGP sorted. After all this I did some of the labs from the IEWBv2 and a few core labs, but not all of them. I then booked mock labs with IE. But when I did these mock labs it was just do them. I was finishing the labs in 6 or so hours without verification. I made a big mistake of just leaving things once I had completed the lab. I did no verification, I just logged off after completing the lab and got a few score reports back.

I sat the lab and fell short. Came back home from Sydney and came up with a new strategy. I knew the technologies, but had no plan. So I logged on and booked another attempt for Dec. The attempt I passed. This gave me time to get everything lined up. This time I worked on strategy. I took 4 IE labs and just worked them over and over again. I wasn't really learning any thing new at this point. All I was doing was trying to get my speed up to a point where I was getting a lab done in 5-6 hours with accuracy. After I got to a point where I was getting a lab done in 6 hours, I was looking at how accurate my configs were to the solution guide. Looking at all the stupid mistakes I made and so on. I then spent time on verification. I would take copies of my configs when I got a lab done on my first pass through, then load them up again and just verify. I think this is what I was missing. I guess I'm a lazy person and didn't want to spend 8-10 hours sitting in front of my computer. So I broke my study up a little:

1. Did 6 hours on the rack to complete a lab and made a copy of my configs
2. Took a break, came back and looked through my configs
3. Worked on how I was going to verify everything was working.

I actually think my job helped me understand the technologies, because in the last 5 weeks before my lab I had 2 projects on. I was redesigning a couple of networks for 2 of my clients. One was a multicast redesign and the other one involved QoS. My luck also changed for the good. I had no work on, 2 weeks out from my lab. Of course that meant no money for 2 weeks, but I wanted to take 2 weeks off before the lab, just to focus. Before my second attempt, I was working right till the day I flew to Sydney. This attempt that I passed, I took 2 weeks off, and the weekend before my exam, I didn't even switch on the rack and just thought about staying focused for the lab.

I arrived in Sydney a day before the test. I went out for lunch with a friend, and then I explored Sydney a little by myself. Took a train into town, walked around, came back to the hotel and went out again out by the water and took photos. Went to Luna Park, and then back to the hotel. By then it was 6pm and I thought I was tired. I didn't sleep very well before this attempt. It was really hot during the day and I had the Air-con on all night. Woke up with a sore throat and was feeling sick. Washed up and headed to the exam centre. I decided to take the free shuttle that the hotel offers, to St Lenords, but some guy decided to park his car in front of the underground parking. So no shuttle today. It was already 7:30am so I got the train. Once the exam started, the sick feeling I had at the beginning of the day went and was able to get on with what I was there to do.

At the end of the day, I left the exam room feeling that she’ll be right. If I failed, I wouldn't know where to start. On my first 2 attempts I knew I didn't make the cut, but this time I felt a lot better. I left, got on the train. Went into the city and got something to eat, walked around and then took the train back to my hotel. Got back to the hotel, turned on my laptop and sat there with the TV on, and every now and then I’d check my email for the score. I’m not sure when the score email came through, but once it came through, I logged into my CCO account, and there it was PASS. I jumped of my seat, ran into the hall way screaming I can’t believe it. Some guy screamed back “shut the F*&^ up you dickhead”. I went back to my room and shut up because people in Sydney are crazy :). I forgot to take the key with me and locked myself out, so I had to go down to reception so I could get someone to let me back into my room.

Next day I got up late, but just before they clean the rooms. Got ready and headed off. Got on the train, went into town, bummed around for a bit and then took the train to the airport. I ate this massive piece of caramel cheesecake at the airport as a reward.

What am I going to do now? Voice, but going to learn the concepts fully first before I get into Voice Lab prep. So hopefully the next 6-12 months will just be off and on study, and get into some serious stuff when I recover from this CCIE. I'll definitely blog about my voice prep more than I did for R&S, so stick around.

That's it. I'm happy to help people out with questions and whatnot. But respect the NDA please.

Last thing, have a safe and happy holidays. If you still studying for CCIE, don't give up. Its worth the effort and pain.

Thanks for reading, I know I wrote a lot………

Finally passed the lab

2008-12-23T00:07:00.000-08:00

More to come later. Now you know why I haven't posted in a while. I've been concentrating on getting the lab done before the holidays. I'm still trying to catch up with life, but hopefully this holiday I'll have some time to come back to blogging and start off by writing a little about the experience and how I went about passing the lab...

Who is still reading this blog. lol.....

Its been a while

2008-09-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

Apologies for not writing anything for a while, thats if anyone actually reads this blog ;).

I've been extremely busy studying and holding down a very demanding job as a consultant.

However, my job is quite flexible, so I can work the hours I want as long as I make up my contracted hours by the end of the week, as long as projects are delivered on time and work is done.

So the only time I study is after work. This is my current day, and I think I'm going to do this till lab day;

9am - wake up
10: leave home to catch bus
10:15: in the office
10:15-6:15 - work by butt off. No lunch break for now.
6:15 - catch bus home
6:30 - home
8pm - 2am - Study.

See my day doesn't allow a lot of time to blog, but I'm going to try and at least put progress reports up and stuff I find tricky.

Since my last blog post, I've done the following

- IE lab 7-11, 13, 16, 17, 18, and 20

Some of the later IE labs I reckon were worth doing, but only a few. If I could get my days back I would have only done say 2 labs out of 16-20.

Lab 13 was a killer. It was rated, I think about a 9/10. I got past the IGP's and got killed on BGP. The rest wasn't too bad.

I think depending on the lab I do, I either feel like I'm ready or I'm not ready. I however feel comfortable about things up to BGP, and have little or no trouble with the core tasks now.

The other stuff still needs a bit of work, but I'm getting there. I think I've sorted out Multicast, and IPv6. QoS is a little shaky depending on the lab I do, so I need to do a bit of work there. And Security is a nightmare for me at the moment. I really need to do a lot of work with Security.

As for IP Services, again it depends what the lab asks for. Some times I can do it straight away, and sometimes I have to dig around the Doc-cd.

My next step is to work on time management, so I know when lab day comes around, I 1. have time to check the DocCD for stuff I don't know, and 2. have time to verify verify and verify.

I'll post more later. Its getting late and I want to get a little more study in before I sleep.

I real study weekend

2008-08-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

This weekend I completed labs IEWB 8 and 9.

These weren't that bad. After going through hell with lab 7, it was a nice change to actually know what the question asked and coming up with a solution.

Again, I have notes for these labs and will try and write them up. The problem is I write small notes on a piece of paper and then go back and read them, make sense of them and type them up.

I will hopefully have some notes for lab 6 through to 9 sometime soon, when I get a chance to type it up.

Progress Report

2008-08-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

Frustrating Weekend

Last weekend was a NO go on the study front. I pretty much spent the whole weekend troubleshooting and trying to prove that the rack rental company that I bought a dedicated amount of rack time from had an issue with there frame-switch.

I must have sent about 10 emails and got a reply saying that it was a layer 3 issue. I then had to strip my configs, just put encapsulation frame-relay on the interface and the interface still never came up.

After sending multiple emails with debugs and whatnot I got a response, and in the morning the WIC card was replaced and it was working. So I lost 2 days. I didn't even get extra time on the rack, it was like its fixed and no sorry either. Ah well, I could go and post crap on groupstudy and go through the whole this rack company is bad blah blah blah, but I rather use my efforts to catch up on my study now.

I actually thought the problem would have been fixed after my first email, and didn't expect to have to do all the troubleshooting to get the problem resolved. I'm hoping I don't have any more issues.

So the week went and I decided to try and catch up. I wrote bits of this post during the week but never had a chance to post it.

So since last weekend, I got lab 6 completed. No big problems with this lab up past BGP. I think I rushed things a little and took some time to think about learning everything that I could be presented with in the lab. I get up to BGP with no real issue, but I really need to also concentrate on the other stuff non-core topics. It could mean a pass or fail.

I'm actually getting tired and its harder to get a full 8 hour lab done in 2 evenings. Its also getting harder to think day by day, as my brain is mush now, after so many hours of study. I might have to cut back on the study time and get a full 8 hours of sleep a night. What I've decided to do is cut back to doing 3 full 8 hour labs a week and trying to understand everything. I've also decided to get more sleep and build up towards a lab date, where sleep will be a luxury. That way I'm hoping I peak on lab day, instead of burn out.

I've completed lab 6 and lab 7. Lab 7 really kicked my butt. This is a hard lab, and really taught me the in's and outs of the distribute-list command. BGP was hard in this lab as well. But the surprising thing was, everything past BGP wasn't so bad and I was able to get through all those topics without too much trouble. I'm thinking to myself, do I know enough to pass the lab. I heard if you can do difficulty labs 7-8 your ok, this lab was a 9 and it really got me. But I was learning a lot while doing everything up to BGP. Now I just have to get the rest done tonight.

I'm glad I did lab 7. It was a hard lab, but really made me think.

I have notes written down on a piece of paper about these labs and will try and get them written up and posted when I get a chance.

Completed IEWB Lab 3

2008-08-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

This week I did 2 labs. Tuesday was finishing up lab 3 and Wednesday and Thursday was doing lab 4.

IEWB Lab 3

It took me about 3 hours to get up to redistribution. Once I got redistribution done I ran into a few problems. I didn't have end-to-end connectivity and couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on. I think it took me 10 minutes just pinging around and trying to think about what I've done in previous tasks and if I picked up on all of the correct errors that are introduced into the lab that we need to identify.

It looks like I'm getting better at troubleshooting my silly mistakes. I didn't have the correct network statement on one of the routers connected to the backbones which meant I couldn't see those routes. At first I thought the backbones might have been configured incorrectly. I think I just have to be more careful when configuring and try and use the build, verify, build verify approach. I'm not really doing that and it does cause problems from time to time. Don't get me wrong, I verify every now and then, but when I do the more simple configuring a routing protocol or configuring a vlan, I just assume it's configured correctly and move on. Then when I run into a problem I back track.

I also didn't have all interfaces on the switches that were trunked "no shut". Another stupid mistake, but if I did a simple verification when I was configuring this trunk I would have picked it up then and there instead of trying to back track.

I really need to come up with a game plan where I can effectively get through an 8 hour lab and know everything is going the way it should be.

We had a redistribution problem at work that caused a loop in the network. If I wasn't studying for CCIE I don't think I would have been able to fix it. That problem took me about an hour to fix, after consulting the network diagram and doing a lot of troubleshooting the problem was identified and fixed, so at least I'm learning something through this process and was quite happy.

I didn't have many technical problems understanding the requirements up to redistribution. I think I'm getting better at the core stuff now. And learning the technologies has paid off. I thought you had to practice, practice, practice to get speed up, but I'm starting to think; knowing the technologies inside equals speed.

Got through BGP in about an hour and I was ready to move on.

I got up to BGP on Sunday night. Monday nights are my nights off, so started this lab again on Tuesday night after work. Its getting harder to start studying when I get back from work. The hard bit is getting started, but an hour in and I'm good to go till 1am. Its just the initial period.

It took me about 3 hours on Tuesday night to get this lab done. After I completed this lab, I deleted tasks and repeated them. I think I did the whole BGP section again and the Security section again.

With Multicast, I didn't know that we needed to use static-group instead of join-group because of the requirement for R2 to fast-switch traffic. The rest of the tasks weren't that bad.

IP Services is another part of these labs which I need to get under my belt. My strategy is to know the doc-cd, configure everything at least once and know where to find it. I really take my time to investigate the doc-cd with these tasks because its hard to know what can and will be asked.

So this lab took me about 6-7 hours to complete. I'm finally getting through these labs in the 8 hour time frame. This is why when someone asks me what they should do when preparing for CCIE, my answer is learn the technologies. It really helps!

I'll write up my Lab 4 experience later. I'm off to do lab 6 now. I've actually done the first half of it, but I think I'll just go ahead and do the whole lab including the first half again.

Completed IEWB Lab 2

2008-08-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

Finally got IEWB lab 2 done last night. I took Friday night off. I needed a break from this for one night at least.

I must have spend about 4 hours finishing up the lab from BGP onwards. I actually wasn't going for time but trying to understand the tasks, and plus I repeated a few tasks over and over again.

Total time to complete this lab would be around 9 hours.

I spent 1.5 hours on the redistribution task, so I could fully understand it.
I spent 1 hour or so on one of the BGP tasks so I could fully understand the question and the solution and work out a strategy to answer that question.
I spent some time on the reflexive access list question as well, again to understand this better.

Nothing else really gave me problems with this lab. Its is a level 6 lab however, but there were a few tricky bits in this lab and I'm glad I did this lab. I did learn a few things I didn't know before.

I had a big problem with task 5.4. This task scared me, as I couldn't understand what they were asking for here. I think it was the wording and I was getting things a little confused in my head at least. The way I got around this task was to think it through logically and use a lot of show commands to see where routes were coming from, see where they were going and what I needed to do to complete and understand this task.

The other task I had problems with was 9.4 where we had to use a reflexive access list. I had to read through the task a couple of times. Looked at my notes from when I was doing Narbiks labs. Configured up my solution and it looked correct. Tested my solution and everything worked. I saved the config before I started this task, so what I did was reload the routers and do the task again. Reloaded the routers and again and did the task again and again. I think I did this task a total of 5 times to drill it home.

I did this with the redistribution, task 5.4 and task 9.4 just to get things right in my head. I don't want to rush from one lab to another not understanding what's going on and set myself up for getting my ass kicked when I take the lab ;).

I am actually starting to dream about CCIE and the labs. Its kinda weird, I dream about labs I've done, solutions to come up with and its freaking me out a little. Is it normal to start dreaming about this stuff? Or have I been studying to hard and for so long that its driving me crazy. I think its the fear of spending a lot of money to take the lab. The lab exam it self is expensive, but travel costs and hotel costs, especially in Sydney are expensive. I think the hotel will be $200-300 bucks a night, last time I checked and couldn't find anything cheaper.

Sometimes I feel I can beat this thing, other days I feel like its going to beat me. I do feel a lot more confident about things though which is a good sign. I did IEWB lab 2 this time last year, and it took me 12-15 hours to complete. This time I could have gone through it in about 6-7 hours if I didn't repeat tasks and investigate stuff I didn't fully understand. There are less and less things I need to investigate as I go through these labs, which I'm thinking is a good sign. But still, I'm hoping all the hard work and sacrifice pays off.

I'm thinking about a date to take the Cisco Assessor lab or an IE mock lab just to see how much I know, what I need to work on and to test strategy. Its easy to do a IEWB lab, because if you get stuck, the answers are right there. I try not to look at the answers when I do these labs, but a few times here and there I can't resist. I just have to take a look at the answer to some tasks I don't think are correct, but what I should start doing is more verification. I will try this with lab 3 which I should be starting and hopefully finishing today.

I have to take the plunge at some stage with a Cisco Assessor or mock lab. But its scary thinking if you don't get a decent score and start feeling disheartened about things. I also want to take the Cisco Assessor or mock lab like its the real thing. I want to prep up to a point where I feel like I am ready for the lab and then sit a mock lab. I don't know, its just me. I guess mock labs and the Cisco Assessor still cost money so I want to utilize them the best I can. Maybe I'm thinking about this too hard and should just take the plunge and sit a mock lab.

Well, I'm off to do lab 3 now.....

Progress Report

2008-07-31T05:56:00.000-07:00

OK, since my last post I've done the following,

IEWB lab 6 until the rack rental craped out on me. Was going pretty good as well. I'm starting to understand most things, but I'm making to many silly mistakes.
Core lab 3 - got through this in 3.5 hours. It wasn't that bad. Looked a head and the next core labs look harder. But that was at first glance. I might get to these labs later on after I finish a few more IEWB labs
Got IEWB lab 1 done.
And tonight I got half of IEWB lab 2 done. This lab is good, the redistribution task kicked my ass and I learnt a few things. I had no problems with stuff up to the redistribution task except for making stupid mistakes. I have to figure out a way to stop making silly mistakes. I spent about an 1.5 hours just on the redistribution task, so I could fully understand that bit. I'm going to strip that part of the config off tomorrow and try it again before I complete the rest of this lab.

Thats it for now, its late and I have work tomorrow. I'll post up my notes and stuff I found tricky later.

Completed IE Core Lab 2

2008-07-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

Allowed time to complete lab: 4 hours

Break down of my time to do this lab:

Started lab at 10:15pm. I know its LAME doing a lab on a Friday night. But I don't want to stuff around anymore. I want my life back (for a little while after I pass). I really want to get this thing done.

10:15pm – 10:50pm – Finished Switching
10:50pm – 11:20pm – Finished Frame/PPP
11:20pm – 12:26am – Finished IGPs
12:26am – made the mistake of not turning off google chat. Someone messaged me, so had to chat to them – so I didn’t look rude. I have the bad habit of always replying to emails and messages from people.
12:40am – 1:30am – BGP

1:30am Finished lab. I verified everything was working and then replied to a few emails and went to sleep. Total time, I would say 3 and a bit hours to finish a lab that should have taken 4 hours. Not bad!

Note to self:

When doing authentication over PPP, make sure that the passwords are correct. Make sure there are no spaces in the passwords. Reloads don’t fix everything :)
When you don’t want a route into OSPF to be associated with any area, redistribute the route in using a redistribute connected and a route-map.
When doing BGP AS-Path Prepending, prepend the AS the router is in.
Summary in BGP means the aggregate-address. Though about this task for a few minutes then it clicked.

In Conclusion:

I didn’t really have too many problems here. Its actually starting to scare me a little. What am I missing here? Is there anything I’m missing? Are things really working? Maybe I’m just a little paranoid, but when I sit this lab I want to pass it. :)

Time to get on with IEWB lab 6 starting in 30 minutes.

Read the DAMN questions fully!

2008-07-25T01:51:00.000-07:00

Core Lab 1 done!

Yesterday I did IE's core lab 1. IE suggests you spend 3 hours to complete this lab. My time 3hours 30minutes. For the most part I was able to get through the questions without too much of a problem. I hardly had to look at the answers and when I did it was just to see if I had everything correct or to see what sort of verification was done.

After going through the technology labs, I wanted to see where I was at in terms of putting everything together. I thought a quick core lab would do that for me and at the same time maybe build a little bit of confidence. It did just that, I was able to get through the core lab without any major problems. I understood every solution.

One thing I have to remind myself is read the whole lab before I begin - which I did. Then when doing the lab read every question carefully - this I didn't do and if it was the big day I would have failed because of silly mistakes and not reading the questions.

A couple of points I picked up from this lab;

When redistributing connected routes into OPSF with a cumulative metric, we need to use metric-type 1 (E1).
Know the Administrative Distance for routing protocols of the top of my head.
Reload Reload and Reload when you think your config is right

With point number 2, I know the ADs, but I have to think about it. I want to get to a point where I don't have to think about these things and they become automatic. So here's a table:

With point number 3: this came about when I was doing the redistribution task. We had two points of redistribution between OSPF and RIPv2. Refer to the diagram:

RIP has a AD of 120 and OSPF has an AD of 110. When we have one point of redistribution, redistributed routes don't return. But when we have two points of redistribution the redistributed routes being RIP routes being redistributed in OSPF on Router 5 will be redistributed back into the RIP process on Router 4 - if that made sense :). This means the RIP routes that were redistributed into OSPF return with an AD of 110, which beats the original AD of 120. This caused a loop to occur. How did I know there was a loop to one of the routes in the RIP domian, one command "traceroute".

Rack1R4#traceroute 150.17.1.1

Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 150.17.1.1

1 140.17.45.5 16 msec 12 msec 12 msec
2 140.17.245.4 36 msec 32 msec 36 msec
3 140.17.45.5 28 msec 32 msec 28 msec
4 140.17.245.4 48 msec 44 msec 48 msec
5 140.17.45.5 44 msec 44 msec 44 msec
6 140.17.245.4 61 msec 60 msec 64 msec
7 140.17.45.5 60 msec 60 msec 60 msec
8 140.17.245.4 80 msec 76 msec 80 msec
9 140.17.45.5 73 msec 72 msec 76 msec
10 140.17.245.4 92 msec 92 msec 92 msec
11 140.17.45.5 88 msec 93 msec 88 msec
12 140.17.245.4 108 msec 104 msec 104 msec
13 140.17.45.5 108 msec 105 msec 104 msec
14 140.17.245.4 120 msec 124 msec 124 msec
15 140.17.45.5 121 msec 116 msec 120 msec
16 140.17.245.4 136 msec 136 msec 137 msec
17 140.17.45.5 136 msec 132 msec 136 msec
18 140.17.245.4 153 msec 152 msec 148 msec
19 140.17.45.5 148 msec 153 msec 148 msec
20 140.17.245.4 168 msec 168 msec

150.17.1.1 is the loopback interface of a router that is directly connected to Rack1R4.

All we have to remember is a HIGH AD being redistributed into a LOW AD causes problems when we have multiple points of redistribution. Not for all cases though!

To solve this, I used tags. When I checked the solution guide they used an access-list. I could have used that solution but would have had to apply the access-list differently as my loop was different by looking at the solution given.

I prefer to use TAGs as its a much neater solution. Sub-optimal routing is a funny thing, you never know what change you might make that will affect which way traffic will flow. So tags are a good way to tackle this as it doesn't rely on which way your routes are going.

So back to the solution that I came up with. By looking at the diagram, I redistributed RIP into OSPF and set the tag on R5 to 5120 and on R4 to 4120.

I then blocked routes with a tag 5120 from being redistributed back into RIP on R4 and I blocked routes with a tag 4120 from being redistributed back into RIP on R5. This was done a route-map. The config is as follows:

Some config is omitted and I've only included the relavent stuff to make my point clear.

On R4:

router ospf 1
redistribute rip subnets tag 4120
!
route-map OSPF->RIP deny 10
match tag 5120
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 20
!
router rip
redistribute ospf 1 metric 1 route-map OSPF->RIP

On R5:

router ospf 1
redistribute rip subnets tag 5120
!
route-map OSPF->RIP deny 10
match tag 4120
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 20
!
router rip
redistribute ospf 1 metric 1 route-map OSPF->RIP

When I got up to redistribution I was on schedule to finish this lab under 3 hours. I configured my solution, tried testing it. IT DIDN'T WORK. Now what? I was scratching my head for maybe 20 minutes, tried a few other things, but I knew my config was right!

After 20 minutes I needed to go get water, and decided that I better just reload my rack and see if that clears up the issue. I reloaded the rack, got up and went to get some water. Came back, and tested. IT WORKED. All it took was a reload, only if I had done this earlier.

Finished with that I went on to BGP. No big surprises. One thing that used to trip me up when I was doing IEWB labs before I did Narbiks technology workbook was those questions about odd and even routes. This lab had one of those tasks, and believe it or not, I knew how to do this task.

The main problem for me was trying to remember what the access-list should be;
A good way to remember for me anyways, which access-list to use is this;

We want routes with the 3rd octet being even or odd

For an even 3rd octet use;
access-list 1 150.1.0.0 0.0.254.255

For an odd 3rd octet use:
access-list 2 150.1.1.0 0.0.254.255

how I remember this is, for even we use 0 and 254 in the 3rd octet for the ip address and mask and for odd routes we use 1 and 254 in the 3rd octet for the ip address and mask. 0 being even and 1 being odd as the main thing that sticks into my head.

In conclusion:

This was a good lab to start with. It wasn't too hard and had some nice things in it that I learnt something from. I was a bit rusty at the beginning, but reckon this will be a good way to get my speed up and its a good way to get something constructive done in 4 hours on a weeknight. I can't do full 8 hour labs on weeknights as I have to go to work the next morning. I've been studying from about 8pm to about 1am, so there's no time for a full 8 hour lab.

That's it for now I reckon, I'm off to tackle core lab 2 tonight and see how I go on with that.

Progress Report 25 July 2008

2008-07-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

Finally done with Narbiks book earlier this week and I did IE's core lab 1 last night. I actually feel like I'm getting closer now.

I found it hard to stay on track and motivated to finish up Narbiks book with all the small miscellaneous topics. But for the most part, IP services could be looked up on the Doc-CD.

What i did was look everything up on the Doc-CD so I knew where everything is. So if I get some obscure thing that I've never seen before I can find it in the DocCD. At least now, I'm familiar with the commands.

I am finding it hard to stay motivated again, but doing the IE core lab last night helped with that. By the end of the lab it was 11:45pm. I still studied till 1am like usual but felt I could keep going, but decided to sleep as I had work in the morning. I was able to have a set piece of work that I needed to do in a certain amount of time. This helped and I think it was something new which helped keep the motivation level up as well.

This made me think about strategy again. I was getting bored just doing tech labs over and over again. It got to a point where I wanted to get them over and done with. Towards the end there were times I thought I'd just leave IP Services and start the IE core labs. Then I pushed myself to get that Tech workbook done, so I don't have to come back and re-visit areas over again. I wanted a solid grounding and a piece of the puzzle behind me. I think I've done that now. Don't get me wrong, I'm still going to visit Narbiks workbook from time to time, but I don't think I'm going to go over it cover to cover again. I've gotten everything I need out of it. I need to brush up on a few areas, and I think I can get that from the IEWB labs and use Narbiks labs to fill any small gaps.

Back to strategy. I was loosing motivation towards the end of the tech labs, so I'm thinking to myself, is this going to happen if I pound away at just the IEWB labs multiple times? Is this going to help me learn? I think it won't! because I won't stay motivated to do multiple labs 3 or 4 times. I need to do new things each time. Learn everything once, re-visit anything that doesn't make sense and lab it up - this sort of thing works for me. I remember back in University when I studied for an exam, I'd do practice tests over and over again, but only re-visit stuff I didn't understand and that strategy worked. Stuff I know cold, for me at least I don't want to keep going over. Just a way to save time which I can use to learn the stuff I don't understand.

I'm not very good at remembering a whole bunch of facts. So trying to understand everything is the key for me. I think by breaking stuff I don't know from the IEWB labs down will help me understand everything better.

I'm going to do a couple of labs twice but that’s about it. It also got me thinking about multiple vendors again. At the moment I'm definitely going to do the Cisco Assessor labs just to get a feel for where I'm at and the wording of questions, which I think will be my major issue for me.

Progress Report

2008-07-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

Well, its been a busy weekend. I'm finally done with the Security labs.

Security was one of my weak areas. Multicast, QoS and Redistribution were some of my weak areas as well. To get over the hump and try and understand these topics I did 3 things. Watched the IneternetworkExpert Class on Demand, made extensive notes from the COD and did some technology labs out of Narbiks Advanced Technology workbook. It worked, I understand Multicast, QoS and Redistribution.

Like I said I was having trouble with Security. I watched the IE COD to get over this topic and followed up by doing the tech labs from Narbiks book. Did it work? I think so. I think I understand the topic better. The test will be next week when I do o full 8 hour lab and see if all this work on learning the technologies pays off.

I have a few things to get through in Narbiks book, and by Friday I should be done. Hopefully I can organise my notes as well sometime this week, but we'll see.

Thinking about Strategy

2008-07-18T01:05:00.000-07:00

Today I thought about strategy. Should I use one vendor to do all my mock labs or mix it up. At first I was a little skeptical about IPExpert as they were pushing there product hardcore. Then I read some posts on a forum where a guy was bragging about IPExperts new product and another guy bagging the product. I thought to myself, shouldn't I keep an open mind about this. Then I took a closer look at there product and downloaded there sample lab. I skimmed it, and then went to there website to see what volume 3 labs are all about. These are there mock labs, they get graded for you and I looked into the demo. Everything seemed good. Now I have to decide should I incorporate IPExpert mock labs into my strategy. I've spent a fair penny so far on my CCIE studies so I'm thinking if spending more is the way to go. There are a lot of people who seem excited about IPExpert products and I'm starting to think about fitting a few of there vol 3 labs into my schedule so I don't get used to one style of thinking.

This is my current strategy for the short term.

I should get Security done soon. And then I'm done with Narbiks technology workbook. It will then be time to hit some 8-hour mock labs. I have all the InternetworkExpert products. Vol 1,2,3 and the class on demand, so buying the IPExpert End-to-End program might not work for me as I'm not going to utilise the whole product.

This is my strategy:

Sat	26-Jul-08 :	IEWB lab 6
Sun	27-Jul-08 :	IEWB lab 8
Mon	28-Jul-08 :
Tue	29-Jul-08 :	Core lab 1
Wed	30-Jul-08 :
Thu	31-Jul-08 :	Core lab 2
Fri	1-Aug-08 :
Sat	2-Aug-08 :	IEWB lab 9
Sun	3-Aug-08 :	IEWB lab 10
Mon	4-Aug-08 :
Tue	5-Aug-08 :	Core lab 3
Wed	6-Aug-08 :
Thu	7-Aug-08 :	Core lab 4
Fri	8-Aug-08 :
Sat	9-Aug-08 :	Mock Lab #5
Sun	10-Aug-08 :	IEWB lab 7
Mon	11-Aug-08 :
Tue	12-Aug-08 :	Core lab 5
Wed	13-Aug-08 :
Thu	14-Aug-08 :	Core lab 6
Fri	15-Aug-08 :
Sat	16-Aug-08 :	IEWB lab 6
Sun	17-Aug-08 :	IEWB lab 8
Mon	18-Aug-08 :
Tue	19-Aug-08 :	Core lab 7
Wed	20-Aug-08 :
Thu	21-Aug-08 :	Core lab 8
Fri	22-Aug-08 :
Sat	23-Aug-08 :	IEWB lab 9
Sun	24-Aug-08 :	IEWB lab 10
Mon	25-Aug-08 :
Tue	26-Aug-08 :	Core lab 9
Wed	27-Aug-08 :
Thu	28-Aug-08 :	Core lab 10
Fri	29-Aug-08 :
Sat	30-Aug-08 :	Mock lab #6

After this I'm going to check where I'm at with regards to being prepared to take the real lab. I'm not sure if I'm pigeon holing myself for failure by using just one vendor for mock labs and getting used to once style of questions.

If anyone has any tips on strategy or would like to tell me what they are doing, please feel free to leave a comment or email me. My email is to the on the right.

Right, back to those security labs.

Progress Report

2008-07-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

So now that I have a few posts up on my blog I thought I'd keep putting updates on my progress through Narbiks Technology focused workbook.

I completed IPv6 Thursday/Friday last week. For the most part I was able to get through these labs, but had problems with the RIPng labs. Not so much the technology itself but I got into a problem where I wasn't able to add anymore ipv6 rip processes to one of the routers.

I tried deleting processes of other interfaces and tried adding the process above and that didn't work. I put it down to an IOS bug after talking to a few people, but haven't had a chance to test this on a new IOS. I got through the other labs and continued to make notes as I went through the labs.

What i've decided to do is make small notes to jog my memory. Something I could read during to the day when I have a few minutes just to remind me of things. I figured if I don't understand what the notes I write mean then its not sticking all that well in my head and I may need to revisit that particular topic. I'll have to see how that pans out.

My weekend was busy. I started QoS on Saturday afternoon and was hoping to finish all those labs so I could take Sunday off. It didn't work out that way. On Saturday I got through the first 9 labs. I think my biggest problem now is staying focused. I'm starting to get distracted easily and taking to many breaks. If its going to get a cup of tea or listening to a prank call on youtube. I have to get some self control back and only take designated breaks so I can work through these labs efficiently. I thought I'd be able to work through till the early morning with these labs, but my brain switched off around 1am and nothing was going in, so I decided it was time to sleep and I'd continue with these labs on Sunday.

On Sunday I woke up late, around 11am. I had a few things to do and then started labbing around 3pm. Again focus was my main problem. I got distracted with other things, and in no time at all it was 9pm and I still had 4 labs to complete. I decided to take a 30 minute break and by 9:30 I was back in the swing of things.

I completed 2 labs, read some documentation and played around with the doc-cd making sure I could find things. Again, my brain switched off around 12:30am and by 1 I was in bed. I needed to get up early so I could get to work on time.

Monday's are my days off. I don't think about studying or do any studying on Monday. I also try and get to sleep by 9pm to catch up on all the lost hours during the week and weekend. This Monday was a different story. It was also my Birthday and was surprised when I got home. I had a surprise Birthday party and there was a whole bunch of people there. I knew straight away this was going to be a late night and it was. I only slept at around 1:30am. One funny thing that happens every year, comes when blowing the candles on the cake. I have 5 young cousins, between the ages of 3-7. They seem to get excited when the cake comes out and get there lips ready to blow the candle out. So it takes for ever to cut the cake. Someone lights the candle, they sing the usual song, but half way through the candle's blown out. So we start the process again. Happens every year for the past 3 years.

Tuesday night I thought I'd get the QoS labs done, which I did. I also thought I'd start on the Security labs, but that didn't happen. I was tired and needed to go to sleep. Funny thing is, I only got to sleep about midnight. And today I'm feeling the consequence of not getting enough sleep. I feel very tired and drained. I really need to get into a pattern where I'm getting enough sleep if I want to make it through the other end alive :).

I guess the rest of the week is going to be spent doing Security labs and once that's done, I need to get through IP Services, NAT and I'm done with the technology labs. I also have to catch up on some notes. I'm hoping by the end of the week, I can get my BGP, IPv6, QoS notes all tidied up.

Then I can get started with the IEWB and core labs.

Progress Update - July 9th

2008-07-11T05:44:00.000-07:00

Last night I spent 4 hours working through Narbiks multicast labs

They weren't all that bad, but I was ok with multicast before I started doing them. I watched the IE class on demand and made my own notes so the theory was there. I've also played around making up my own mini labs to test what was taught in the class on demand so I was able to work quickly through these labs.

A few things that I either forgot or didn't know were:

1. Changing the PIM hello interval:

R3-1(config)#int e0/0
R3-1(config-if)#ip pim query-interval 60

2. Checking for RPF failures when multicast is not working.

To troubleshoot multicast issues in the past I would use the show ip mroute count command or debug ip mpacket, and look for RPF failed packets from the other counts bit shown below:

Router# show ip mroute count
IP Multicast Statistics
4045 routes using 2280688 bytes of memory
41 groups, 97.65 average sources per group
Forwarding Counts:Pkt Count/Pkts per second/Avg Pkt Size/Kilobits per second
Other counts:Total/RPF failed/Other drops(OIF-null, rate-limit etc)

From Narbiks labs I found a new way to troubleshoot multicast faults. Setting up a dense-mode multicast neighbor with R1 being the near end and R6 being the far end router.

We start at the far end router and use the following command:

R6-1#sh ip rpf 10.1.13.1
RPF information for ? (10.1.13.1)
RPF interface: Ethernet0/0
RPF neighbor: ? (10.1.246.4)
RPF route/mask: 10.1.13.0/24
RPF type: unicast (ospf 1)
RPF recursion count: 0
Doing distance-preferred lookups across tables

The RPF neighbor is 10.1.246.4.

Follow the path up to the next router. In the example config the next hop is 10.1.246.4. Issue the command sh ip rpf x.x.x.x for the source.

Once we find the router that has the problem we should see

R5-1#sh ip rpf 10.1.13.1
RPF information for ? (10.1.13.1) failed, no route exists

To solve RPF issues in two ways:

1. manipulate unicast routing
2. use a static mroute

example - ip mroute 10.1.13.1 255.255.255.255 next-hop (for multicast interface or point-to-point interfaces) or interface (for point-to-point interfaces)

Configuring static-RP

When configuring static-rp make sure that the address used as the static-rp is advertised into the routing protocol.

static-rp is configured as follows: on all routers

ip pim rp-address 2.2.2.2 1
!
access-list 1 permit 224.1.1.1

R2 is RP and is using its loopback address. This didn't work for me first up. After scratching my head for 10 minutes and looking for RPF issues, I did a show ip route on all the routers and noticed that 2.2.2.2 wasn't in the routing table. You have to advertise the rp-address into the IGP routing protocol so every device in the network knows about it.

Filter multicast neighbors on the interface

Progress Update - July 8th

2008-07-11T05:34:00.001-07:00

I started BGP about a week ago. The first lab took me 2 hours to complete. Not because I didn't know how to configure basic BGP but I was trying to verify everything, I was trying to get a full understanding of all the show commands. I expanded the labs out to more then what was asked in the tasks just to see how things behaved.

I moved on to Lab 2. This lab took me about an hour, but again my main goal was to expand on what was asked, think about what if I changed this or that. I figured this way I'd get a full understanding after these labs are complete.

The last thing I want to do at this point is rush through these labs and then have to repeat the process because of holes in my knowledge of the technologies that might show up when I start full scale labs again.

Over the weekend I finally completed all the BGP labs.

To date I've done RIPv2, EIGRP, OSPF and BGP. I have a full set of notes and have only consolidated RIPv2 and EIGRP. My OSPF and BGP notes are all over the place. I usually keep notepad open while I do these labs and paste in show commands and write small notes when required. I also keep a notebook and write notes in there. This is probably a bad idea because now I have to go back and organize all my notes into one word document.

I think I have a pretty good handle on the routing protocols now.

I'm now trying to work out a new schedule to get through the other technologies using my time efficiently so I can get through the rest of the labs as quickly as possible. I want to incorporate the IE vol 3 labs into my schedule so the core topics stay fresh. But I like the idea of getting through all of Narbiks Technology labs and then hitting the IE stuff later. I'll have to think about it....

Once I get through the rest of Narbiks tech labs I want to get a few IE vol 2 labs under my belt and then take a mock lab, just to see where I'm at. I might do a cisco assessor lab, but I'll have to think about it.

Over the next couple of days I want to concentrate on Narbiks Multicast labs......

Here we go again! - june 30th

2008-07-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

I decided recently to get back into my CCIE study again. I thought I'd blog my progress, which would be a good way to document everything and others can get something out of it. It might also help me keep to a schedule and note stuff up that I need to focus on.

I have an exam booked for November, but depending on my progress I might push this date up or back.

I've been studying for this thing since March 2007, but things always got in the way, but that's life. I've had to travel a bit and work long hours throughout 2007 and early 2008. Now I'm back home, focused and preparing to get a those digits in the next couple of months. Don't get me wrong, I've studied and have a good grip on most of the technologies. I think I need a couple of months to polish everything and make a good attempt.

I've written stuff that I was going to add to my blog but never got around to doing this, so you might see multiple posts over the next couple of days while I format and paste my entries into my blog =).