CCIE Candidate

Permit me a non-CCIE post. In addition to my Cisco work, I also spend a lot of time with F5 Networks products, both the Local Traffic Managers (LTM) and Global Traffic Managers (GTM). We just completed an enterprise migration from 4.x to 9.x family code. We also run Enterprise Manager.
Anyone else run [...]

I forgot to mention one important thing I learned in scenario 11.  When running IPv6 over frame-relay, you have to manually map your addresses to DLCIs.  Inverse ARP isn’t supported.  I didn’t notice this before, because in almost every lab thus far, I’ve had to disable inverse ARP for the IPv4 networks.  So naturally, I [...]

NetMasterClass.com scenario 11 is the first of the 25 to not include the 3560 Catalyst. I’m assuming therefore that the rest of the practice scenarios won’t have 3560’s either. And frankly, that’s not hurting my feelings. On scenarios 1-10, there were so many technology areas that one scenario could cover, that you [...]

I did this scenario in one shot today, working on it about 8 hours, plus a break for lunch in the middle. My idea was to make it more like the actual lab. Doing the scenario in one day was a good exercise by itself. It takes a lot of mental energy [...]

I didn’t know that the 2 North American CCIE lab testing centers were booked 6 months ahead of time. But they are. So if you’re planning to attempt the lab soon, you better get on the calendar now. You don’t have to pay until 28 days before the scheduled date, so there’s [...]

My new study schedule is still a work in progress. I’ve made a couple of changes that I think are necessary.

I’ve chosen a lab date, at least mentally. February 1, 2008, or as close as I can schedule to that date in RTP, NC, is the target. I need a set date [...]

If you’re pursuing the CCIE, you realize just how much it takes. The studying is endless. The list of topics you are required to have an in-depth knowledge of is long. If you are prepping for the written or the lab, the materials list is staggering. You study and review, study [...]

It’s hodge-podge day. I’m posting little paragraphs about issues I ran into with this scenario. This won’t be a stream of consciousness post, as I’m writing the paragraphs as I run into the issues.

I was scratching my head about an EIGRP split-horizon issue. I knew that a particular router wasn’t receiving [...]

They say that pursuit of the CCIE can screw up your family life.  Well, that exact thing is happening to me.  My kids really need me to spend more time with them.  So, I’m rescheduling my CCIE rack sessions during the week to keep up with my kids.  To that end, I’ll be working on [...]

I finished up scenario 8 between Thursday and today. I had a good session today, spending about 6 hours on the rack, taking my time to read and understand all of what I was doing. I’m getting better and better and identifying a task and finding it on cisco.com/univercd. Other things are [...]

Not one of my better days at work. Hopped from one early morning issue where we largely failed to recreate a problem we’ve been troubleshooting, then moved to a crisis, where one of our big mainframes was in a death spiral. I escaped work after the mainframe crisis, made it home a bit early, [...]

I started on scenario 8 tonight. It doesn’t look TOO bad, although there’s the standard level of weirdness, some things I’ll blog about later in the week. Just strange ways to configure things that you’d never do in real life. I blew up my terminal server again, so I’ve been working [...]