CCIE Candidate

I am working on Narbik Kocharians’ advanced technology lab workbooks, and had one of those “duh” moments. That moment relates to a fundamental working of PPP. When a PPP circuit comes up, you get a /32 of the opposite side auto-installed into the routing table. I saw that behavior in a lab [...]

I’ve completed a week with Narbik Kocharians at his CCIE lab bootcamp. How did bootcamp affect my lab preparation strategy? In a number of ways…

I am going to keep my lab date of April 29 in RTP. Going into bootcamp, I wasn’t sure how close I was. After bootcamp, I know [...]

I am going to wrap-up my bootcamp experience with Narbik Kocharians in a Q&A format, as there’s been a lot of interest in the CCIE candidate community in this series of blog posts. If I don’t answer a question you have, please unicast me, or post a comment to this article.
I’ll tell you right [...]

The last day of class was really a half-day, 9am to 12pm. Narbik purposely constructs the class to run 5.5 days, so that the Friday ends up being a full day. He feels that if you try to run the class as a 5 day class only, it ends up really being 4.5 [...]

The first part of the morning, we worked on labs. Narbik wanted us to do BGP labs, but there was one big area I wanted to work on while Narbik was on-hand to ask questions: NAT. I’m not too bad with NAT, but I’m not great, either. NAT is one of [...]

Narbik focused on BGP throughout day 4.  One of Narbik’s lecturing distinctives is that he explains the “why” of something before he explains the “how”.  In other words, he didn’t stand up there and say “We all know that iBGP peers are expected to be full mesh, but what options can we use to avoid [...]

Day 3 was focused on OSPF.  Narbik’s OSPF lecture was about 3.5 hours, and covered everything you ever wanted to know about OSPF.  I’ve mentioned it before, but Narbik’s lecture style is focused.  He doesn’t waste words.  You have to stay right with him, or you’ll quickly lose track of him.  In his OSPF lecture, [...]

On day 2, Narbik lectured on RIPv2 and EIGRP.  For lab work, we covered RIPv2 and also began IPv6.  The IPv6 labs were lengthy - about 150 pages, much devoted to RIPng.  I have never done a RIPng lab that was so intense before.  There were 10 routers RIPpin’, all kinds of mutual redistribution between [...]

The bootcamp format is straightforward. Narbik lectures in a somewhat open format, where you can ask questions and get a dialog going. He does not use Powerpoint or a projector. He’s all whiteboard. He will diagram and write command sequences on the board in real time, talking through everything while he [...]

I am all packed up to go to Narbik Kocharians’ CCIE lab bootcamp in Pasadena, CA. I have about 8 hours on a plane each way, so I printed off a lot of CCIE reading material. I also loaded my laptop with OpenOffice & Doc CD PDFs so that I can hopefully finish [...]

I’ve spent much of today working on upgrading a couple of our lab Catalyst 6500s with Sup720s from a pretty old version of IOS - 12.2(18)SXD5 to the shiny new 12.2(33)SXH1 Cisco released last month. Among a number of other new features, 12.2(33)SXH1 supports the VSS1440 platform. We don’t have a VSS in [...]

Some of the comments that interested me from GroupStudy.com CCIE-LAB mailing list over the last 2 or 3 weeks:

While running dot1q tunnels with L2TP running through them, you might see errors like the following:

ETHCNTR-3-LOOP_BACK_DETECTED: Loop-back detected on
PM-4-ERR_DISABLE: l2ptguard error detected

This may indicate a topology loop in your L2TP infrastructure. Deal with it by applying [...]

I spent some time with Narbik Kocharians’ Soup-To-Nuts BGP labs today. There are 15 small BGP labs, each focusing on a specific BGP feature. Here’s a few notes from my work today.
Lab 1 - I don’t know why, but it never registered with me to be concerned about BGP’s auto summarization capability.
Lab 2 [...]

3:00am (or so) - One of my cats begs for death by waking me up while scratching to get out of the bedroom door. The door is on a spring-loaded hinge. We don’t latch the door so that the furry herd (3 cats) can let themselves in and out at will. Awakening [...]

I have been working on writing the solution for the mini-lab I posted a few days ago.  I had no idea how long it was going to take to write up the solution.  The solution is a very big deal, as I’m trying to write it well-documented and well-linked, so that it is of maximum [...]