CCIE Candidate

I know that many of you are working on (or perhaps completed) the InternetworkExpert.com 4.1 Volume 2 full-scale practice labs. Would you mind recommending your favorite 5 that are of average difficulty? I’m planning to do them during the week of April 21, which I’ve taken as a vacation week. I might [...]

There’s no backing out now. I reserved the plane tickets, hotel, and car for the trip to RTP. I’ll get into Durham, NC before noon on 4/28. From there, I can check out the Cisco campus, and make sure I know where the lab building is. Cisco describes the RTP lab [...]

There’s a new “Ask The Expert” thread about Preparing for CCIE in Routing and Switching on the Cisco NetPro boards. Thanks to one of my fellow bootcampers for letting me know about this.
This quote is from the first post in the thread.
“Welcome to the Cisco Networking Professionals Ask the Expert conversation. This is [...]

I spent my lunch hour and about a half-hour past when I was supposed to leave re-cabling my rack for the InternetworkExpert.com 4.1 Volume 3 workbook.  This is the third re-cable I’ve done since starting prep.  Compared to the other 2 (NetMasterClass.com DOiT Volume 2 and Narbik Kocharians’ Advanced Lab Workbooks), IE uses more interconnections.  [...]

From the March 2008 Cisco Technical Services News e-mail:
CCIE Routing and Switching Labs Open on the Weekends
Registration is open for weekend Routing and Switching labs until May 1, 2008. Take advantage of this opportunity to take your lab now. View open appointments now, as new weekends are added frequently.

This small lab uses IP SLA to track the reachability of a remote IP. That IP SLA event is associated with a tracked object. Then a static route can be conditionally inserted into the routing table, using the tracked object. If the object is “up”, then the static route should appear in the table. If [...]

These lab exam strategy tips are courtesy of triple CCIE Narbik Kocharians. This certainly isn’t the only way to approach the lab, but this is an approach that has worked successfully for him.

PRELIMINARIES

Get there at least 15 minutes early. The proctor will come in, get everyone, and orient you on your rack. After [...]

Although the title sounds like spam, I’m not selling any pills here.  Rather, “getting a performance boost” describes what I’m going to be working on in the next few weeks as my lab date approaches.  I want my core configuration to be fast and flawless.  The issues for me now are not understanding tech as [...]

One of the enjoyable elements of a technical class is kibitzing with other geeks. You get to hear about their pain and suffering, share your own, learn how someone likes a product you don’t use (but might), etc. You also get into some vaguely personal discussions about study habits, why we’re doing CCIE, [...]

Coming back for a second round of bootcamp with Narbik Kocharians has definitely been worth it. Hearing his lectures a second time has been good reinforcement, plus he’s mixed up the lectures a bit. They’ve been largely the same, but some things have been phrased differently or illustrated differently from what I remember [...]

Tomorrow, I’m heading out to Pasadena, CA again for another week with Narbik Kocharians.  This is a repeat of the bootcamp I attended in February.  I did not meet my goal of completing all of Narbik’s advanced lab workbooks before returning.  I got about half-way through what I had left.  I still have all of [...]

I finally finished Narbik Kocharians’ BGP Advanced Lab Workbook last night. I have been having a tough time getting rack hours in. The BGP book was good for establishing a sound understanding of BGP fundamentals. When you’re done with that particular book in Narbik’s advanced workbook series, you’ll have covered the following [...]

In the “I doubt anyone cares but I’ll mention it anyway” department…
I registered cciecandidate.com today.  The CCIE Candidate blog still lives at ethanbanks.net, even if you hit cciecandidate.com; there’s no changes to bookmarks required.  Register.com had a price I couldn’t pass up - free for a year, so why not.
Part of the reason I grabbed [...]

I quit the GroupStudy.com CCIE-LAB mailing list a few weeks ago, and I don’t think I’ll go back.   I found the list to be initially interesting and helpful.  After being on the list for a while, I found that there wasn’t enough there beneficial to my preparation.  I had to pick through a lot [...]

I’m still making slow progress through Narbik’s advanced lab workbooks. I was scheduled to have the BGP book done last Saturday. (Ha ha. I’m funny.) I’m only halfway through the BGP volume at this point, not because it’s harder than I expected, but because I just haven’t had the hours to [...]