CCIE Candidate

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So I spent today doing IE Vol 2, lab 18. Take a wild guess what my score was.
The lab itself wasn’t that hard, but naturally that’s in hindsight. It hit me with a lot of stuff I’d never tried before, like redistributing BGP, EIGRP, connected and ODR on the same router. The [...]

After the beating I took Monday on IE Vol 2 lab 17, I needed a win. I think I got one, if only a minor one. This was my first stab at Vol3 three, which is aimed at people pretty much finished with their preparations - I’m not sure I’m there, but one [...]

Many CCIE candidates have asked for my comments on their studies. What do I think of a particular vendor or product? What books did I use to prepare? Is CCNP a prerequisite? Etc. This series of “syllabus” posts will answer those questions and more to the best of my ability.
If [...]

This was my first mock lab in about three months, and while I knew I would get clobbered, I was interested to see how I would do after spending so much time really making friends with each technology. I kept time on this one to simulate the real lab. … What follows is [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post, I finished NAT mid-day yesterday and didn’t want to start an entire mock lab (I’ll be starting it shortly). So I poked around at some things I knew I was weak on, and generally spent the time looking for potential test questions, exploring neat little features, and [...]

It was a lovely morning in LA. So calm and peaceful I tried to run out and do a quick errand at 7am. Ha! No one is awake in Hollywood at 7am on a Sunday, unless you want to get a laugh and drive past the stretch of Santa Monica Blvd where the [...]

How does one even broach the topic of NAT? If you were to go grab a random sysadmin and tell him that you just spent an entire day figuring out NAT, and you still felt shaky, he’d think you were a moron. Joke would be on him though; it might be the single [...]

I spent the last three days doing IPv6. Well, last night and this morning didn’t really count since I had another one of those zero-downtime meltdowns and loaded an old video game (this morning at least, last night I stared at the monitor for two hours trying to focus). At any rate, that [...]

I am buried at work. That is to say, happily buried. I bore easily; it’s a mistake to me give too little to do. The more projects on my plate, and the more challenging they are, the happier I am. These days, I’m just buried with stuff to do - it’s [...]

I have a love/hate relationship with multicast. On one hand it’s so flippin’ weird that the last thing I would want to do is deploy it in our environment in any meaningful or vaguely complex manner. On the other hand, it’s so flippin’ weird that I really want to deploy it in a [...]

Anyone used the CCIE Command Memorizer product and care to comment? I’m not at all familiar with it. At a glance, I don’t see how it would have fit into my particular method of preparation. I did labs and labs and labs, and as a side-effect memorized practically every command I needed [...]

Today was a rare day. I got to study things to solve problems at work … that actually applied to the lab exam directly (maybe, depends what they give me of course). First I had to look over a change request (we actually do peer-reviews, not stupid managerial rubber-stamping) for a new Netflow [...]

There’s a new “Ask The Expert” thread about Preparing for the CCIE Security Exam on the Cisco NetPro boards.
“Welcome to the Cisco Networking Professionals Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to get an update on the Cisco CCIE Security with Cisco expert Yusuf Bhaiji. Yusuf CCIE No. 9305 (Routing & Switching and [...]

IP Services is a bizarre hodgepodge of every little feature that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else, but has to do with IP … probably. It’s hard to know how much energy to dedicate to IP Services, as you’re practically guaranteed to not be tested on most things you read. I’m taking the Brians’ [...]