CCIE Candidate

We recently had the chance to poke at the Nexus 7k (and 5k, but that platform us much less interesting as it’s just L2) both in our own lab and in Cisco’s Customer Proof of Concept (CPOC) lab in San Jose.  I must say the experience in the CPOC really reaffirmed my belief that the [...]

While perusing Brad Reese’s blog, I noticed a couple of recent articles asserting the following:

The CCIE headcount in the US is actually declining.
Of late, new CCIE numbers are being issued at the rate of ~9.3 a day.

Hmm…

In theory, if demand for the CCIE skill set is growing in the US, then CCIEs with the ability [...]

I’ve been neglecting posting my progress over the past week as I’ve had my head buried in Narbik’s sections on QOS, ACLs, and multicast.  I breezed through the section on QOS (because I’m leaving the switch configs for now until I can get my hands on a remote lab) and ACLs.
Multicast, however, had me stumped [...]

I am over the initial euphoria of passing the R/S lab and thinking about the future.
I am getting married in March, so before that, I can muster up some time. And since last year studying was all I did, I don’t know what would I do for the next 5 months if not study J [...]

Well this post will be in two parts. The smaller first part will detail what I did to prepare for the lab.
And the in second part, I will detail what I think is the best way of preparing for the lab, based on personal experience and problems I had along the way. In short, if [...]

Well
About my experience of the lab, I am making a Q&A.
And yes, it was my first attempt.
 
Was the lab very difficult?
No, to be true, I found it ridiculously easy. I was done in three and half hours, spent next three and half verifying more than a dozen times, and left an hour early.
It may seems [...]

Yes, I passed.
Just checked the report, and will write in detail after the moment has sunk in

I hope that it’s not strange that I get excited about tackling a new technology…does that make me a nerd?  (not that there was ever any question on that)  :)  I’m pretty pumped to move on to QOS.  It’s something that I’ll have to move fairly quickly through as I’m giving myself until the end [...]

I have spent the last week going over the BGP sections of Narbik’s workbook.  I have spent a good amount of time on each of the sections running debugs (debug ip bgp updates, etc), running packet captures, and breaking things.  I break things to see what it looks like when a process is not working.  [...]

I’ve determined over the last few days that delaying my lab scheduling until after the bootcamp is probably the best idea.  (with the 90 day payment window and all)  Hopefully dates will be readily available when I’m ready.
I don’ believe at all that I will be ready by the end of the boot camp, but [...]