From: Shaughn Smith (Shaughn.Smith@za.verizonbusiness.com)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2008 - 08:59:37 ART
Congrats man.
I am doing the SP LAB on the 24th of October. Hope my story can have a
happy ending like yours :)
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
keith tokash
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 8:30 AM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: I am NOT a number ... I AM A FREE MAN!
I am NOT a number ... I AM A FREE MAN!
w00tness! I am now CCIE #21236! My life! Oh how I've missed thee.
Oi vey what a ride. I worked harder on this than I did on anything in
my
entire life, so I'm going to take my time with the email. Sort of a
victory
lap. After 13.5 months of studying, I can burn an hour typing.
I got into networking as an undergrad because I was a political science
major,
and by the second semester I was bored numb. Rather than prolong the
pain of
college I just finished up and two weeks after I graduated I had my CCNA
-
December 1999. I passed the CCIE R&S written about a year after that,
but to
be honest I had no friggin idea what I was doing, I'm just good at
taking
written tests. My company went chapter 7 and I never pursued the lab,
but I
did bother with the CCNP/DP in ... 2003 I think, but I let it expire.
It was
too easy back then so it didn't mean anything to me, and employers
didn't seem
to care. I heard it has gotten a lot harder lately.
Any way, I started the CCIE journey because I thought my company was
going to
basically outsource anything vaguely difficult or interesting on the
network
end due to the brutally powerful charisma of a networking consultant we
worked
with. I figured that since I was going to stop learning on the job, I'd
take
advantage of the learning credits we had and actually come away with
something. I'm happy to say I was wrong; we bounced the consultants,
the team
and company are great, and now I have every intention of giving back
what I
was able to take away to get the digits.
My journey can be divided into stages.
1. The Great Meandering
For the first few months, I read Odom's written exam guide and plunked
away at
various technologies, most of which I hadn't touched since my last Cisco
test.
Frame Relay, EIGRP, etcetera. I truly had no direction. A guy I work
with on
occasion had recently gotten his CCIE (hi Craig Hammond!) and told me to
stop
farting around and get IE's workbook since that's what he used. He also
recommended the Class-on-Demand (COD).
2. The Beatings Commence
I thought to myself, "self, you've been in this field for years, just
start
with the mock labs." Boy was that dumb. It's REALLY hard to learn a
technology in any meaningful way if you do 3 seemingly random tasks in a
row,
then move on to another technology you suck at. Think QoS. I had no
real
knowledge or experience with it, so I was learning snippets here and
there,
then moving on to multicast, another topic I had no knowledge or
experience
with. It's like trying to put eight 1,000 piece puzzles together at
once,
just adding 2 or 3 pieces to each, then moving to the next.
3. Ya Basta!
I melted down around the end of IE Volume 2, Lab 16. It was just one of
many
burnouts, but I remember it because it was a couple of weeks before I
went to
Narbik's class. His material went really deep into every individual
technology, and I found that that methodology was far more conducive to
relaxed learning than straight mock labs. This isn't a shot at IE, they
make
great material. Furthermore, they flat-out tell you on their site not
to skip
Volume 1, which I happily ignored and then wondered why I was having so
much
trouble.
Anyway, I spent about 4 months just sitting there tinkering with every
technology on the exam. I went as deep and as crazy as my mad little
mind
desired, without any artificial constraints like trying to finish a
section in
an hour, or trying to make it through a workbook in three days. None of
that
crap. I dug and dug, and if I didn't know what a field meant in a BGP
show
output, I dug some more. I found the childlike fascination again.
4. Back to the Grind
After finally fumbling my way through every one of the various
technologies on
the exam blueprint, and sweating ALL of the details, I went back to the
mock
labs. I now had a solid grasp on all of technologies, and just needed
to work
on IGP redistribution, time management, diagramming, and build endurance
by
doing 8 hour labs routinely. I also grabbed IE Volume 3, which let me
pound
on core technologies harder. You can't do an 8-hour lab every day, it's
just
not feasible. Even if you're good enough to finish them all, it's too
intense. Your head starts to throb after day 2. So the 4-hour labs I
liked
because I could mix them in between the 8-hour ones and take a half-day.
At
this point my manager had let me stay home and study full time, so I'm
lucky
there. I also took both Cisco mock labs ... and failed them both quite
horrifically. I think I got a 46 and a 53 or something like that, but
it was
worth it to see how Cisco words things and draws their diagrams. It's
like
being behind enemy lines.
- The lab itself
I tested today in San Jose. I'll spare everyone my views on Silicon
Valley's
deathgrip on the human soul (ok, maybe not entirely...), but the lab
environment wasn't that bad. I had heard everything from it being
freezing
cold to the mouses being all old and covered in nastyness from thousands
of
clammy hands. Nah. I brought a sweatshirt, never put it on. My
monitor had
a refresh rate that was low enough to flicker with a white background
and give
you a headache, but I didn't have much white background anyway.
Besides, who
cares? The point is it wasn't that bad. There was rack noise, but I
brought
earplugs and never bothered to use them. A few phones rang every 10-15
minutes. Meh. The rack noise was white noise, it kind of made it
easier to
dig in.
The night before I took a Unisom (over the counter sleeping pill) and
still
had a little trouble sleeping. I probably banked about 6 hours, which
is good
enough. I brought my own oatmeal to the hotel, because it's filling,
and if
you mix the sugary packets with the plain ones you aren't just eating
gobs of
brown sugar.
The material was hard. It wasn't impossible (obviously), and it wasn't
easy.
It was, as my co-worker told me last night, fair. The whole test was
actually
quite fair. I believed going in that if I knew the technologies inside
and
out, time wouldn't be an issue, and I wouldn't be easily tricked. I
walked
out feeling the same way. The only thing that I was really stressing
about
was the stupid little mistakes. The mis-named ACLs, the wrong
router-ids, the
neighbor relationships with the wrong IP of your neighbor ... all that
stuff.
That stuff would kill me in the home labs. Overall I'd say it was just
like
IE claims - a 7-8 lab of theirs. Probably right in the middle. But of
course
you're in a foreign environment under a lot of pressure, so a 7.5 lab
becomes
an 8.5.
Fortunately I finished everything but a few skipped items with a lot of
time
left, so I was able to comb over everything from the beginning, then
still had
enough time to pick up the skipped tasks.
Advice
I told my manager I could shave months off of the prep time of the next
guy on
our team to do this. How? DON'T SKIP AHEAD. Start at dum-dum level
and work
up from there. I started in the middle, and ended up going *back* to
basics,
then working up again. Waste of time, and very frustrating.
Learn every technology to a RIDICULOUSLY deep level. You probably won't
need
to explicitly call upon that knowledge, but it makes it easy to decipher
things like the correct OSPF network type to use, because you're not
just
memorizing things, you truly understand them. Once you know why things
work
the way they do, you have no fear of them wording a task in a wacked out
way,
because you're going to see through it like Louise Lane's skirt. Here's
an
email from Joe Brunner I kept from January 08.
"No you need to learn
1. the technologies so well you can be fooloed
2. to stop what ever you are on at 2pm sharp (3pm in CA) and spend the
rest
of the time just verifying the "easy" sections. Don't underestimate the
importance of this. You WILL probably fail otherwise."
Thanks for that advice man, I really took it to heart.
Finally, thanks to my wife, who could probably do better. My parents
and
siblings, whom I've completely ignored for the last year, including my
new
niece, who is about to get an even newer baby sister. My co-workers for
pulling my weight increasingly until I ducked out 100% to study a few
weeks
ago. My manager paid for all of this garbage and gave me time off,
which,
counting the lab rack he financed, probably came out to about 30k.
Also,
thanks to Ethan Banks for letting me blog until that ... yeah, ya know.
This
list was also a help. Just reading these emails helped keep me going.
Finally, I'd like to preemptively thank all of the strippers that are
going to
be smiling at me in the near future.
Enough of this crap, I have books to heave from the balcony and a gaming
rig
to build.
The information in this e-mail is intended for the
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