Monday, October 11, 2010

Round 3 begins now !!

Well enough is enough !! I am not going to let the exam beat me up !!I will fight and pass the exam !! I am beginning with MPLS ! I went through the theory again today used the MPLS fundamentals book , its a pretty neat book !!

The Idea is to get the following completed this week !!

* MPLS
* BGP
* IGP
* Multicast
* Switching

If can have all of this digested by 17th which I should be able to comfortably I will go on with the other sections the next week.

The Plan is to work out 5 to 7 workbook labs before I determine am ready for the real lab !! The sooner I go for the lab the better it is as I intend to take it up before end of the year !!

All the best to me :)

Friday, October 8, 2010

2nd Time Unlucky

Well i went for my second shot at the lab and my first for the v4. Was in the cisco office by 7am and was the only one there. 30mins later i was joined by other folks. 4of us all for R&S. The only good thing was that everyone were light headed and talking about cisco and ccie. I felt good, no anxiety or tension.

We got our name badges with "CCIE" written below it ( thats the closest i have got to being a ccie).The proctor came and took us inside briefed us about the exam.
Went to my pod logged in and the first section was the Troubleshooting section. The interface is really well done with neat diagrams !! I felt very comfortable using the UI on the large monitor. Took about 2mins to understand the various options available for us and then started with the tickets.

I took the full 120 mins to solve what i believe was 9 tickets, the rest i dont think i got them working or had the configs required. Well i was happy because i though i will pass as i had enough tickets resolved. With that confidence i moved to the configuration section.

I went and brought myself a cup of tea and started out with the config section. Read through the entire lab, saw the various diagrams presented(which were very neat and dint have to be redrawn). Got a good idea about the overall lab and started out with the L2. The L2 and L3 went well !! We went for lunch. After lunch i resumed my lab, got stuck in a certain task but got it working eventually !! I finished the lab with 60mins to spare !! I went through the entire lab and config again tweaked some areas !! I told myself i was going to pass , even if i did fail will do so by a few points !!

4 hours later i checked my mail !! Lab score report had come ... I though oh no ... opened the link provided and was actually startled to see some of the section i had scored less than the expected level and i had eventually failed. I was shocked, i dint expect to fail and certainly not with that kind of score !!

Well I really dont know what went wrong, but here i am ready to go for my 3rd attempt aain !! But this time i will nail it no matter what !!

Monday, August 9, 2010

55 days to lab

Just finished Lab 34 of NMC. Did pretty well. Have to push forward in terms of timing though. But overall I did well. Feeling confident !!

Its way too scary for. Its a must pass for me with respect to my personal commitments. I hope I do well this time.

As far as the lab was concerned. It was very interesting. Most of it was preconfigured, so we just had to do the advanced portions of the lab. Its like you walk into a network setup to function and we tweak it for the advanced stuf ;)
Couple of interesting new learnings picked up yet again. I love NMC for this, just when you think ok I know it all we have the new stuff to deal with.

Plan for the week is to brush up with the core stuff including L2(that would be MPLS, BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, RIP, Multicast, IPv6). Get Lab 33 completed on saturday to complete all of the V4 configuration labs completed. Then hit a few advanced V3 8 hour labs. Then it would be time to move on with the troubleshooting.

Well just another 55 days to go !!

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Booked my LAB

Well here goes nothing. I have my lab booked am all set. Booked my tickets to reach the city. I am yet to book the hotel which i thought i will do it by September.

I feel ready, as always hehehe. But yes, its time to have a go at it. I am sure I will get my numbers this time. Feeling all good and dandy :)

Send me some good will and lots of luck. Will keep you posted.

Full Scale Lab 3 - 7

Finished NMC labs 28 - 32. Good learning. My speed is built up. Need to work on some labs with PPP. Just a bit dry in that front. Otherwise i have a had a good run in terms of learning. Sort of feel ready to take on the real monster. Have to improve my troubleshooting speed.

Lab 33 - 35 will be finished a couple of weeks. Will go back and redo some labs also will do some old NMC 8 hour labs.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Full Scale Lab 2

NMC Lab 27
**********

I should say I enjoyed working out this lab. It was power packed for the 5.5 hours i spent working on it. I had some really good learning from this lab.

Switching and FR was pretty straightforward. Nothing much to dig in here. The Only irritating part was that I had to spend some time configuring the IP address & sub interfaces. I really hated that. The catalyst specialties were straight forward.

IGP was pretty intensive. Nothing new or dint have any gotchas here. Did go well.
Redistribution was fun !! It was one of favorites of the lab. I really enjoyed performing the redistribution & keeping routes from looping !!

BGP was ok !! Just had the route reflection concept involved here nothing much other wise. But interestingly I had a certain loopback address unreachable, Although it was advertised. I really couldn't sort it out. I was disappointed with that but I am planning to work it out again.

IPv6 was good. It had a bit of everything with the IGP. As always this being my favourite section I enjoyed working it out !

Qos was a no brainer.

Multicasting was interesting, I got to finally work on a concept which I really had no practice but ended up doing well.

Other concepts were pretty new or a build up knowledge on the things I already knew. But I thoroughly enjoyed it nevertheless.

Overall a good challenging lab. I lost known 8 points which was pretty disappointing.
Looking forward to do better on the other labs.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Full Scale Lab 1

NMC Lab 26
**********

Today I did my serious full scale lab. Its was lab 26 of NMC. I dint do the troubleshooting part of it though.

It took me 4.5 hours to finish up the whole lab.

The lab was pretty straight forward & easy. I was able to comfortably go through the lab. They did get me thinking at one stage. I did refer to the answer key then I go going.

L2:

Pretty Straightforward no twisting the tasks. Breezed through it without any problems. Total time taken was 30mins. It was pretty basic.

Routing:

Interesting yet simple portion of it. Configured everything as per requirement & got the whole IGP working.

BGP was also pretty simple except for a task that i was a little confused eventually a later part of the lab had the solution.

Redistribution was not much of a challenge but yes for a basic lab we can see how the routes are being share with each other.

IPv6:

My favorite section !! was interesting ! had only bgp & no IGP. I breezed through this section also. I got a link layer address assignment wrong apart from that it was a cake walk.

QOS & Multicast:

Nothing much here. Simple & straightforward got them working in no time.

OTHERS:

For a basic lab it was good. Gave me a good deal of confidence to start off the labs in full flow.


Learning:

Felt a bit lazy to draw diagrams today that gave me a bit of confusion.
Dint make a task table which had me look at the answer key.
I would rate myself 85% for the lab.


OVERALL:

Simple lab with simple tasks. Enjoyed the 4+ hours I spent working through them. Although a bit stiff while starting my confidence is up & I look forward to get going with the other labs.

Full Scale Labs

Last week I did my lab-1 of the famous workbook. I felt good & pretty much ready to go through & do the full scale labs. I was a little bit slow in starting off & going through the entire section of the lab. I was bit rusty drawing diagrams & getting others things in but it did get me started..

So I have about 30 sessions book & a tight schedule booked ahead of me. I am planning to kick off with the V4 version labs as they are more relevant in terms of time, length & most importantly the content. I planning to probably go thorough them twice & then get started with the older V3 labs. I am trying to go for the maximum here.

I am planning to go through the Troubleshooting section subsequently. I really don't have a time line or an attack plan for my troubleshooting yet. But , I really want to know how to configure & verify all the technology & then eventually the troubleshooting will become easy.

Lets see how it works out !!

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Breezed through layer 2 & other sections

I breezed through the layer 2 section. Switching & frame relay is done. Only th catalyst side of qos is pending. HSRP/VRRP is also done. Those are one of my favorites. DHCP is also done

Today I will be finishing up with NTP & other few system management sections. Tomorrow I have planned to go through QOS & practice a few of the concepts mentioned above. GLBP is pending. IPv6 multicast is pending for a long time so I just thought I will finish up with that too over the week.

I will be starting out with full scale labs from Saturday onwards. Cant wait to get started :)

Saturday, May 8, 2010

OEQ reach end of road

Finally after a year of terrorizing the ccie world cisco has finally made a move to remove the OEQ a.k.a Core knowledge section from the ccie lab exam. Having faced the ccie v3 lab I did find the OEQ pretty easy to handle. I cruised through them. But, having said that the sheer pressure it crated before I took up the exam was huge just because if I missed one question I had to fail the exam. The OEQ was more of a mental strain while preparing. Yes, those who are preparing for the lab should & will be able to answer it. But the very thought of losing the lab because we dint get one question right was the pain.

No need to worry moving forward.Well now it official on the ccie website

. It says & I quote

"Beginning on May 10, 2010, CCIE R&S and CCIE Voice Lab Exams, in all global locations, will no longer include the four, open-ended Core Knowledge questions"

We can further see it on DOC-6484

But honestly I wonder why cisco decided to remove this section. It was introduced to eliminate cheating. I think its because the troubleshooting section introduced will take care of that problem.

So its a happy ccie community & I am very happy too !!!

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Moving on to security

After breezing through the multicast section its time for me to move over to the security topics of ccie. This is going to be an interesting week as this is one my favourite topics. I am going to start of with the following topics from the checklist;

6.2. Access Lists
6.2.1. Standard Access Lists
6.2.2. Extended Access Lists
6.2.3. Time-Based Access Lists
6.2.4. Reflexive Access Lists
6.5. Cisco IOS and Zone-Based Firewalls
6.5.1. Basic Cisco IOS Firewall
6.5.2. DoS Protection on a Cisco IOS Firewall
6.5.3. Basic Zone-Based Firewall
6.5.4. Zone-Based Firewall with Deep Packet Inspection
6 6 NAT
6.6. 6.6.1. Dynamic NAT
6.6.2. PAT
6.6.3. Static NAT
6.6.4. Static PAT
6.6.5. Policy-Based NAT
6.7. Other Security Features
6.7.1. Configuring the TCP Intercept Feature
6.7.2. Configuring Blocking of Fragment Attacks
6.7.3. Configuring Switch Security Features
6.7.4. Configuring Antispoofing Using an ACL
6.7.5. Configuring Antispoofing Using uRPF
6.7.6. SSH on Routers and Switches
6.7.7. Cisco IOS IPS
6.7.8. Controlling Telnet and SSH Access to the Router and Switch

I am taking tuesday & wednesday off so hopefully by end of wednesday I will be done with all the topics mentioned above.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Going through multicast mini labs

I am working out my multicast mini labs. I went through the theory this week in the week days. Labbing up the scenarios was fun. With refernce to the checklist that cisco has provided, I haqve covered thne following topics=

5 1 1 PIM Dense Mode
5.1.1. 5.1.2. PIM on an NMBA Network
5.1.3. PIM Sparse Mode – Static Rendezvous Point
5.1.4. PIM Sparse Mode – Multiple Static Rendezvous Points
5.1.5. PIM Sparse Mode – Auto Rendezvous Point
5.1.6. PIM Sparse Mode with Multiple Rendezvous Points Using the Auto Rendezvous Point
5.2.1. MSDP
5.2.2. MSDP to an Anycast Rendezvous Point
5.3.1. Multicast Rate Limiting
5.3.5. Multicast Helper Address
5 1 7 Bidirectional PIM
5.3. Multicast Tools
5.3.4. Multicasting Through a GRE Tunnel

I have left out the following topics in ipv6. Will lab them up later.

5.4. IPv6 Multicast
5.4.1. IPv6 Multicast Routing Using PIM
5.4.2. IPv6 Multicast Listener Discovery ( MLD) Protocol
5.3.2. IGMP Filtering on the Switch
5.3.3. Use of the Switch to Block Multicast Traffic


I read a lot of interesting blogs which helped understand & throw light on the various concepts. Will post those links also over here.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Have set my lab date !!

Alright !! I have my lab date set. Its all do or die here. Have booked it in the month of october . I have a small counter setup on the right sie of the blog to track the days left for my lab.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Day 1 of 100 ccie groundwork

Decided to start off with OSPF which is Section 2.2 on the detailed blueprint checklist. I started by reading the doc cd. Read through it twice & then labbed up some scenarios. I dint get a good idea of a few concepts, so had to dig deep. Finally I did understand them. For a particular gray area queried the experts on GS & got a detailed explanation.

Will lab the scenarios once more to get a solid understanding. Tomorrow I will start with eigrp theory but I will not be able to lab any scenarios. So will go strong with the theory.

I kind of like the Detailed checklist of the ccie topics put up in the cisco learning network. gives us a good idea of what topics to cover under each technology.

Plan for this month is to cover topics 2, 3, 5, 6 in the detailed checklist.
Hope I have enough time to cover all the topics.

Alright I am off to bed now.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

OEQ waiver & the buzz around it !!

Well cisco announced an oeq waiver if people take up classes with the cisco360 partners. OK, that's cisco way of promoting the 360 classes, why fuss about it ?
Its cisco certification & 360 is their vendor & its their call. Why crib about it?

You either take it or leave it. If you are like me & cant afford it just prepare for the OEQ also. Helps you build more knowledge. You are not going to lose anything !!
The oeq are not a big deal to pass if you know your stuff.

Heard that Cisco employees get to take up the ccie exam for free ... so are you gonna crib that you need to shell out 1400$ to take up the exam while they take it up for free ??? NO .. so just move on.

There is more to worry & think about than this. Lets utilize the time to study.
Else pay up & take up the 360 classes, I am sure its worth the money + you get the oeq waiver !!

Saturday, March 20, 2010

100 day approach to ccie

Well I have decided to take the 100 day approach to conquer my ccie. Through this time I will master my skills in each of the topic. Planning to leave no stone unturned.

After a lot of thought & from my experience from my previous preparation, I believe this will be a practical approach to my ccie preparation.

This is how I have planned it out;

* Pick a topic that you want to prepare :)
* Read the book that you believe gives you the seeds.
* Read the RFC to know how exactly a protocol should work.
* Read the DOC-CD.
* Use your workbook to lab & prepare the technology.
* Refer the DOC-CD while labbing the workbook.
* Master all the mini labs in your workbook so that we know hows things work.
* Be creative break things so that you know what error you get when things break.
* Use a lot of show command to know what outputs can viewed.
* Use debugs where necessary to know what happens @ packet level.
* Ensure you have learnt all options for a protocol.
* Ensure you know what the different option for a single scenario.
* Always make notes as you learn.

When its nothing new, its only a practical approach to learn things completely. Its mandatory not to skip any of the steps. This will help us for both the config, TS & OEQ for the lab.

Is it possible in 100 days ? Well lets see I myself have to find out :)

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

v4 exam passers on the rise

If you are a CCIE R&S aspirant then you have some good news. The number of folks who pass the exam are on the rise, although not as much as the v3 exam. But, its good news & gives all of us some confidence that the exam is conquerable.

As far as I heard, sound troubleshooting skills will help you finish the section in two hours. Knowing where to look for problems is going to be the key. For the configuration section, it appears to be as tough as the v3 exam.

Lets hope for the best & all the best to folks taking up the exam.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Its Summer !!!!

Howdy folks ... I have changed my job, I with a different employer now. I was away for a month as I was busy with the final wrap up. I am back, my ccie studies is offtrack. I am starting over all over again. I am beginning with MPLS. This is one of the areas which I don't have much knowledge or experience.

As of now no plan its only studies. Got to be aggressive & focused. Will update as I make progress.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Apply the latest Microsoft IE patch !!

Following the famous hacking attacks on Google, Microsoft has released some patches marked critical for internet explorer on 21st Jan.

Microsoft says "This security update resolves seven privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer"

More details can be found here

Probably you want to review the details & apply the patch !!

stay safe :)

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Preparing IPv6 :)

I am preparing IPv6 in two fold. Now that we have multicasting include in this. So the core part of the top[ic I will cover first that includes;

* IPv6 Addressing (all kinds & enabling them over ethernet & frame relay)
* Routing Protocols (rip, eigrp, ospf & bgp)
* Tunneling (all four)
* redistribution & filtering
* NAT

I am already practicing some of the topics mentioned above.
Then I am planning to hit the part that includes multicasting which would include

* PIM , MLD & others

The thing is that I need to get some theory for IPv6 multicasting, so will need some time. I am planning to club that with the core multicasting part of the topics. I have 14-17 of January off so will plan the multicasting topics during that time frame.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Happy New Year !!!

Hope we all had a wonderful holiday with lots of fun . Well its the New Year, time to change things around & time to earn the CCIE

I am looking to work on Section 3 & 4 starting today. Section 3 of the blueprint covers IPV6. EIGRP is the new add on although I already have learnt & played around with it. It will be interesting to work on the redistribution & filtering topics. I wonder how much of it has changed in the exam & to what level we are required to learn. Well its best we know it all !!

In my opinion IPv6 will be & is being deployed all around. So I dont want to lose out not knowing stuff. So IPv6 it will be.

INE has updated their Volume1 material. Will download the updates & practice them too. Will blog daily from today @least for the next 2 months as I am pushing forward @ full pace.

Once again wishing all you mates a Happy CCIE New Year !!

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