Pi day (3/14) was good to me; I passed the routing and switching lab to get my digits! CCIE #28391
I stayed at Comfort Suites this time rather than the Wingate next door and was happy I switched. Much nicer hotel - cleaner/newer room, better breakfast and free beer from 5-7pm (Mon, Tue and Wed only I think.) They will shuttle you to other nearby places but I didn't ask about the lab. Regardless, I recommend renting a car so you don't have to rely on someone else on such an important day. Overall I felt my lab this time was more difficult than last time but I was more prepared. Strange how a day can feel like it is dragging on forever yet going by so quickly at the same time. I felt much more rushed on this attempt and was very aware of the clock throughout the whole day. For my last attempt I also said that I was having fun for about 75% of the day and that was not the case this time. I had a number of times during the day where I was rather stressed about either mistakes I'd made or not being able to think through the solution I wanted to use. I struggled more with the troubleshooting section this time than before and ended with only 2-3 minutes to spare (after 1 round of verifying all the tickets at the end.) One good thing about the TS section now is Cisco is VERY clear about what you need to accomplish in order to consider a ticket solved. Even so, there were a couple tickets that I felt I made too drastic of changes to fix the problem and wasn't sure if I'd get the points for them. Even though my solution matched the output they wanted I wouldn't be surprised at all if I missed points on those. Config section was more complicated than my first attempt but there was nothing in there that I had absolutely no idea how to accomplish. There were several topics I needed help from the DocCD and I asked the proctor quite a few questions again. I got off to a fairly slow start and by lunchtime wasn't even done with IGP config. After lunch it felt like things were just getting worse as I struggled with a couple sections and started making some really stupid typos. In the end I had to scrap all my BGP config and start over due to non-technical mistakes. By then I was freaking out pretty bad and before starting BGP over I took a bathroom break and tried to 'reset' myself. I pushed through the rest of the routing config and by the time I started on services and misc topics I didn't think I had enough time to finish. Somehow I was able to knock all those tasks out in a pretty short amount of time and still had an hour left to verify. Line by line I went through the entire lab and verified points for each section. In the end there were a couple tasks that I wasn't sure if I'd get points for but the rest I felt very good about. I did go back and change a few things in that last hour and had a freak out moment in the last 15 minutes when I couldn't get something working again that I tried to fix. That last change took me right up until the last 5 minutes. You hear it all the time from IPexpert instructors and I can't stress this enough - READ THE ENTIRE LAB BEFORE YOU START. Tasks at the end can have a big impact on how you do things early on. If you don't read the whole thing you will likely be rebuilding some of the basics to allow later tasks to work correctly. Two things that stood out to me about my lab day: 1. Had a router pull an 'R2' on me twice throughout the day when I rebooted it. The proctor was clear that this was my problem to fix even when the router didn't recognize it's flash memory. 2. A task was worded using KB for a function that clearly required Kb. I asked the proctor a couple times and she insisted that I should configure it as if it requested Kb. I almost started the task by converting bytes to bits and that would have been completely wrong based on what I was told. After the lab she agreed with me that the lab wording is misleading. _______________________________________________ For more information regarding industry leading CCIE Lab training, please visit www.ipexpert.com
