I've been quiet for quite sometime now. In fact I think I've been a member
of this list for at least two years. I wanted to toot my horn, as I am quite
excited by my progress through the CISCO Track. If you have no interest
reading this, delete at will.
I'm going to give you some backgroud on myself.
I am 21 years old, dropped out of high school when I was 17. I got a great
job as a HTML writer, where after a year a Systems Administrator of 20 years
took me under his wing and taught me the biz. After about a year, we began
moving our profitable ecommerece site from UNIX/Oracle to NT/SQL. Since we
were only a two person team, I volunteered to take the MCSE study track.
After 6 months of night-time courses I finally got my MCSE. I thought it was
the hardest thing I ever did... until this year.
I took ICRC in February 1999, but did not take any exams. I had the intent
of being a CCNA by June, but failed to move on it as I moved jobs. This
worked to my advantage, since prior to June my only expierence with a Cisco
router was my lonely 2524 at home hooked up to a 56k Frame Relay. The
company I moved to, and continue to work at has 5 offices world-wide. I was
responsible for building the WAN, which is where the majority of my work
experience comes from. Since I had no one to learn from, I surrounded myself
with books (see below for a Biblography). January 2000 the WAN was only with
Point-To-Point T1's. Cisco 2621's in all the offices, a 7204 at the "hub" of
the hub & spoke network.
May 2000 marked a begining of a whole new level of Network Engineering, when
I proposed and began building a BGP Multi-Homed network to 3 providers
(Level 3, C&W USA, UUNet), as well as a public internet exchange point in
Seattle. I took the BGP course in Kirkland at Global Knowledge, my
suggestion to you is to take it if you are even considering running BGP.
Excellent course, great teacher! I also augmented my knowledge by attending
NANOG 19 in Alburque, and NANOG 20 in Washington DC.
The only prep I used were those lovely red books by Coriolis, and the Boson
Tests. While the test scores are not GREAT, I am quite proud of my
accomplishment. I will study in the areas in which I personally feel I
failed, and that are relevent to my job (we don't use bridges, IPX, Token
Ring, etc). I will briefly describe each test so far, below:
September 8th, 2000
#640-507 (CCNA 2.0) - Score: 924
September 29th, 2000
#640-505 (CCNP - Remote Access) - Score: 796
October 20th, 2000
#640-503 (CCNP - Routing) - Score 736
October 30th, 2000
#640-441 (CCDA - Designing Cisco Networks) - 815
November 3rd, 2000
#640-506 (CCNP - Cisco Internet Troubleshooting) - 747
I have a few suggestions for all the other struggling Network Engineers on
this crazy path.
- Routers - Buy Some, good ones. I have a Cisco 7000, Cisco 2511, and a
Cisco 2524 in my home lab. I have a Catalyst 2924XL, Cisco 7204, and a Cisco
1720 on my desk.
- Boson - Buy all the tests you can, and milk the system. The knowledge in
these crams are not just valuable for the tests, but for real life.
- Listen - Find other Network Engineers, let them tell you stories. Listen
to the gentleman from Qwest who comes to you house at 8:00pm to fix your 56k
Frame Relay
- Spend Money on a good connection - I bought a frame relay, why? It gives
me the most realistic enviroment to work with. It also is great for learning
about the internet in general, and provisioning circuits
- Subscribe to Mailing Lists - I subscribe to 8 different
ISP-Lists(http://www.isp-lists.com). BGP, MPLS, Colocation, DSL, Wireles....
all valuble true stories of other peoples blood, sweat and tears
- Be confident - Enought said
All in all I plan on having my CCIE by April. While I feel I could have
tried to jump right into the CCIE track, I like the slow path better. Much
more relaxing. =)
Enough said,
Good Luck All!
Aaron Moreau-Cook
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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