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Pavel @ LinkedInThe Road I Was Not Afraid to Take February 19
Where It All Started
It was 2005 and I knew nothing about networking and very little about computers. My brother urged me to enroll in a Cisco Networking Academy. A year later, I was officially certified as a CCNA.
Then I took a month or so off networking and was thinking of enrolling again in the netacad for CCNP. As you probably know, it’s expensive when it comes to CCNP so my brother told me to study at home from books. I had to choose between BSCI and BCMSN. I went for BCMSN (switching). It got very, very interesting. In the meantime, my brother got his CCNP and started his CCIE preparation. He realized that about 50-60% of the material in the CCIE R&S track was covered in CCNP so he advised me to start preparing directly for CCIE because it was not worth spending $600 for exams (now it’s even more) just to get a professional certification. As I see now professional certifications, they are just useful if you want to get a good job or a higher salary. But when you are 16, this is not the case. Yet, I was hesitating BIG TIME. It looked quite daunting to me and I was more inclined to go for the CCNP first. I decided then to post in GroupStudy and get some advice (more here). There were different opinions and only 2 or 3 of the people who posted advised me to go for the CCIE. Everyone else either said I’d fail, I couldn’t do it, it wasn’t worth it or I’d trade my childhood for money. Despite that I went for it.
The Journey Began
I started preparing for the written exam. Don’t get me wrong by saying I didn’t prepare for the CCNP certification. I still covered the material in the CCNP track, but I didn’t take the exams and there is just some extra stuff in the curriculum that I did not need to know. So I read BSCI (without IS-IS) and BCMSN end-to-end.
As I went through the material, I encountered an enormous amount of unfamiliar concepts. It is a real struggle until you get to the point where you have enough knowledge to bind concepts together and build the whole picture. I was lucky my brother answered a lot of my question because I really had a LOT. It was 2 or 3 months before they officially announced the changes to the written exam blueprint. They added MPLS, DMVPNs and some IPv6 advanced stuff. Go figure what MPLS and DMVPNs are for in this exam, but I had to learn them. So I copy/pasted the blueprint in a doc file and made a plan. I didn’t make a detailed plan, it was just “topics covered, topics in progress, topics to be revised”, some deadlines and “GOAL: CCIE Written Passed”. Meanwhile, I got into a traineeship in one of the several Cisco Gold Partners in Sofia. There I was assigned a task of preparing a lab for the Cisco Gold Partner Audit. There was MPLS with VPNs and Traffic Engineering. I had no idea what MPLS was then so I read 3 books for a little less than a month and had some devices where I was labbing all day long. MPLS was pretty interesting to me, but as soon as I realized I didn’t have work to do, I switched back to my CCIE preparation. I decided that I should put pressure on myself and schedule the written exam in order to get the topics covered in a more timely fashion. I passed the written exam in October, 2007, about 8-9 months since the start of my preparation. I don’t regret taking the written exam early because I considered it a step I had to make. I wasn’t kidding myself thinking that passing the written meant anything, but I wanted to get it out of my mind and not worry about technologies only covered in the written. By the time I got to this point, I had already read the following books:
- Cisco Multicast Routing & Switching
- CCNP Self-Study BCMSN Official Exam Certification Guide, 4th Edition
- Cisco Press 2000 – CCIE Developing IP Multicast Networks (skipped some chapters)
- Cisco Press 2000 – MPLS and VPN Architectures
- Cisco Press 2001 – Routing TCP-IP Volume II (CCIE Professional Development)
- Cisco Press 2002 – Traffic Engineering With MPLS (skipped some chapters)
- Cisco Press 2003 – Cisco Self-Study Implementing IPv6 Networks (skipped some chapters)
- Cisco Press 2003 – MPLS and VPN Architectures Volume II
- Cisco Press 2005 – CCIE Professional Development Routing TCP-IP, Volume I, Second Edition
- Cisco Press 2005 – Cisco QOS Exam Certification Guide IP Telephony Self Study 2nd Edition
- Cisco Press 2006 – CCIE Routing and Switching Official Exam Certification Guide 2nd Edition (the Switching and the NAT part only)
- Cisco Press 2006 – Deploying IPv6 Networks (skipped some chapters)
- Cisco Press 2006 – IPSec Virtual Private Network Fundamentals (1st, 2nd and 7th chapter)
Some of the books I read twice because when you don’t practice the theory intensively, you forget it easily. Of course, I made a lot of labs, but they were just to get things tested how they work and to explore cases not mentioned in books. Almost everything weird I could think of, I labbed it. That really helped me understand some of the core technologies like OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, MPLS, IPv6, Multicast, QoS, etc.
The Extra Factors
The CCIE is a really long and lonely journey. I experienced it myself. I didn’t expect anyone to learn the things or do the dirty work for me. I’ve really had a lot of ambition, and most importantly I had the time, dedication, and commitment. Of course, not having a girlfriend gave me a lot more time than I would’ve had it been the other way around.
So the aforementioned things helped me, no doubt. But there were also factors that a lot of people would be influenced by. I can’t tell you how many times I met people who tried either to discourage me, didn’t believe I could do it, just didn’t take me seriously, or even laughed at me. This can sometimes be quite daunting, but that wasn’t the case. I constantly heard people saying “You need experience to become a CCIE“, and ”without experience you’re just a paper CCIE“. That’s total crap and I don’t give a shit about it. The more I meet/met such people, the more determined I become to prove them wrong. In my opinion, it is very important not to care about these things.
After the Written
It was time to make a plan for the lab. I think making the plan for the lab was one of the hardest things because there is so much stuff that you rarely know where to find resources and what exactly you will need. The plan looked like this:
I copy/pasted both the official lab blueprint from Cisco’s website, and the one that InternetworkExpert provides. If it was a technology that I had to acquire more knowledge for, I read books and documents from Cisco’s website including config guides.
Topics were marked either:
- In Progress
- Covered
- To be Revised
- Not Covered/Partially Covered
Then I had “Books to Read:”
- Regular Expressions – http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2/termserv/configuration/guide/tcfaapre.html (BGP only) & Cisco Press 2001 – Routing TCP-IP Volume II (CCIE Professional Development) (Appendix B only)
- QoS – Cisco Press 2005 – Cisco QOS Exam Certification Guide IP Telephony Self Study 2nd Edition
- Cisco Press 2001 – Routing TCP-IP Volume II (CCIE Professional Development) (MSDP only)
- Cisco Press 2000 – Performance and Fault Management (SNMP section only)
- BGP – Cisco Press 2000 – BGP – Internet Routing Architectures, 2nd Edition
- PPP – http://cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ito_doc/ppp.htm http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/471/understanding_ppp_chap.html , http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/471/config-pap.html
I also copy/pasted the following Cisco IOS Configuration Guides:
- Cisco IOS IP Addressing Services Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS IP Application Services Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS Bridging and IBM Networking Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (Bridging Overview, Transparent bridging (includes IRB, CRB))
- Cisco IOS Configuration Fundamentals Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS Dial Technologies Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (PPP only and not everything)
- Cisco IOS Interface and Hardware Component Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS IP Multicast Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS IP Routing Protocols Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS IP SLAs Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (except for VoIP Gatekeeper Registration Delay, VoIP Call Setup Operation, DLSw+)
- Cisco IOS IP Switching Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS IPv6 Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (R&S related stuff only)
- Cisco IOS LAN Switching Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS NetFlow Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS Network Management Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS Quality of Service Solutions Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
- Cisco IOS Security Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (R&S related-stuff only/blueprint, and without 802.1x authentication)
- Cisco IOS Wide-Area Networking Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (Frame-Relay only)
I read these end-to-end. You will probably say I’m insane and I probably am, but I wasn’t just reading these for the lab, I wanted to improve my IOS culture. It’s really an enormous amount of work and thousands of pages to read, but I found it really useful to read all of them. It took me like 6 months to read all this and it was a lot of tedious work sometimes. This is probably the time I acquired studying habits that I will also benefit from in the future.
I left the 3550 and 3560 configuration guides last because I wanted switching to be fresh in my mind when I was about to start labbing, and I also found myself not having access to switches except for those on the PEC, where you can only find a 3550 in a lab provided by NIL.
The boring stuff was over. Lots of theory in my head and lots of scenarios to lab. I’d decided that InternetworkExpert’s Class-on-Demand series should be the next step in my preparation. I watched some of the videos just before I took the written exam as I had some doubts about certain things in FR and Switching. I was highly impressed with the CoD. You get so much knowledge in so little time and it’s a pleasure to study this way. So I watched all the videos, that is two weeks (10 days) worth of training with about 5-7 hours a day. I highly recommend the CoD, it’s probably one of the best, if not the best training you can get for the CCIE.
Then it was time for labbing. I quit my job because I needed more time and wanted to completely concentrate on my CCIE lab preparation. I used to teach CCNA classes as Joseph Brunner suggested in a topic in GroupStudy, but it wasn’t fun anymore, and probably because I could hardly ever gain free access to 2960s from then on, which was the reason I agreed to teach classes in the first place.
I started with InternetworkExpert’s volume 1 workbook, which includes plentiful of labs on all topics from the blueprint. These are very useful as you get to test many features you’ve only read about, and also because you get to configure all possible scenarios of a technology working alone and not interfering with other technologies.
After that I moved on to IE’s workbook volume II. At first, I found it hard to interpret the wording of the tasks. Speed was another issue, but I always tried to configure and think about all tasks. Later on, when I was a month or so before my real lab exam, I started worrying about speed and tried getting 80 points in 8 hours, but as I did more and more labs, my speed improved with every session. By the way, do not do the Dynamips workbook labs if you are using Dynamips for your preparation. Do the regular labs and just write the solutions you cannot configure in a notepad and then check your solution with the solutions guide.
So I did 10 labs from IE, then I moved to IPExpert’s v9 workbook. I didn’t do the first 18 labs or so because I didn’t have much time and they are practically the same as volume 1 workbook of IE so I did the first 10 multiprotocol labs. When I moved to IPExpert, I found out that tasks there were much easier, a little bit vaguer, but you have more freedom and most of the labs do not have initial configurations so you build the network from scratch. Then I returned to the last 10 labs of IE and then again to the rest of the IPExpert labs. The reason I switched between vendors so often was that I easily get used to the physical topology and I really wanted to be able to do a lab with any possible physical topology.
I am very thankful to a person from the local Cisco office who booked ASET labs for me. These labs are provided by LabGear, but are booked via Cisco and are only available for Cisco Partners. Contact your local Channel SE if you are interested. You have 6 built-in labs there and auto verification available to run. I also had 3 labs for this topology from a workshop in the local Cisco office my brother attended plus the CCIE Practice Labs. So it was 11 labs that I did in 7 sessions. I had 8 sessions booked – 4 in the beginning of January, just before I took off to San Jose, and 4 a week before the real lab. So in the last session I labbed all the Catalyst features I could think of. I wanted to know how to configure them in case I get them in the lab. The list is as follows:
- Local Proxy ARP
- Flex Links
- MVR
- MST
- 3550 QoS
- 3560 QoS
- IP Source Guard
- DHCP Snooping
- IGMP Snooping
- L2PT
- QnQ Tunneling
- Private VLANs
- RSPAN
- Protected Ports
- Port Blocking
- SDM Templates
- Voice VLANs
- UDLD
- Fallback Bridging
- Smartport Macros
- 802.1X
- HSRP with Port Security
- Flow Control
- 3560 IGMP Profile (available on 3550 as well)
- IGMP Max Groups
- Loop/Root/BPDU Guard and BPDU Filter
- Etherchannel
- LinkState Tracking
- Jumbo Frames and Routing MTU
- System MTU Change
- VLAN MAPs/ACLs
- Error Disable & Recovery
- IGMP Snooping
- MLD Snooping
I also watched once again Netmasterclass’ VoD for Catalyst QoS as this is a very vague topic and to be honest I still have some things to clear up. The video is amazing! It explains a lot of things about the 3550 and 3560 QoS so I definitely recommend watching it. Not to mention the amazing posts in some of the blogs out there on the Internet. Remember this: Google is always your best friend. I’ve found so many things in blogs, IE and IPExpert forums, and of course GroupStudy, which I couldn’t find in any book.
So it was February 3rd and time to take off to Brussels. I will post about the actual lab in a separate post very soon.
