Certification on 0x2142 | Networking Nonsense

CCIE: Lab Day

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 15:07:07 +0000

In the weeks leading up to the lab exam - I felt very unsure of where I was at. On one side, I felt like I was doing pretty well at most of the practice labs I was working on. But on the other side, I felt like I didn’t have any true idea of what challenges the real exam would hold - so I could be missing something big and have no idea yet. I know some people will throw the exam blueprint into excel and give themselves ratings on how well they know a particular blueprint item - but I never got into using this after trying it a few times. Realistically, I should have forced myself to do this anyways. Then I would have had a more deterministic way to judge how prepared I was. Instead - I had just reached a point where I knew I just needed to take the actual exam and figure out what I didn’t know yet.

Lab day finally came - and I arrived at Cisco building 5 in Richardson, TX around 7:45am. There were already a handful of other CCIE candidates waiting outside for the building to open. Once it hit 8am, we all went in to get signed in and fill out our lunch order forms. Then it was time to wait.

The exam proctor showed up around 8:17 and guided us to the exam room. I figured there would be more time allotted to the proctor talking through rules, guidelines, etc… but instead he just said a few quick things and we were told to begin.

Troubleshooting

The troubleshooting section had me a bit concerned. It’s always difficult to jump into a completely unknown network and try to fix a problem - and this was no different. My first question immediately made me start panicking a little. I read the ticket, looked at the expected output - and began wondering where to start while being very aware of my short time limit. Every question felt like “I’m never going to figure this out in time” - yet after a few minutes of troubleshooting I was able to find the answers to the first few questions.

Halfway through the section I received a few tickets that required a lot more work. Some of these I didn’t make much progress on, and some I was able to get half-way resolved. For each of these I tried very hard to keep to a reasonable time limit per question, then mark it down as something to come back to later if I had time.

A lot of people talk about counting your points during the exam to know where you stand. I had originally assumed that this would just be a waste of time. Yet when I finished going through the remaining tickets, I knew I had to make sure I had enough points. Turned out I was barely on the edge of a passing score - assuming I had resolved all of the tickets correctly. My first two hours ran out, and I got the 30 minute warning. I was hoping to avoid using the extra 30 minutes, but I knew I needed to go back to the 3-4 questions I hadn’t completed.

About 15 minutes later - I had managed to figure out one or two more of the tickets and decided to give up on the remaining items. Based on my estimated point count - I should have been in a good spot on the troubleshooting section….. But I still wasn’t confident in all of my answers. I knew I had a ticket or two that might not be resolved in the correct way. I decided to save the remaining 15 minutes and just move onto the next part of the exam.

Diagnostics

Next was the diagnostics section. My biggest complaint here (and it’s somewhat minor) is that the on-screen timer is located in a completely different place than troubleshooting & config. At first (probably because I was in a rush), I couldn’t find the timer - and I also had not kept track of when I began the section. That was a big mistake on my part. So I forced myself to rush through the section, knowing it could end unexpectedly at any second.

Once I wrapped up my diag questions - I finally found the timer… and to my surprise had just under five minutes left. Not a ton of time, but enough for me to go back and double check a few answers that I had rushed myself through. I also used the last minute or two to run for a restroom break before starting the config section.

I honestly had no idea how well I was doing on this section. One of the questions seemed straightforward, but the answer I picked felt too simple. But maybe I was just overthinking it? The other questions made me waffle back and forth between a few answers. In the end, I just went with what my instincts told me was the most likely answer and just stuck with that.

Config

The config section is extremely overwhelming at first. Well, I suppose it doesn’t get any less overwhelming during the exam - but you quickly get busy enough to stop caring about that 🙂

I had about 30-45 minutes in the config section before we took lunch. That was enough time for me to get through all of the Layer 2 tasks quickly and then build out my task list on the scratch paper. During this time, I thought I was doing okay until I got to the end of one of my first tasks. I had just completed all of the items within that task when I read the last item - which made me realize I had done the entire task incorrectly. That was not a pleasant feeling. Luckily, I caught my mistake before moving on - but the time had already been wasted and now I had to go back and re-configure that entire section.

Lunch was quick. We went out, ate our food, then got back to the exam in less than 15-20 minutes. There was a bit of minor discussion - but not a whole lot.

The remainder of the day went by very quickly. As I had practiced during the prior weeks of practice labs, I placed my trust in strategy & order of operations - then just went heads down and got to work. I tried not to look at the clock and instead just focused on getting the tasks done as quickly and efficiently as possible. I’ll share a little more on my strategy in the next post.

I ran into a few problems here and there throughout the exam, but nothing too crazy. The strategy I used allows for quick connectivity/functionality testing after completing a task, which allowed me to find and fix my errors quickly. Similar to the troubleshooting section, I hit a few tasks that I could only figure out parts of - so I marked them down to follow up later and just moved on. Since you don’t get partial credit for tasks, I knew I would need to circle back to these if I wanted a shot at passing - but there is no sense in wasting too much time on one task if I couldn’t figure it out quickly.

By the time I had finished every task, I finally let myself check the clock. I was shocked to see I still had almost a full hour remaining. I quickly took advantage of the time to go back to the several sections I needed more work on. A few of these I stumbled through until I was able to find my problems - and some of it I had to crack open the documentation site to figure out what I needed to do.

Running through a lot of the verification steps - there was still a few things not working as they should. I spent time troubleshooting, changing configs, and finally figuring out a few things. I made quite a few configuration changes here to force a few things to work, but I wasn’t sure if they were valid solutions - or if I would end up losing points for doing things I shouldn’t have.

In the last 10 or so minutes, I tried to very quickly add up my points while performing a quick skim through the tasks again. Being that close to the end of the exam - it made me feel a bit sick to start finding additional items I had missed. I rushed to throw in a few last-minute changes, then retest to make sure nothing broke in the process. I didn’t make it through re-reading all of the tasks, so I was left wondering what else I might have missed.

Assuming I had not missed anything else - my count of points placed me in a fairly decent spot on config. However, since there is an overall cut score for the entire exam - I had no idea if I would have enough total points between all three sections to pass. I was already like I might have just barely scraped enough points together for troubleshooting, and diag felt like a complete wildcard.

When I left the exam center, I found myself feeling much better than when I had entered. If I passed, then that would be awesome. And if I had failed, then at least I was confident in what I needed to go back and study. Rather than having to keep worrying about what tricks the exam might hold, I now had the experience of knowing what to expect. I was happy to have attempted the exam once - and knew I would be far better prepared the next time.

That evening I went to dinner with a few CCIE candidates who would be attempting the exam the following day. Just tried to have a good time, and not check my email too much :). When I got back to the hotel that night, I still had no results yet - so I just went to bed and tried to get some sleep.

The Next Day

I woke up probably a dozen or more times throughout the night. Every time my first instinct was to grab my phone and see if I had gotten my results yet. Every time I forced myself to not check, and just go back to sleep. Around 5am, I finally let myself check once - but still had nothing.

I finally got up around 6:30 - and the CCIE exam site was down. I had a bunch of text messages from people back home asking if I had anything to report - but now I couldn’t even check the site. Later I would find out that the site was broken due to an internal issue at Cisco, but for the time I couldn’t do anything. I tried a few more times throughout the morning, but mostly just gave up and decided to wait it out.

My flight left around 10:30 am. While waiting in the airport, I still kept checking every so often but could not get to the site.

Once I got onto the plane, the site finally loaded! But my results were the same: No score yet. A this point I figured I would just give up, enjoy the flight - and check when I got back home.

Boarding took a little longer than usual for the remaining passengers. Right as it was announced that they were shutting the doors and we would be taking off shortly, I decided to try checking one more time.

As the site loaded - this time I was greeted with a new status: Pass.

My initial reaction was just absolute relief to finally be done - knowing that I didn’t have to keep worrying about trying to pass before the upcoming certification changes. I sat back for a minute before refreshing the site again to make sure the result didn’t change. Nope - the result still said pass.

With that - on October 9th, 2019 - I was done. I had my number. CCIE #63461.

Keep going for the rest of my story:

CCIE: Written Exam & Lab Prep

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 15:06:47 +0000

Written Exam

Finally in early 2019 I gave up on trying to gauge where I was at - and figured it was time to just give the exam a shot. I had already been studying for almost a year and a half, and I was craving some definitive way of figuring out where I was at. I went ahead and scheduled an exam for Tuesday, March 12th.

When I walked into the written exam, my first question immediately made me feel unprepared. It was something specific to provider WAN switching - not a topic I had spent enough time on yet. I did my best to take an educated guess, but that first question gave me a lot of doubt about how well prepared I was.

The written exam overall felt very… all over the place. It didn’t feel like a single cohesive exam - instead it felt like 20 different banks of questions shuffled into one. Some people call the exam just random networking trivia - and in some ways that might be accurate. For example, I might have a question on very basic L2, followed immediately by a very in-depth question on MPLS. Then probably over to something completely different. I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but I probably felt far less confident in answering many of the questions I got - and gave my best effort on guessing at quite a few.

Already not feeling great about how well I was doing, the test finally made its way into the evolving technologies section. This section did nothing to ease my nerves :). I completely understand why this section exists, but it felt like there was almost no effort put into some of the questions. Many of the questions I got made no sense, had grammatical errors, or gave a set of possible answers that didn’t line up with what the question was asking. Even for technologies that I did have a lot of experience with, it felt like the question was just written by someone who had no understanding of it.

As I finished my last question, there was no doubt in my mind that I had failed. To me, it was just a matter of how badly did I miss and how can I better prepare for next time. I was already making several mental notes on what topics I desperately needed to go back and review for the next attempt.

However - when I clicked through the remaining screens on the exam, I was extremely surprised to see that I had passed. It was only by a few points - but a pass is a pass!

Walking out of the exam, I sent a message to a few people at work to let them know I had passed. Even with the score sheet in my hand, I didn’t feel comfortable saying that I had passed. At no point during the exam did I feel like I was doing well. Maybe that’s just part of the difficulty? I don’t know… I’m honestly glad to see the written exam requirement is being dropped from the new exam blueprints.

Studying for the Lab Exam

Once I had gotten past the written exam, my full attention went into working toward the lab. I spent too much time initially trying to get my lab environment all sorted out. Went back and forth trying to choose between EVE-NG and GNS3, before finally settling on GNS3. Then I wasted a bunch of time trying to find the right images to use and testing them to make sure everything worked.

Finally - I picked up a copy of “CCIE Routing and Switching v5.1 Foundations: Bridging the Gap Between CCNP and CCIE” and got started. Going through this first book was far less enjoyable than I had hoped. Each lab was a completely different topology with a lot of pre-work to get going - and in many cases completing the actual practice lab would take a fraction of the time it took to get set up. I got frustrated with this a lot - but tried to keep pushing through to at least finish the book as a starting point. This ultimately amounted to a rocky start to labbing for me. Not working on it as much as I should, and not necessarily looking forward to it.

My next set of materials would be the INE workbooks - which honestly are structured far better. These labs were all on a shared topology that I could easily clone in GNS3 every time I started a new section. All of the pre-config is done for you - so that you can just focus on the pieces relevant to the topic. For example, if you’re working on a BGP lab - you don’t have to start from scratch with IP addressing or L2 configs. This made the content much easier to consume, and did a lot to help me spend more time working on practice labs. I got through these labs pretty quickly and repeated quite a few for additional practice.

At Cisco Live US 2019 - there was a huge announcement regarding certification changes. The CCIE exam & content was changing (along with pretty much everything else). I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear the announcement since the existing track was several years old, and I had come across a few rumors on the internet of possible changes. Even still, I was finding myself now up against a very finite amount of time to pass the lab exam. The old test would be phased out in just eight months (in February 2020).

After the announcement, I talked to my manager about what to do. We decided it would probably be in my best interests to schedule a lab date, and do whatever I can to try and pass ahead of the exam changes. So - only a few days after the new content was announced, I had scheduled a lab date for October 9th, 2019. This was less than four months away, and I still had a ton of content / practice labs to get through.

Having the looming deadline did great things for my motivation :). On the good side of things - It helped me to spend more and more time studying for the lab exam. I was able to focus more than before, and I was finding it much easier to push myself to practice even when I wasn’t necessarily excited to. Over the summer I nearly doubled the amount of time I had spent labbing compared to before the announcement. On the not-so-good side - I had also put together a week-by-week plan of what I still needed to accomplish between now and October. It was a tighter timeline than I was originally looking at, and now it felt like I didn’t have enough time to accomplish everything. I pushed through it anyways, knowing that October was just my first attempt. If I couldn’t finish everything in time, then I would still have time before the second try.

Remember back when I mentioned that six year gap between getting the CCNP and starting on the CCIE? This is the big part where that helped me a ton. Going through a lot of the workbooks - I didn’t necessarily feel like anything was too crazy. Over the past 10+ years I’ve worked at a number of different companies and had the opportunity to play with a lot of networking gear. I had a great base of experience with most L2/L3 technologies, including quite a bit of practice with all the fun that BGP has to offer.

One of the other big things that I think helped was that not all of my prior experience was on Cisco equipment. Having to learn how to configure BGP, VRFs, or switching on multiple vendors forces you to think beyond the syntax. Every vendor implements things in their own unique way - and this helps you to get beyond just memorizing what commands to enter. Instead, you begin having to learn much more about the underlying technologies and how they operate - and understanding what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Then it’s just a matter of researching whatever syntax that specific vendor uses to implement that function.

Having that good base of knowledge and experience helped me burn through the practice labs fairly quickly. A lot of content felt very familiar, with maybe a few new variations of commands - or maybe a new option that I hadn’t previously used. Even some of the pieces that I hadn’t used much of before, like DMVPN or multicast, still seemed easy enough to grasp how it worked and learn the necessary syntax.

That being said - In a lot of ways it also gave me a false sense of security. Feeling like maybe I knew more than I realized and therefore maybe I was better prepared. Yet at the same time, knowing how difficult the lab is supposed to be - and constantly wondering what I could be missing.

Keep going for the rest of my story:

Story Time! How I Started Working Toward the CCIE

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 15:06:07 +0000

Now that we’re firmly into 2020 - I finally decided it was about time to get this posted. I actually wrote most of this shortly after passing the exam, but it just sat unedited and collecting dust since them.

In about a month, most of the exams will be changing over to the new blueprints so I’m not sure how relevant any of this will be - but it’s still worth throwing out there, right?

Why CCIE? Why now?

The two years I spent working on the CCIE dragged on for what seems like forever. Back in late 2017, I had hit a point where I felt like I wasn’t being challenged enough technically - and I missed the old days of excitement when I was studying/labbing for certifications exams. I had always wanted to go after the CCIE for a number of reasons, but it never made sense before. I had decided that maybe it was finally time to give it a shot.

To step back for just a moment - I originally began my career in networking by taking advantage of the Cisco Networking Academy program, which had been offered at my high school. It’s hard to believe I started that over 14 years ago - but it was likely the single most influential thing in getting me where I’m at in my career today. After two years of classes, I walked out in late 2007 with my CCNA and eager to begin working in networking.

Over the next few years - I worked on a number of additional certifications. I always had fun going after certifications because they gave me a path to follow and a goal to achieve. They helped to make the process of learning a bit more fun. On the Cisco side of things, I worked on the CCDA, CCNA Voice (now retired), and my CCNA Security. Finally in 2011 I finished up my CCNP and had to figure out what was next. I was super interested in the CCIE - but there was no way my company would pay for it. For the time I shelved the idea - but I didn’t give up on it as a goal. Instead, I just continued to maintain & recertify my existing certs, and picked up the CCDP along the way.

Fast forward to late 2017. I had officially passed my 10 year anniversary on my CCNA. I was also feeling like I was hitting a wall in my technical abilities. I wanted to do something different and fun - and my first thought went back to pursuing a new certification because of how much I used to enjoy the process. I debated between a handful of certs, including CISSP, CCNP Security, CCDE, and CCIE R&S. After giving it some thought and talking to a few people, I decided it was finally time to tackle the CCIE and work toward one of my long-standing goals. That six year gap between CCNP and starting on the CCIE would come back to cause me a lot of problems, but also help me in a few ways I hadn’t expected - both of which I’ll talk about later.

Time to Study

On October 4th, 2017 - I ordered by first set of books and began studying for the CCIE Routing & Switching written exam.

To be absolutely honest, I had no plan going into this. Historically when I took certification exams my process was usually watching a set of training videos (usually CBT Nuggets), reading through the official cert guides a few times, picking up maybe another book or two, taking a bunch of notes, then a lot of labbing. It was never enough for me to just watch/read about the stuff - I needed to get hands on and break it to really learn. Usually by the time I had finished all of that, I would be feeling confident enough to go give the test a shot. I went into the CCIE written assuming this strategy would still probably work - and I was absolutely wrong.

When I began working through the books and videos I had - I found that I wasn’t getting as excited about it as I had hoped. In fact, it just felt like so much of the content was just review of things I had learned years ago during CCNP studies. That long gap since my CCNP also left me reluctant to want to memorize all of the little details again. How many things had I studied for the CCNP that I never used in my actual job? I certainly didn’t want to waste the time trying to re-learn/re-memorize those things now… But I knew I would need to if I wanted to pass the exam. This kinda killed my motivation in some ways - because I would end up having to force myself to try and retain information that I didn’t want to.

Studying for the written was hard for me - and probably more than it should have been. Between the mixed motivation, I was also working through a lot of stress and nonsense in both my personal and work life. I would eventually work through these issues - but sometimes it would mean having to take a few weeks off from studying.Every time I took a break, I knew I needed to - yet it was still very demoralizing.

I got some help toward my goal in June 2018: I had the opportunity to take a job working at Cisco as a Systems Engineer. In terms of working toward the CCIE, this was an absolute key step in getting there. I was finally working for a company that was willing to encourage and help me toward my goal. I was also surrounded by a ton of engineers and enthusiastic networking professionals who were there to support me. I got to spend time with other people who were working on certifications, and even network engineers at my customers who always wanted to ask how my studies were going. This helped a lot to get me back into being excited about the content - and brought a bit of motivation back.

Even though I was spending a lot of time studying for the written exam - I never really felt like I was making true progress. I believe this was likely caused by the fact that the exam blueprint is so large and diverse. I never settled on a good method to reliably track how far I had progressed on all of the content. While I felt like I had learned a lot, I also perpetually felt like I was nowhere close to where I needed to be. I also have an old habit of waiting to schedule the exam until after I already already feel confident I have a good shot at passing. With the CCIE written, I felt like that level of confidence was never going to happen.

Keep going for the rest of my story: