Journey to 21yr old double CCIE
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Posted by rick
on May 21st, 2009 - 14:30
First of all, thanks to all people that have congratulated me the past 2 days. It’s such a great feeling to receive all these compliments from great people!
About my SP track
After about 2 months preparation for the Written and 4 months of preparation for the Lab I passed the CCIE Service Provider lab yesterday!!
I took my attempt in Brussels (yes, I was one of the few fortunate people being able to book a seat 
) and I really like this location (apart from that it’s less than 2 hours of driving for me). We had Dell 20″ widescreen LCD’s and the breakroom had a good variety of choice. Temperature was perfect, AC’s did make some noise, but I wasn’t bothered by it. Equipment is behind a glass wall and you don’t hear anything from it (I had the last seat of the room, so my back was almost against the glass wall).
Funny thing was that when I started IE7 I got the good-old UniverCD page as a homepage. I could also access the new documentation, but I found it a little weird that the old docs were accessible as well. I had some benefit from it as well, since the documentation of old releases is not on the new site and the SP lab uses a little older IOS releases.
The overall impression of the lab was tough but fair. You really need to know a lot of stuff and the questioning was quite difficult. The language was not 100% correct English and I felt that some words were added or removed from the sentences, so I had to get up and ask the proctor for making it 100% clear. In total I went to him 3 times and he really helped me with his answers, which he gave very fast, all 3 times I wanted to give 2 possible answers, but he gave me the right direction immediately, so my questions were good enough or I had a nice proctor 
My adrenaline level was really high the first 2 hours, everytime a ping didn’t succeed I got so nervous, especially since I got stuck on the third task, which is the only one I skipped. After getting my IGP, BGP and MPLS up and running I got a little more relaxed. At lunchtime (11.50) I had configured everything (except one task), so I got to lunch with a good feeling.
Lunch was great, I had some shrimps with noodles and vegetables, I hope the garlic smell wasn’t that awful the rest of the day
After returning from the lunch I went on looking for the task I skipped. After digging in the documentation I found a great example config which had one command extra and that was the entire trick Silly that one command can drive you nuts.
For the rest of the lab, some stuff was straight forward, other times you got a lot of freedom in choosing the right way to go and some times they brought in some freaky features.
The day ended at 4.50 at which I reviewed and tweaked about 5 or 6 things in my config. Everyone left the room really quiet after the proctor checked our workbooks if all pages where still in it.
When I got home I hoped the result would get in at a normal time, for my R&S lab I got it at 11.45, but at 12.00 still nothing so I went to sleep. Woke up about every hour and checked the CCIE site and at 4.30 I got up and had 1 unread e-mail. The adrenaline level was back again and it seemed to take ages before the page refreshed.
There it was: PASS. I totally freaked out. Wow I was really a double CCIE now, maybe the youngest on the planet at age 21
Today I got congratulated by at least 200 people, which feels really good.
For my preparation I used both Internetwork Expert and IPexpert.
For the written I used MPLS Fundamentals, this is a gold-mine, it’s called fundamentals, but it contains all the Cisco MPLS knowledge you’ll need for the lab. The other books were MPLS-Enabled applications, which is the best book out there to give you a vendor-independent view of MPLS and really learn the theory behind it. The last book I used was Interdomain Multicast Routing, which is the best text on PIM I ever read. I never knew PIM that well untill I read that book, previously Multicast has been one of my weaker points, but after that book I just rush through it.
The Class-on-demand of Internetwork Expert is fantastic!! I used it for my written prep as well, since it teaches you the importance of an end-to-end LSP and all the funny things that IOS has with MPLS. This is one of the biggest resources of knowledge I had for my SP preparation.
Workbook 1 of INE goes over several set-ups of different types of SP technologies, it skips the R&S type labs and assumes you have a good understanding of IGP and BGP. Workbook 1 of IPexpert is quite good as well, this one goes over the basic areas as well and focuses less on SP stuff. So both are good for preparation, for learning SP stuff I would go for INE, since it covers these things a lot deeper.
Workbook 3 of IPexpert is one I wouldn’t advice if you are really up to speed already. The labs are short and easy. The video walkthroughs only show ‘typing in the answers’, there is very few explanation about technology in there. I contacted IPexpert about this and their customer service is the best! They agreed with my arguments and promised to improve it.
Workbook 2 of INE is very good. The labs built up from easy to hard with all levels in between. The real exam is like a level 8 or 9 IE lab, so it’s pretty tough.
The labs cover all the stuff that you need, except the real lab has a little more tasks.
The workbook 2 of IPexpert is fantastic!! If I may advice one workbook that you should buy from those guys it’s this one. The 5 labs are so tough and cover every little thing in each lab. You can’t do these when you just started preparing. First time I did one of these I totally got overthrown. When I got a little more prepared it was a great resource. So much stuff is asked for and they are at least twice the size of an INE lab. So as a preparation for the last month, they prepare you really well for the real deal.
Mid-April I was able to join the INE Online SP bootcamp with Brian McGahan as instructor. I wrote a large article about it on my blog, so I won’t go in to that with much detail. The mocklabs we did during the week (total of 3) were great. They are much more like the real exam and have troubleshooting and even L2VPN. I would change the name to a mock-lab-workshop. Getting a few labs graded was really the push I needed in the right direction, since I never got graded I never really knew if what I did was the right thing. Getting those scores made me confident and I knew I could do it. A want to say a huge thanks to Brian McGahan for his excellent explanations and again helping me reaching the able-to-pass level
Again I’m soo happy passing in first attempt for my SP lab and I think I’m the youngest double CCIE now on the planet.
Next up are first some Cisco DataCenter exams, then JNCIS-ER/M and in a few months I’ll start my CCIE Security track!
Thanks to everyone here and special thanks to Mike from IPexert, Kady Heaton from INE and a huge thanks to Brian McGahan for his great CoD and bootcamp. Also Scott Morris for his great Wb2 labs from his previous employer 
Rick Mur
CCIE2 #21946 (R&S / SP)
Passed CCIE Service Provider!!
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Posted by rick
on May 20th, 2009 - 5:11
After 2 days of so much stress, an intensive lab day and a couple months of preparation I just received the so much feared e-mail at 3.21am:
Your CCIE lab score report is now available on the web. The report will show your
performance in each section for the CCIE Lab.
After logging in I saw the precious PASS sign!
I totally passed the CCIE Service Provider!
As of today I can call myself a 21 year old double CCIE 
I’m so so happy, will let you know about the lab and a brief overview of my preparation later, first some sleeping (since it’s 5am).
Rick Mur
CCIE2 #21946 (R&S/SP)
Exam is approaching
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Posted by rick
on May 7th, 2009 - 9:48
There are less than 2 weeks between now and my CCIE Service Provider Lab attempt in Brussels. I have a good feeling since I’m not really challenged by the practice labs anymore, but someone I know and I respect for his knowledge, failed the exam twice already, but hearing why this person failed gives me more courage and confidence
I planned a few rack rentals next week, before my lab attempt on Thursday, Friday and Saturday to do a few labs again and Sunday and Monday I’m totally off the Cisco CLI Giving myself a little rest and Tuesday is the big day!
I’m so excited to make the exam!
Internetwork Expert SP 5-day bootcamp
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Posted by rick
on April 20th, 2009 - 16:03
Again I had a nice benefit because I’m using Twitter A week ago I saw a message popping up from Kady Heaton about 2 extra seats at an online SP bootcamp with Brian McGahan as instructor. I wasn’t that enthusiastic in the first place, but when I contacted Kady she told me the price and that got me excited They practically gave it away, so after 10 minutes of thinking I decided to go for it.
Some people might say that I don’t need it, but after doing the bootcamp I feel a lot more confident and I have the feeling to really know this stuff, the same feeling I had after doing the R&S bootcamp in Reno. The feeling that they can through anything at you
Now something I would do totally different is the planing. The online bootcamp starts and ends on US times, the day started at 7am PDT, which is 4pm CET for me and the thing I did wrong is to work in the morning. The bootcamp itself really costs a lot of energy, but I had the worst thing, because we had a major issue with a customer. So wednesday I got dragged into several conference calls and had endless conversations with a load of people. Thursday I had to go to the customer, which is a 200km single drive. After spending several hours of intensive debugging I got home exhausted . Friday was driving to that customer again, so I basically had days starting at 5.30am and ending at 1.30am which is not something I can recommend to people. So next time I take some sort of bootcamp I definitely take all 5 days off to stay relaxed and focused.
The fantastic offer I could get from Internetwork Expert included 5 days of 24-hour rack rental, 3 graded mocklabs, 2.5 days of lecture combined of technology, strategy and walkthrough of the labs. Which is an amazing package!
Day 1
The first day kicked of with an introduction by Brian of the online classroom, the schedule and all possible resources that were available. I also really make a compliment to the new classroom server, because I experienced that the video and audio are getting out-of-sync when watching recorded sessions, but I never saw that the entire week and I had a pleasant experience of the online format.
After about 4 hours of introduction and some technology lecture we started with MockLab 1. This lab wasn’t that hard. I’d say a difficulty level of 6. 
But still it consisted of some very nice features like multi-homed sites, inter-AS MPLS, L3VPN, L2VPN and Multicast VPN. I managed to complete the lab in 3 hours (4.5 hours after extensive verification) and my score was initially 88 points, for which I was happy, but after breaking down all questions with Brian and discussing the L2VPN question he told us that he’d change the wording so the solution I had (which was the same as in the solutions guide) was correct, it was technically incorrect due to a requirement in a previous task, but the solution I should have given wasn’t possible with the IOS software trains used in the lab. So after correcting this error I got to 96 points!! During the lab we could ask proctor like questions and Marvin Greenlee answered these in the way the proctor will do in the real lab. This is a fantastic way to practice the questions you can ask to a proctor and to verify if it’s you or the question that’s crazy
Day 2
Second day was quite short and this is where I see improvement in the schedule for the bootcamp. It consisted of a walkthrough of lab 1, but because this is the easiest of the 3, I’d like to recommend to INE to switch day 2 and 3. So the tuesday is making lab 2 and wednesday going over lab 1 and 2. Mainly because doing lab 2 and 3 back-to-back is very hard and I heard from other students that they had difficulty with this schedule as well. So if I have to mention points that can be improved than I’d switch day 2 and 3 and change the name from bootcamp to MockLab workshop, because it’s not really a bootcamp where you get lecture and such, but still the live portion is so important.
So the second day was going over lab 1 and I think I asked about 20 questions about all the minor details in the lab and really get a thorough understanding of the topics that where in there. I really need this kind of information to be certain of my answers and it’s an acknowledgement that I did it the right way and also I had a reason of why it was correct. The other thing that’s so cool about Brian’s walkthrough’s is that he askes the students a question about every minute. This way you really stay focused and have to participate, because Brian waits for an answer.
After going over the lab we finished for the day and it took only 4 hours. This is an other reason why I would change it, because this day is quite short and friday is quite long compared to it.
Day 3
I started the third day by missing the introduction Brian gave about the lab, because of all crazy things at my work. I got home a little past 4pm so I was totally stressed out and the day took a lot of energy. Therefore I expected a bad performance at the lab. So I tried to relax, print out MockLab 2 and got off. Actually it wasn’t really bad at all The difficulty level is around 7.5.
The diagram of this lab was like the new Version 5 material of R&S and I love these. There is so much information but it doesn’t overwhelm you, so really a perfect combination in just one sheet. The lab was focused on a CsC (Carrier Supporting Carrier) scenario with a lot of tweaks in the IGP’s (IS-IS and OSPF) and a customer with backdoor link. I scored 79 points on this lab, but my main mistakes (around 12 points) where due to that I missed some minor details in the question. Which is so frustrating, I had everything correct except some minor command that I missed in the question (really 1 or 2 words), but I thought the 79 points where quite fair because of the difficulty of the lab. I finished the lab 5 hours and spend 2 hours on verification again, but not good enough, which had to do with the time I had to get up again (since it was around 1.30am).
Day 4
The morning of day 4 I had to get up around 5.30am to go to this customer, that day we troubleshooted on bit-level which costed a lot of energy again. I got home around 3pm, but I couldn’t relax, because my score report of day 3 was available and I had to print out the new lab. So again at 4pm we kicked off by a very short review of lab 2 so all main points were discusses in about 30 minutes and than we started MockLab 3. I started off quite well, but after finishing about 50% I got stuck in several things and I have to make a compliment to Brian about the extreme difficulty of this lab. This lab has to be close to a level 10! All the combination’s and numerous bullet points in each question makes it so hard to stay focused. Every question had another challenge and the wording was quite difficult as well, so it took a relaxed mind to focus on the questions alone, which was quite hard after hours of packet debugging 
The lab was focused on BGP communities and had an ‘internet’ router in a MPLS cell-mode cloud between 2 Autonomous Systems. It costed soo much energy to complete this lab and it took me around 7 hours to finish all tasks, I verified for about 30 minutes when I really collapsed and could only think of my bed (again around 1.30am). The score report initially said I score 69 points(!) and I was so happy with that score (other scores were 40 and the rest in 20’s), but after going over the verification with Brian I saw that several tasks were marked wrong, because of 1 thing I forgot, but this command was totally useless and my config without the command totally worked! So that got me another 9 points and a NTP authentication question which was marked wrong, but the show ntp association detail showed: ‘authenticated‘ so that was marked wrong incorrectly as well and the last thing was marked incorrect because I didn’t apply BGP accounting to an interface, but that interface didn’t exist on the router, so I did it on a loopback which represented the IP subnet , which brings me to a total of around 80 points!! I never expected that. I could have scored higher if I was more focused in the last sections, because I missed a few words in the question again or didn’t think about some things that needed to be configured to make it work, but that totally had to do with my physical status at that moment
I was so happy with this score and that all my hard work paid off!
Day 5
Again I had to get up at 5.30am, which was really hard But it was a good thing to get to the customer again and do some stuff. I got home (with delicious pie, Limburgse Vlaai) around 1.30pm and had some time to relax a bit, which helped in staying awake for the rest of the day . Class started at 4pm again and we did an extensive walkthrough of lab 2 and 3, the scores for the third one were really bad so there was a lot to discuss. We spend at least 5 to 6 hours walking through the 2 labs and I could ask around 30-40 questions again, which is so good. I really have a 100% understanding of the topics and the meaning of the questions and the technologies needed. This is where the real value of the live bootcamp is added. Again it’s so good to discuss your findings with a great instructor who knows every minor detail from the top of his head. After the walkthrough we got some strategy lecture about the SP lab and how to attack it.
Final thoughts
I can’t tell you how good it feels to do a bootcamp of this level! For a next track that I’ll pursue I will definitely do a bootcamp again, because I have such a better understanding of all topics now and I was able to verify my thoughts with Brian. Next time I’ll do an on-site bootcamp again and take the entire week off, that gets you in such a great study ‘zone‘. Lastly I’d like to thank the proctor Marvin Greenlee for his great proctor-like answers and I’d like to thank Brian McGahan veery very much for his great lectures and fantastic labs. I hope to meet you again soon!
Now off to study again, I have quite some racktime scheduled for the coming weeks and I can’t wait to start!!
Cisco Nexus 7000
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Posted by rick
on April 8th, 2009 - 14:01
This week I have the privilege to attend a Cisco Nexus training at Cisco HQ in Amsterdam. The Nexus family is brand new (introduced mid 2008) so Cisco tries to make people enthusiastic about this product so they will be sold of course The Nexus family is not just a new model of switch, it also runs a different OS called NX-OS which is a combination between SAN-OS (which runs on the MDS family) and normal IOS.
I have to say I really like NX-OS, way more than IOS-XR. The command-line interface of NX-OS is far more like normal IOS but has a lot of improvements. A lot of configuration is far more logical so I really hope that this will be THE future OS of Cisco, because now we have 5 (IOS, CatOS (which is still developed), IOS-XR, SAN-OS, NX-OS and some Wireless stuff).
The training has been quite nice the last 2 days, the training material is still so new and has a few mistakes in there. Even some things that can’t be configured. Other things like VPC (Virtual Port-Channels) which is a major feature of the Nexus 7000 is NOT in the training. I really don’t get that, because this feature is one of the main reasons that people think about purchasing Nexus switches. The platform is really basic at the moment (only 3 linecards and NO service modules), there is no support for MPLS so the Catalyst 6500 has WAY more features than the Nexus, but if you need a lot of bandwidth within your core and have a high density 10 Gig ports, the Nexus is your way to go.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Cisco for their kindness and giving us this training for free! So Thank you!
With this training there’s also an exam that I really want to get. If I complete 2 exams (DCNI-1 and DCNI-2) I’ll be: Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Support Specialist which will be, apart from all certifications I already own, the longest name ever
I’ll keep you posted on when I will have this cert
