CCIE SP Written
With great proud I can tell you that I passed the CCIE Service Provider Written test with 96 points yesterday!!
I just returned from my vacation in Austria where I studied A LOT! I read almost 2000 pages both in paper and on Safari Online watched 40+ hours of video training and it paid off! I was quite nervous when I started the exam, but I clicked trough the questions (nice thing about CCIE written exams is that the Back button is enabled instead of *click* ‘oh noo I clicked wrong’-never to return again exams 
And after I made my first run trough the questions I answered about 70 of the 100 without much thinking So I went on and thinking a little harder about the remaining 30 and most of them I could answer with great confidence, but I also had to gamble a few.
Example gamble (not from the exam):
Which attack is Best Current Practice 84 in RFC 3704 about?
A. Birthday attack
B. Man in the middle attack
C. SYN-flood attack
D. Spoofing attack
I thought, how on earth can they ask such a thing (the link to the RFC is of course not there in the exam 
)? But I just took a look at the written blueprint again and it’s on there! Damned you nasty Cisco tricky-exam-questions Business Unit!
(snippet from written blueprint)
Security
A. IP spoofing, Denial of Service (DoS), DDoS, Worm
B. Data Plane Security
C. Control Plane security
D. Management Plane Security
E. Intrusion/Anomaly detection
F. Attack mitigation
G. Best Common Practices (BCP) <<<<<
The answer of the question is by the way D (Spoofing attack) and when I read trough it now I realize this is important, because RTBH (Remotely Triggered Black Hole, a way to blackhole a specific source (in conjunction with uRPF) or destination with an iBGP update) is also an important thing for the SP exam.
But besides a few questions about strange principals, best practices and RFC questions it was quite a fair exam. I got at least one question about every topic of the blueprint (including the SONET/SDH thing) and very theoretical questions about MPLS. I had no drawings at all, only theoretical questions and a few configuration snippets (What’s wrong in this BGP config?-type questions)
So I hope I gave everyone a quick look in the CCIE SP Written exam without violating too much rules
Now on to the Lab preparation, the real deal!
More on the books and texts I used and the lab preparation very soon!
1 response so far ↓
Congrats Rick!
I’m one of the few who will look to take the SP written much closer to the Lab (studying for both concurrently).
Hope all goes well with your lab prep