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 :-P) 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)
No comments:
Post a Comment