From: Martin, Chris (chris@xxxxxxxxxxxx)
Date: Tue Nov 06 2001 - 19:42:04 GMT-3
actually its not, i used start run to lauch calculator to do some custom
queuing formulas
----- Original Message -----
From: "Albert Lu" <albert_ccie@yahoo.com>
To: "'Dennis Laganiere'" <dennisl@advancedbionics.com>
Cc: "'Dennis'" <vacant@home.com>; <ccielab@groupstudy.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 1:44 PM
Subject: RE: San Jose lab experience: logistics notes (LONG)
> I would assume that the start, run option would be disabled. Otherwise it
> would be chaos =)
>
> Albert
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com]On Behalf Of
> Dennis Laganiere
> Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 8:33 AM
> To: 'Dennis'; ccielab@groupstudy.com
> Subject: RE: San Jose lab experience: logistics notes (LONG)
>
>
> It there isn't a notepad icon, just do a start, run, notepad.
>
> By the way, I used notepad in the San Jose lab, so I know you can...
>
> --- Dennis
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dennis [mailto:vacant@home.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 1:05 PM
> To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
> Subject: RE: San Jose lab experience: logistics notes (LONG)
>
>
> Very nice thoughts Bruce... Thanks for sharing!
>
> Dennis #6
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com]On Behalf Of
> Bruce Hahne
> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 3:41 PM
> To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
> Cc: hahne@digisle.net
> Subject: San Jose lab experience: logistics notes (LONG)
>
>
> Hello. I took the CCIE lab for the first time yesterday (Nov. 5 2001)
> and thought I'd post a few comments on logistical and related issues.
> Maybe these notes will help somebody to do some stress-reduction going
> into the lab the first time. Sorry, no NDA violations here. :)
>
> Note that all of what follows is just one person's experience at one
> CCIE lab site. As they say, "your actual mileage may vary."
>
> I took the lab in San Jose. The email I had received said I should be
> at the building at 8:00 AM, so I showed up at 8 AM sharp only to see a
> sign at the reception desk mentioning (apparently mostly for the
> benefit of the security person staffing the desk?) that "CCIE
> candidates should show up at 7:45 AM to be escorted in". My
> expectation had been that 15-30 minutes would be spent explaining the
> rules to candidates, filling out paperwork, answering any questions
> etc, so that we'd start the actual 8-hour CCIE lab timer at about 8:30
> AM. Not so; they started the 8-hour countdown right at 8 AM. I had
> to wait for the front desk to call one of the proctors to escort me
> in, so by the time I got the lab briefing and sat down at my desk, it
> was about 8:10 AM and I had lost 10 minutes of lab time. Not a huge
> amount of time, but these new one-day labs are a speed test as well as
> a knowledge test so every minute counts. LESSON LEARNED: ignore the
> email that Cisco sends you and show up at least 15 minutes,
> preferrably 30 minutes, prior to whatever time Cisco says to show up.
>
> The proctors were nice people, I had no problems at all here, and even
> had a good conversation with one of them during lunch. There were two
> proctors. They spend most of their time at the front of the room
> grading the previous days' exams, but you can interrupt them any time
> you have a question.
>
> The schedule was:
> 8:00-11:30 AM: lab time
> 11:30 AM - 12:00 noon: lunch
> 12:00 noon - 4:30 PM: lab time
>
> You MUST take lunch at the scheduled time and you must leave the room.
> Cisco gave us each a $10 coupon usable at the Cisco cafe in the next
> building, so you don't have to worry about lunch if you're taking the
> lab in San Jose. I had brought my own lunch, so I didn't have to wait
> in any cafeteria lines.
>
> Don't stay late at lunch or you'll be eating (heh) into your afternoon
> lab time.
>
> Various logistical nits:
> - No food is allowed in the lab, but drinks are OK. As is expected at
> most California tech companies, Cisco has a kitchen down the hall
> stocked with free drinks, so if you need caffeine at any time during
> the day, you can go get a Coke and bring it into the lab. I thought
> this policy was quite benevolent given that most people don't want
> soft drinks coming within 50 yards of their routers. It also respects
> the fact that a lot of us really do configure routers much better when
> we're properly drugged.
>
> - Despite Cisco's comments in the New Format FAQ at
> http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/625/ccie/ccie_program/new_format.html
> that "candidates will no longer have physical access to the rack", in
> San Jose you CAN go over to your rack if you want to, there's just no
> point. I like being able to see the equipment I'm configuring so I
> know if it's blowing out smoke. The one exception on physical access
> is that each rack is apparently capable of doing simple VOIP, so there
> are some POTS phones mounted by each rack. So if you get VOIP on your
> lab, apparently you can configure it and then go to the phones on your
> rack to test. (You don't cable the phones, you just dial.) This
> setup naturally results in various phone-ringing throughout the
> afternoon as people test their setups, but that doesn't happen too
> often and I didn't find it annoying.
>
> - The proctors get antsy if you bring in your own scratch paper, but
> they have plenty of paper they can give you. What they like to give
> you is this monster-sized paper (17"x11" maybe?) which I didn't find
> very convenient to work with, but oh well.
>
> - I brought in a set of my own colored pens, no problems there.
>
> - The lab itself is in a 3-ring binder with the sheets, including the
> network diagrams, slipped inside transparent sheetcovers. When I
> configure gear, I always need my network diagrams in front of me at
> all times. Since I wasn't interested in constantly flipping back and
> forth between the diagrams in the front of the binder, and the
> questions later in the binder, the first thing I did was remove the
> diagram sheets from the binder and put them on my desk. One of the
> proctors wasn't too happy that I had done this and said so, but didn't
> make me put the sheets back. My feeling is that in general, you'll
> need to plan on drawing your own diagram (which I also did) rather
> than just using what Cisco gives you. So, learn to draw fast (but
> accurately!)
>
> - I found the desk rather cramped given that the PC monitor takes up a
> fairly large chunk of real estate. This made it difficult to spread
> out my various diagrams AND notes AND the Cisco lab questions all at
> the same time. If you're doing lab practice at a large desk, you
> might want to force yourself to work with a smaller worksurface to get
> a feel for what the environment is like in San Jose.
>
> - The PC was running Windows something-or-other, the browser was
> Navigator (Netscape), I think the comm program was Hyperterm but I
> didn't actually check. The applications on the Windows taskbar have
> been seriously stripped down, so that AFAIK you can only fire up your
> browser and your comm program. I recall looking for Notepad and not
> finding it, which actually didn't matter to me since I didn't really
> need it. I didn't ask the proctors if Notepad was available. I did
> all router configuration from the single terminal window using the
> ctrl-shift-6-X technique to flip between routers. I don't think that
> my lab station was set up to allow you to fire up multiple terminal
> windows, one to each router. However I don't know if all the lab
> stations are the same or not.
>
> - On my home and work machines I use a multiple-virtual-screen utility
> called Edesk that allows me to put my browser in one virtual screen,
> and my router windows on another virtual screen. Obviously this kind
> of utility isn't set up on the CCIE lab PCs, so if you want to more
> accurately simulate the lab environment, turn off these types of
> virtual-screen utilities on your home PC. On several occasions I
> found myself pressing ctrl-leftarrow, which is what I'd normally use
> in Edesk to see my browser's virtual screen, and of course that didn't
> work on Cisco's PC.
>
> - You can't write on any of Cisco's lab sheets. This is a serious
> limiting factor because IMHO it pretty much forces you to make your
> own diagram (so that you can scrawl info on it), AND you can't put
> checkmarks or notes next to the lab questions as you do them. Even
> though I did all the questions strictly in order, I had a hard time
> keeping track of which questions I wanted to revisit later and which
> questions I felt I had successfully completed. LESSON LEARNED: when
> you do practice labs on your home equipment, part of your practice
> should be learning to track what you've done, and not done, on a piece
> of paper that's separate from the lab instructions.
>
> If Cisco wanted to be nice, what they would do is allow the lab sheets
> to be expendable, i.e. "here are your diagrams and your instructions,
> now feel free to scrawl on these sheets as much as you want, spread
> them out on your desk, make paper airplines, etc." This would mean
> that Cisco would need to do some photocopying each night to prepare
> new lab copies for the next set of candidates, which I suppose the
> proctors don't really want to have to do. A more serious reason is
> that Cisco probably doesn't want lots of photocopies of their master
> labs being generated every day, even if in theory no piece of paper is
> supposed to leave the lab room.
>
> ---
>
> The advice I heard from multiple sources strongly recommended "read
> the whole lab before you start", so I did. However I think it's
> debatable whether this was a good idea, since it probably took me half
> an hour to read through all 20 pages, and I could have used that half
> hour to do config work instead. I was afraid that there would be
> something in the final few pages of the lab which would drastically
> influence how I'd need to do an earlier section. I don't RECALL that
> there was anything like this, but I could have missed something. My
> advice here is that you'll need to make a conscious decision in
> advance of your exam: am I, or am I not, going to spend time reading
> the whole lab before I touch a router?
>
> Despite the continued horror stories on this list, the one-day lab IS
> passable in theory, if you get a good day and a lab that works well
> for you. I don't think I passed (I'm awaiting results now) but I can
> see how it could be done. I was concerned that Cisco might be making
> the 1-day labs so abusively hard that you could only pass if you
> happened to get one with questions that concentrated on your strong
> areas. My single-data-point experience suggests that's not so. I
> thought that a few of the subpoints of some of the questions were
> abusive, but the overall subject coverage seemed fair to me.
>
> My recommendation to first-time exam-takers is to treat the first run
> as a practice, since it really is going to be difficult to pass this
> thing the first time through. You need to do a dry run first to learn
> how you're going to need to pace yourself on tasks the second time
> through. By this I DON'T mean "don't study", rather I mean don't get
> yourself worked up with hopes that you'll pass. Take it once and then
> ask yourself "now, how can I time-optimize the second time?"
>
>
> Best of luck to all exam-takers,
> Bruce Hahne
> hahne@digisle.net
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