From: Erlend Ringstad (erlend@xxxxxxxxxxx)
Date: Tue Nov 06 2001 - 21:59:39 GMT-3
Strangness,
Some comments on that this one:
I sat the lab in Brussels a few weeks ago, and i was able to run notepad
and i had icons all over my desktop saying Router1, Router2....for direct
access to them all. I was able to access both notepad and calc from the
start->run...i don't know if there were icons for them on the progams-menu,
i never use that anyways ;-)
The email i got from cisco told me the exam would start at 09:00, and it did.
Showing up more that 10 mins ahead would be a waste of time.
--erlend
-----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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