From: Shaun Wakelen (Shaun.Wakelen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Date: Wed Nov 07 2001 - 07:16:44 GMT-3
I have attempted the lab in Brussels and Halifax, and at both places notepad
was available and there was a separate icon for each piece of kit on the
desktop.
The email received does state what time the exam starts (not what time to
arrive), so it would be wise to arrive beforehand! The one I had for the
Brussels exam (a 2-dayer), stated the exam started at 9am, but to arrive and
register at reception by 8:45am. The exam will start when the proctor has
gone through the details (restroom locations, coffee area etc) with the
group. Obviously if you arrive after this, you will have to abide with what
time has been officially declared as the start time.
In Halifax (1-dayer), our start time was 8am, but the two of us were there
at 7:40 (before the proctor!). There was no scheduled time for lunch, the
proctor came in at 12, asked if we were ready for lunch, so we went. By the
time he had brought us back into the lab it was 12:45, so as we had 4 hours
before lunch, our finish time was 4:45 (total 8 hours).
I feel with any exam, it is best to read through the test paper. It will
give you an idea on what is required at the end of the day, and you can then
see where your strong and weak points are.
In Halifax, I eventually took the diagram out of the plastic sleeve. I was
fed up having to keep going through the folder to look things up, and my
drawing was getting messy! So long as you do not write on it, it should be
OK. Mind you, our proctor was not seen for most of the time to complain
anyway!
Shaun Wakelen
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Hahne [mailto:hahne@digisle.net]
Sent: 06 November 2001 20:41
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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