From: Jeff Nelson (jnelson@rackspace.com)
Date: Fri Jan 09 2004 - 19:37:16 GMT-3
Well, I don't find out officially about the failed attempt til Monday (new "feature" for those working in a wekeend out), but I left 15 points on the board that I knew were wrong or unfinished and didn't have time to go back over anything too much, so a chance in hell remains.
Anyway, I thought it suiting (after my little braindump) to write up a little lessons learned--for my own sake if no one elses.
This was my second attempt, but the first I really devoted some time to. Maybe it was luck of the draw, the fact that it was my second attempt, or maybe the cries of CCIE 0xC23AE has got the proctors hot-and-bothered, but this lab was definitely more difficult and, by sheer volume of commands, more timeconsuming. My first was in SJC and this one in RTP, but I don't attribute it to that (I've heard under good authority that the labs are pulled out of the same pools).
OK, so this lab was more difficult, yes; however, it was passable. I knew I had some weak areas, but my core was strong and I spent some time memorizing where those areas were on the Doc CD. My thoughts were to whip out 70% of it in half the time and leave more time for those areas I didn't know blind. Well, my % were a bit off and I didn't quite know them as blind as I thought. I would say, what I considered "core", only represented 50% of my lab. (I think I need to redefine that definition, as should some of you.) Also, the Doc cd is fine and dandy for the half-hearted 2 point obscure configs, but when they put their mind to digging into an issue at 3 or 4 points with a 3 point follow-up that CD site might as well have MP3s on it.
There are still two problems I had that I still haven't figured out. I'm going to have to lab them up and figure out how to interpret what they were asking. My only thought right now is that if I knew those two subjects better I would have been able to key in on what they were looking for. Other than those two, it came down to time again: to much bouncing around checking, making little mistakes and fixing them, rechecking....
Grad school starts back up Monday, so X-mas break was my only real chance to do this. It seems so close now, but I've come to realize that the testing information is like a circle and the further out you go the more information area there is. Although, I can probably get 70-80% consistently, I will probably need to learn twice as much as I know now to give me another 15%. It just burns me up to think about all the different things that I could recite in my sleep that were not on there, but that's the point, isn't it.
Anyway, that's my spiel... back to realworld keep-it-simple-stupid configurations.
--j
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