From: Eric Phillips (eric@phillips.tc)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2007 - 12:29:21 ART
Hey Scott,
I am down near my 40-days as well. I am taking my first shot at the lab on
February 14th in RTP. Being newly married, I have quite the understanding
wife. :) When and where is your lab?
I intensified my CCIE studies about six months ago, and took every piece of
training material I have and put each chapter, video, or lab under the lab
blueprint. I then started studying one major topic at a time. During and
after each topic I spent a considerable amount of time creating my own labs
to test every variation or setting of the commands. I then made the labs
build on top of each other. For example, I started studying IGPs and QOS,
then by the time I was studying BGP I would make sure to build QOS, RIP,
EIGRP, and OSPF into the same lab.
I have two more days of IPv6 studying, and I will be done with my "academic"
studying of the major topics. I then plan on spending a week refreshing my
understanding of the non-core topics such as SNMP, RMON, NTP, etc. Luckily,
I have extensive real-world experience with most of the non-core topics, but
I still need to explore the "odd" features of each.
I now plan on working on the full labs and taking two accessor labs. I
bought one of the IE graded labs for January 21st when they were on sale,
and I will do one Cisco assessor lab, but I am undecided on exactly when to
do that.
I think the most valuable part of my studying has been creating my own
labs. I feel that to create a lab that completely tests a subject I needed
to thoroughly understand the technology and every intricacy about it. I
have also found that the labs I built were substantially more difficult then
the vendor-created labs. I would imagine the difficulty stems from knowing
how to exploit my own weaknesses, and the labs focused on the difficult
parts of the technology. Did anyone else create their own draft-quality
labs while studying? I am curious if you all agree that to make a lab
requires a complete understanding of the technology, not just a
syntax-memory of the commands.
-----
Eric Phillips
mailto:ephillips@ltiit.com<ephillips@ltiit.com>
Network Consultant II
*LTI Information Technology
501 Avis Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
Phone: (734) 929-1400 Fax: (734) 929-1401
On 12/19/07, Scott M Vermillion <scott@it-ag.com> wrote:
LTI Information Technology http://www.ltiit.com
501 Avis Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
Phone: (734) 929-1400 Fax: (734) 929-1401
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4
: Tue Jan 01 2008 - 12:04:31 ARST
*http://www.ltiit.com
>
> OK all, I'm not quite down to 40 days 'till lab time but I will be by
> Christmas. Of course I am interested in general thoughts on how to spend
> these last weeks, but I am particularly interested to hear thoughts on
> specifics, such as when best to do assessor labs. I know I still really,
> really need to work on speed, so it's too soon right now. But I don't
> want
> to wait until the point of no return and bomb an assessor. Since there's
> only two of them, you really want to get as much out of each as possible.
> Also, do you bother with reading anything but the DocCD and lab solutions
> guides at this late phase? I'm finding myself really, really wanting to
> read Odom's QoS book again. Also that Router Firewall Security book has
> largely faded from memory. I have books I haven't even cracked (and at
> least one more still in the shipping pipeline). Etc.
>
>
>
> I will mostly be staying with my full-time study approach but will be
> blending in some paid work. Thus, I'm probably down to about 30 full
> study
> days left, which is why I chose to fire off this query now. Honestly, I
> would likely slip my date a month at this point, but I'm already committed
> to about three weeks of travel immediately following my current lab date,
> so
> slipping it a month would mean slipping it two or three, which I'm not too
> keen on right now. I have lots of air miles, etc, so the lab isn't as
> expensive for me as for some. But I loathe failure in all of its many
> forms, so I want to be deadly serious about each and every attempt. Any
> and
> all thoughts/experiences welcome!!
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Scott
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Subscription information may be found at:
> http://www.groupstudy.com/list/CCIELab.html
>
--
Eric M. Phillips Senior Network Consultant