From: dara tomar (wish2ie@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2008 - 06:04:13 ART
*Congrats Keith,
You got the digits and will get the life!!!!
Cheers for that!
I still very much remember your wish/to do list, well that was one awesome
piece of advice that I liked while working on mine,
I still usually check that to get a bit of relax.
Great description of the pursuit, thanks a lot for this!!!
Regards,
Dara*
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:00 PM, keith tokash <ktokash@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am NOT a number ... I AM A FREE MAN!
>
> w00tness! I am now CCIE #21236! My life! Oh how I've missed thee.
>
> Oi vey what a ride. I worked harder on this than I did on anything in my
> entire life, so I'm going to take my time with the email. Sort of a
> victory
> lap. After 13.5 months of studying, I can burn an hour typing.
>
> I got into networking as an undergrad because I was a political science
> major,
> and by the second semester I was bored numb. Rather than prolong the pain
> of
> college I just finished up and two weeks after I graduated I had my CCNA -
> December 1999. I passed the CCIE R&S written about a year after that, but
> to
> be honest I had no friggin idea what I was doing, I'm just good at taking
> written tests. My company went chapter 7 and I never pursued the lab, but
> I
> did bother with the CCNP/DP in ... 2003 I think, but I let it expire. It
> was
> too easy back then so it didn't mean anything to me, and employers didn't
> seem
> to care. I heard it has gotten a lot harder lately.
>
> Any way, I started the CCIE journey because I thought my company was going
> to
> basically outsource anything vaguely difficult or interesting on the
> network
> end due to the brutally powerful charisma of a networking consultant we
> worked
> with. I figured that since I was going to stop learning on the job, I'd
> take
> advantage of the learning credits we had and actually come away with
> something. I'm happy to say I was wrong; we bounced the consultants, the
> team
> and company are great, and now I have every intention of giving back what I
> was able to take away to get the digits.
>
> My journey can be divided into stages.
>
> 1. The Great Meandering
> For the first few months, I read Odom's written exam guide and plunked away
> at
> various technologies, most of which I hadn't touched since my last Cisco
> test.
> Frame Relay, EIGRP, etcetera. I truly had no direction. A guy I work with
> on
> occasion had recently gotten his CCIE (hi Craig Hammond!) and told me to
> stop
> farting around and get IE's workbook since that's what he used. He also
> recommended the Class-on-Demand (COD).
>
> 2. The Beatings Commence
> I thought to myself, "self, you've been in this field for years, just start
> with the mock labs." Boy was that dumb. It's REALLY hard to learn a
> technology in any meaningful way if you do 3 seemingly random tasks in a
> row,
> then move on to another technology you suck at. Think QoS. I had no real
> knowledge or experience with it, so I was learning snippets here and there,
> then moving on to multicast, another topic I had no knowledge or experience
> with. It's like trying to put eight 1,000 piece puzzles together at once,
> just adding 2 or 3 pieces to each, then moving to the next.
>
> 3. Ya Basta!
> I melted down around the end of IE Volume 2, Lab 16. It was just one of
> many
> burnouts, but I remember it because it was a couple of weeks before I went
> to
> Narbik's class. His material went really deep into every individual
> technology, and I found that that methodology was far more conducive to
> relaxed learning than straight mock labs. This isn't a shot at IE, they
> make
> great material. Furthermore, they flat-out tell you on their site not to
> skip
> Volume 1, which I happily ignored and then wondered why I was having so
> much
> trouble.
>
> Anyway, I spent about 4 months just sitting there tinkering with every
> technology on the exam. I went as deep and as crazy as my mad little mind
> desired, without any artificial constraints like trying to finish a section
> in
> an hour, or trying to make it through a workbook in three days. None of
> that
> crap. I dug and dug, and if I didn't know what a field meant in a BGP show
> output, I dug some more. I found the childlike fascination again.
>
> 4. Back to the Grind
> After finally fumbling my way through every one of the various technologies
> on
> the exam blueprint, and sweating ALL of the details, I went back to the
> mock
> labs. I now had a solid grasp on all of technologies, and just needed to
> work
> on IGP redistribution, time management, diagramming, and build endurance by
> doing 8 hour labs routinely. I also grabbed IE Volume 3, which let me
> pound
> on core technologies harder. You can't do an 8-hour lab every day, it's
> just
> not feasible. Even if you're good enough to finish them all, it's too
> intense. Your head starts to throb after day 2. So the 4-hour labs I
> liked
> because I could mix them in between the 8-hour ones and take a half-day.
> At
> this point my manager had let me stay home and study full time, so I'm
> lucky
> there. I also took both Cisco mock labs ... and failed them both quite
> horrifically. I think I got a 46 and a 53 or something like that, but it
> was
> worth it to see how Cisco words things and draws their diagrams. It's like
> being behind enemy lines.
>
> - The lab itself
> I tested today in San Jose. I'll spare everyone my views on Silicon
> Valley's
> deathgrip on the human soul (ok, maybe not entirely...), but the lab
> environment wasn't that bad. I had heard everything from it being freezing
> cold to the mouses being all old and covered in nastyness from thousands of
> clammy hands. Nah. I brought a sweatshirt, never put it on. My monitor
> had
> a refresh rate that was low enough to flicker with a white background and
> give
> you a headache, but I didn't have much white background anyway. Besides,
> who
> cares? The point is it wasn't that bad. There was rack noise, but I
> brought
> earplugs and never bothered to use them. A few phones rang every 10-15
> minutes. Meh. The rack noise was white noise, it kind of made it easier
> to
> dig in.
>
> The night before I took a Unisom (over the counter sleeping pill) and still
> had a little trouble sleeping. I probably banked about 6 hours, which is
> good
> enough. I brought my own oatmeal to the hotel, because it's filling, and
> if
> you mix the sugary packets with the plain ones you aren't just eating gobs
> of
> brown sugar.
>
> The material was hard. It wasn't impossible (obviously), and it wasn't
> easy.
> It was, as my co-worker told me last night, fair. The whole test was
> actually
> quite fair. I believed going in that if I knew the technologies inside and
> out, time wouldn't be an issue, and I wouldn't be easily tricked. I walked
> out feeling the same way. The only thing that I was really stressing about
> was the stupid little mistakes. The mis-named ACLs, the wrong router-ids,
> the
> neighbor relationships with the wrong IP of your neighbor ... all that
> stuff.
> That stuff would kill me in the home labs. Overall I'd say it was just
> like
> IE claims - a 7-8 lab of theirs. Probably right in the middle. But of
> course
> you're in a foreign environment under a lot of pressure, so a 7.5 lab
> becomes
> an 8.5.
>
> Fortunately I finished everything but a few skipped items with a lot of
> time
> left, so I was able to comb over everything from the beginning, then still
> had
> enough time to pick up the skipped tasks.
>
> Advice
> I told my manager I could shave months off of the prep time of the next guy
> on
> our team to do this. How? DON'T SKIP AHEAD. Start at dum-dum level and
> work
> up from there. I started in the middle, and ended up going *back* to
> basics,
> then working up again. Waste of time, and very frustrating.
>
> Learn every technology to a RIDICULOUSLY deep level. You probably won't
> need
> to explicitly call upon that knowledge, but it makes it easy to decipher
> things like the correct OSPF network type to use, because you're not just
> memorizing things, you truly understand them. Once you know why things
> work
> the way they do, you have no fear of them wording a task in a wacked out
> way,
> because you're going to see through it like Louise Lane's skirt. Here's an
> email from Joe Brunner I kept from January 08.
>
>
> "No you need to learn
>
> 1. the technologies so well you can be fooloed
> 2. to stop what ever you are on at 2pm sharp (3pm in CA) and spend the rest
> of the time just verifying the "easy" sections. Don't underestimate the
> importance of this. You WILL probably fail otherwise."
>
>
> Thanks for that advice man, I really took it to heart.
>
> Finally, thanks to my wife, who could probably do better. My parents and
> siblings, whom I've completely ignored for the last year, including my new
> niece, who is about to get an even newer baby sister. My co-workers for
> pulling my weight increasingly until I ducked out 100% to study a few weeks
> ago. My manager paid for all of this garbage and gave me time off, which,
> counting the lab rack he financed, probably came out to about 30k. Also,
> thanks to Ethan Banks for letting me blog until that ... yeah, ya know.
> This
> list was also a help. Just reading these emails helped keep me going.
> Finally, I'd like to preemptively thank all of the strippers that are going
> to
> be smiling at me in the near future.
>
> Enough of this crap, I have books to heave from the balcony and a gaming
> rig
> to build.
>
>
>
>
> The information in this e-mail is intended for the
> attention and use of the everyone in the world, or I wouldn't have sent it
> in
> an unencrypted email. This message or any part thereof can and should be
> disclosed, copied, distributed and retained by any person without
> authorization from the addressee. Furthermore, I reserve the right to
> disclose, copy, distribute and retain anything anyone sends *me* via email,
> up
> to and including putting the exact text in a MySpace bulletin.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> The i m Talkathon starts 6/24/08. For now, give amongst yourselves.
> http://www.imtalkathon.com?source=TXT_EML_WLH_LearnMore_GiveAmongst
>
>
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