From: Narbik Kocharians (narbikk@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2008 - 17:23:54 ART
Keith,
I am proud of you, good job M8, all the best, BUT DON'T FORGET TO GET READY
FOR THE SP TRACK. Take few months off and jump on SP track. By the way, my
granma asked me to congratulate you, she is also proud of you.
See you
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 9:26 AM, Fernando Carvalho <
fernando.cagica@t-online.de> wrote:
> Congratulations and welcome to the group of free men.
>
> keith tokash schrieb:
>
> 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
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________________________________
>> Subscription information may be found at:
>> http://www.groupstudy.com/list/CCIELab.html
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Fernando Carvalho CCIE #20126 (R&S)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Subscription information may be found at:
> http://www.groupstudy.com/list/CCIELab.html
>
>
>
>
>
-- Narbik Kocharians CCSI#30832, CCIE# 12410 (R&S, SP, Security) www.Net-Workbooks.com Sr. Technical Instructor
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