From: Gary Duncanson (garyduncanson@btinternet.com)
Date: Sun Oct 05 2008 - 17:23:51 ART
Vendor products are certainly popular, however it is something of an urban
myth that they are a relatively new phenomenon. Bootcamps and bootcamp
labbooks have been around in one form or another for almost as long as the
CCIE track has been public. In other words they have been used to a greater
or lesser extent by just about every CCIE minted for years now. Practice
labs do not have to come from vendors though. Cisco Press have done practice
labs through books by Gorito and Duggan and Solie has practice labs as well.
There was also 'fatkid' once upon a time but I digress :)
In terms of challenge, regardless of the mix of materials you use, you still
have to put the necessary time in to cover the lab footprint and get to a
point where you can recall the *right* solution to meet particular
requirements. This is certainly a challenge in terms of demands on your time
and to some extent your intellect. Your elapsed time to complete the lab
footprint is a variable. The demands on your time and energy elsewhere will
have an impact on that. If you hold a demanding job down and have family
commitments like myself for example this has a bearing on how aggressive or
flexible your study schedule needs to be. Vendor materials are helpful but
not a magic bullet. You have to make the effort. Many people have invested
lots of money in multiple vendor sources and come unglued. A vendor product
wont give you determination or the inherent intellect to be able to
understand it all. You have to find that in yourself. Any vendor would
advise you to do your own research and work from a fairly wide range of
sources. Cisco Press books and CCO offer an almost endless source of
topologies you can lab up and play with at home and I recommend you do so.
That type of foundation learning will help you get more out of vendor
labbooks should you choose to invest in them. Books and Vendor labbooks
both provide tutorial in technologies. Lots of people use vendor labbooks
as sort of a study framework to build up confidence in layering technologies
together through clearly defined lab exercises and at the same time
referring to a library of books and CCO. Nothing wrong with that. Workbooks
save a lot of time in trying to come up with your own scenarios to practice,
although later on you will probably be doing that once you get up a head of
steam. For example today I wanted to practice BGP best path scenarios,
rather than find workbook lab X where it was covered and load the whole
thing up and practice the technique there I reconfigured a Duggan lab to
provide multipath eBGP peerings and added another physical link. Worked a
treat and I got more out of the exercise I think.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ovais Iqbal" <ovais.iqball@yahoo.com>
To: <ccielab@groupstudy.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 6:43 PM
Subject: CCIE, i wish to take a different path !
> Hi all, first of all i mean no disrespect to the gurus who are helping
> CCIEs a
> lot, namely IE, IPexpert, Narbik and others,
> mostly when i read the success stories, one point is present in all of
> them, x
> months configuring the routers using x vendors workbooks, i just want to
> know
> something very simple, can some one pass the lab without these workbooks ?
> can
> someone suggest me a path that i shall take if i dont want to use any of
> the
> vendors ? right now i think getting CCIE is not a challenge any more, no
> offense, but thats the truth, look around and you will see a hell lot
> increase
> in the production of CCIE as never seen before, i know more and more ppl
> are
> inclined towards it but i think the real challenge is to take the lab
> without
> using any of the workbooks, ( again no offense to the latest CCIEs, i
> respect
> them all :-) ),
>
> Is there anyone who took the lab without using any vendors, can he/she
> shed
> some light on his/her preparation ??
>
> Thanks
>
>
> Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
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