RE: CCIE Service Providerv3 - General Question

>>Right, there are obviously differences between the two OSes, both in
>>hardware and software, but for any true CCIE this should not be an issue.
>> The point of the CCIE is to obtain the level of expert in network
>>engineering. As an expert you should have a deep theoretical knowledge
>>of why and how different networking technologies work. OSPF is OSPF,
>>BGP is BGP, whether it's on IOS, IOS XR, NX-OS, JunOS, etc.
>
>Yeah, that's the kind of viewpoint that causes outages. When you start thinking like this, you tend to make some very, very bad assumptions. Of course, you might live you in a world >where vendors never change options or defaults between platforms or even OS revisions on the same platform, never mind the consideration of interoperability.

Right, there are obviously different caveats to the different implementations, but at the core they are all functionally the same. If you know OSPF, and you know OSPF on IOS, you're not reinventing the wheel trying to learn OSPF on IOS XR.

>>
>>What I'm saying is that if you're a CCIE in R&S - an *expert* in
>>Routing & Switching technologies - and you need to start back at CCNA
>>level for the Service Provider track, then you have failed. You've
>>failed yourself as you've missed the entire point of CCIE to begin with.
>
>There's something about this I find to be fairly offensive, and quite a bit elitist. Do you honestly believe that achieving a CCIE means you never have to go back to basics? You never have to review? That you don't have that much to learn?
>
>When you're dealing with an unfamiliar platform and a new OS, I think it's prudent to probably start with the basics. I'd expect a CCIE to be able to breeze through it, since it should simply be a matter of reconciling the differences with what you already know, but to say that you've failed yourself by making an attempt to cover all the bases? I think that's a bit too cavalier.

What I'm saying is that if you pass the CCIE R&S and you're not an expert in OSPF then something went wrong. It's not meant to be offensive, but the whole idea of CCIE to begin with is elitist. It doesn't mean you know everything, but it *should* mean that at the end of obtaining CCIE you're an expert in a specific subset of technologies per the blueprint. I would think that for most CCIEs the path to SP shouldn't then be back to CCNA. If you go take a class in CCNA SP you're going to be following topics like this:

- Describe the OSI and TCP/IP models and their associated protocols to explain how data flows in a network
- Describe the structure of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
- Describe bridging concepts and Layer 2 Ethernet frames
- Describe classful versus classless routing
- Describe ICMPv4 and ICMPv6
- Describe Frame Relay

In my opinion this is not the right learning path to go from CCIE R&S to CCIE SP, and would be a huge waste of time for most people. They would be better off spending their time reading through the documentation of XR to find the platform and feature differences, and then spend time reading the theory of topics they aren't already an expert in.

Brian McGahan, CCIE #8593 (R&S/SP/Security)
bmcgahan_at_INE.com
 
Internetwork Expert, Inc.
http://www.INE.com

-----Original Message-----
From: nobody_at_groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody_at_groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of Kenneth Ratliff
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 3:19 PM
To: ccielab_at_groupstudy.com
Subject: Re: CCIE Service Providerv3 - General Question

On 10/26/12 7:29 PM, "Brian McGahan" <bmcgahan_at_ine.com> wrote:

>Right, there are obviously differences between the two OSes, both in
>hardware and software, but for any true CCIE this should not be an issue.
> The point of the CCIE is to obtain the level of expert in network
>engineering. As an expert you should have a deep theoretical knowledge
>of why and how different networking technologies work. OSPF is OSPF,
>BGP is BGP, whether it's on IOS, IOS XR, NX-OS, JunOS, etc.

Yeah, that's the kind of viewpoint that causes outages. When you start thinking like this, you tend to make some very, very bad assumptions. Of course, you might live you in a world where vendors never change options or defaults between platforms or even OS revisions on the same platform, never mind the consideration of interoperability.

>
>What I'm saying is that if you're a CCIE in R&S - an *expert* in
>Routing & Switching technologies - and you need to start back at CCNA
>level for the Service Provider track, then you have failed. You've
>failed yourself as you've missed the entire point of CCIE to begin with.

There's something about this I find to be fairly offensive, and quite a bit elitist. Do you honestly believe that achieving a CCIE means you never have to go back to basics? You never have to review? That you don't have that much to learn?

When you're dealing with an unfamiliar platform and a new OS, I think it's prudent to probably start with the basics. I'd expect a CCIE to be able to breeze through it, since it should simply be a matter of reconciling the differences with what you already know, but to say that you've failed yourself by making an attempt to cover all the bases? I think that's a bit too cavalier.

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Received on Mon Oct 29 2012 - 16:14:55 ART