CCIE R&S Expanded Lab Blueprint

Internetwork Expert posted an expanded lab blueprint on their blog a little while back.  I took that and put it into a nicely formatted Word document.  That way, I can have a copy on my laptop or print it out so I can reference and mark off topics that I am prepared for.  If anyone else would like a copy, you can grab it at the link below.

http://ccietrek.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/ccie-study-blueprint1.docx

Status Update

I recently hit a milestone in my studies.  It’s been just over half a year now since I began this trek for my digits.  Things have been going well for the most part.  I passed my written exam on the first attempt.  Not that passing on the first try means anything, but I was happy to save myself any retesting fees.  I was able to get that out of the way a little over a month after my original goal.  Now that I have that out of the way, I’ve been able to start focusing on the lab.

My original goal for passing the lab was to do it by the end of 2009.  I felt that timeline was long enough to give me plenty of time without feeling the need to cram or rush.  But short enough as to not drag things out longer than they needed to.  Now that baby #1 is slated for an early August arrival, my goal changed to getting my digits before the baby comes.  Something tells me if I don’t get it before then, the first 2-3 months after the baby comes will pretty be pretty unproductive in terms of studying.

I have my lab date tentatively scheduled for July 9.  I still have a few weeks left before I’m required to put down money on it.  So I’ve been really trying to get a feel for how well I’m doing these past few weeks in terms of preparedness.  If I really don’t think that I’ll have a shot at passing, I’ll postpone until later in the year.  But at this point, I’m optimistic.

So far I have done 2 PolyLabs and 2 of Internetwork Expert’s workbook 2 labs.  They have all been at an easier difficulty level than the actual exam.  But the results are promising.  I’m pretty much nailing the core topics.  I’m getting most all of the points in the switching, frame relay, and IPG sections.  I’m also starting to get the core BGP, multicast, and IPv6 topics down pretty good.  But the QoS, security, and IP Services sections are just killing me.  My progress with those is not moving along as fast as I would like.  But even with that, I still scored a 75% and a 83% on my first 2 workbook 2 labs.  Plus, I’m doing pretty well in terms of how long it takes me to do a lot of the tasks.

So all in all, I’m feeling optimistic about being ready for July 9.  I’m doing well in the most important topics.  In the topics that I’m so-so on, I feel pretty confident that I can get myself to where I’ll need to be by test time.  I’m still not sure about my problem topics.  My count-down timer is telling me that I have 15 1/2 weeks left to prepare.  I know I’ve got the ability.  I just need to make sure I’m putting in the effort during each of the next 108 days.

Internetwork Expert Poly Lab Review

Over the weekend, I took a couple of the newly released poly labs from Internetwork Expert.  Since I haven’t really seen anyone write about them yet, I thought that I would share my experiences.

For those of you out there that have purchased the CCIE 2.0 product, it comes with unlimited labs.  In other words, you don’t have to pay any tokens just to generate a lab.  For non-CCIE 2.0 owners, it’s 25 tokens (which is $25 without any bulk purchase discounts).  When you create your lab, you can rate yourself in about 7 different topic ares (like switching, multicast, QoS, etc).  The higher you rate yourself, the tougher the tasks should be in that particular section.  Once you rate yourself, you click on Generate.  About 10-20 seconds later, you have a lab waiting your you.

After creating your lab, you can open it up and view the rules and lab tasks.  The last thing that you need to do to actually take the lab is to rent some rack time from Graded Labs.  Once you have some active rack time going, you can go back to your Poly Lab page and click Setup.  This will kick off their process of loading the initial lab config on your rack.  This can take 10-20 minutes or so.  It’s a good time to start going through your lab tasks and make some notes.  Once it’s done setting up the rack, you then click Start and a timer begins.  IE suggests an estimated completion time for your lab, which is what the timer is based off of.  You don’t have to finish in the allotted time.  But it helps to simulate a real lab.

Now that the lab has started, you can remote into your rack and go to town.  When you’re done, go back to your Poly Lab page and choose to grade your lab.  This takes 5-10 minutes.  After that, you get a score report and a task by task breakdown.  That’s it!  After all is said and done, you can go back into your rack if you still have some time left over on your rental and do whatever you want.

So that’s the overall basics of the Poly lab.  Now for my experience…

Since this was my first multiprotocol lab, I thought I’d just start off with a beginner rating on all of the sections.  I generated my lab and clicked on Setup.  I walked away while this was happening and when I came back, I was back at the main poly lab page.  But, it didn’t have a start button for me to click.  Evidently something went wrong during the rack setup process.  After waiting for a while longer, I just went in to the rack and saw that it looked like everything had been setup.  So I went through the lab.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to have it graded.  I did contact support on this, and since I saved my configs at the end, they are going to load them up on a rack and grade it for me so I can see my results.

The next day, I thought I’d try again.  So I whipped up a new poly lab and ran the setup.  This time everything worked as expected.  I whipped through the lab and was able to get it graded.  Overall, I thought the grading was done quite well.  It breaks down each task section and lets you know what was right and wrong.  It also allows you to see what the criteria used for grading was, what you did, and what the correct answer was.  So it’s very helpful in showing you where you went wrong and how you should have been verifying things.  Based on your performance, the grading engine gives you a ranking in each topic category, which you can use the next time that you want to generate a lab.  You also get links to materials that you can study from to improve based on your skill level.

Outside of the rack setup issue I had, I was pretty impressed with the product.  I see myself using it on a fairly regular basis.  The other workbook labs are great.  But it is nice to be able to customize things at your skill level.

So what did I score?  Well, it wasn’t very impressive.  I only got a 55%.  But had I read a little closer and known what “best practices” was referring to, I would have gotten around a 75%.  Those were more reading mistakes, and not lack of knowledge of how to configure things.  But I did get utterly spanked on the security, QoS, and IP services sections.  I don’t know what it is about those topics, but I always feel like an R-tard trying to solve them.  There are just so many little nuances to know.  But I did nail the core topics.  I’d rather it be that than the other way around.

It’s definitely a good tool that I would recommend people should check out.  It’s got a similar feel to the real lab environment.  Plus you get the automated grading.  No need to figure out through a proctor guide if you really got the points or not.  Also, there’s just something about being ranked that makes you want to do better the next time.  Maybe it stems from countless hours playing RPGs and trying to level up.  I don’t want to stop until I’m an expert in each topic area. =)

CCIE written study tips- part 3.1

As I was going over my last few posts, I realized that I missed one fairly important aspect of the written preparation.  So I thought that I would do one little post addressing that.

So how do you know when you are ready to take the written exam?  I would say that you should go through all of the sections of the written exam blueprint using the study methods that I talked about in my other posts.  Once you get through everything once, do a reassessment of each major topic area to see how much you remember.  Take note of any topics that you aren’t doing so well at and make a new plan to review those.

As you go back over topics that you need to study more, you can change up your study method a bit.  You probably don’t need to follow the exact same plan as you did before.  Definitely do some reading, whether it’s in a book or the Cisco online documentation.  Maybe review some videos if you have them.  Then come up with your own short labs to practice on the specific areas that you need some extra help with.

Also, as I’m in my final review preparation, I typically will be taking a lot of practice tests.  Not that I expect to see the practice test questions on the actual exam.  Although every once in a while I’ll see maybe 1 or 2 on the actual exam.  But it helps to keep things fresher in your memory.

Once you’re feeling pretty good on most all topics, schedule the test and go for it.  Try to avoid being a perpetual preparer.  Due to the large amount of subject matter in the CCIE, it can be pretty easy to never feel quite prepared.  But the good news is that you don’t have to know the nitty gritty of every topic.  At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and see what happens.  If you do happen to fail on the first try, be sure to use it as a learning opportunity.  As you take the exam, try to identify some areas where you have knowledge gaps and make mental notes of what things might be good to review in case you don’t pass.  If you can identify some more specific things, it will help.  For instance, your score report might show that you did poorly in BGP, which is a fairly large topic.  But if you can remember that you specifically had issues with route reflectors and confederations, it’ll let you focus your follow-up studies.  That’ll save you some time