Review of the R&S lab

This post is a review of my lab experience.  I’ll be making a few other posts that talk about my lab prep and reviews of study materials that I used soon.

I took my R&S lab on July 9 at RTP in North Carolina.  It was my first attempt at the lab.  I drove myself to the lab, even though my hotel did have a shuttle there.  I stopped by Starbucks and McDonald’s to get some caffeine and some food before the lab.  I showed up pretty early.  I think I was at Cisco by 6:30 AM.  There is some visitor parking right outside of the building that you can use if you drive yourself.  The parking lots are pretty empty at that time, so getting a parking spot isn’t hard.

A little before 7:00, I got out of my car and headed over to the building entrance where a few other candidates were waiting.  Most people weren’t too talkative.  But I did chat it up with a few people who were taking the SP and Voice labs.  There were probably about 10 people there in total taking their labs that day.  Eventually, our proctor (Howard) popped out and brought us into the lobby.  There, he handed out name tags with our rack numbers on them.  We did have to provide a photo ID to get our name tags.  A driver’s licenses work just fine for that.  Once everyone was there and had their name tags, Howard brought us back into the lab room.

The lab room was a good size, with a number of pods of desks and racks of equipment for the different lab tracks.  There is a low hum of router/switch fans, but it’s not too loud.  It does provide a bit of white noise to cover up noise from other candidates, which is nice.  The temperature of the room was comfortable.  I was just fine in a T-shirt and jeans.  The lab has a stack of small lockers (maybe a foot high by a foot wide) that you have to put everything on your person in.  The bathroom is outside of the lab area.  You can use it whenever.  You just need to grab a security badge attached to a bottle on your way out so you can open up the door on your way back.  But if someone already has it, you can just ring a doorbell to have the proctor come and open up the door for you.  Supposedly there was a room outside of the lab that you could grab some coffee or water, but I didn’t bother trying to look for it.

Once we were in the lab room and had our stuff put away in our lockers, Howard went through the rules pretty quickly.  After that, the timer started and we were off to our workstations.  The desks setup in pods of 4.  The desks themselves aren’t overly big.  You’ll definitely be using most every inch if you want to spread out your diagrams and lab materials.  The R&S pods had new 25″ LCD monitors.  Those were quite nice.  I was able to open up a SecureCRT window for each device and be able to see each one without much overlap.  The keyboard and mouse was pretty standard.  I had 2 sheets of letter size scratch paper and a jar full of colored pencils to use.  You can get more paper from the proctor if you need it.

When you get to your station, it’s setup for the core knowledge questions.  I think I spent around 10 minutes on those.  They ones that I got weren’t overly difficult.  I think that they were fair questions.  They were all answerable based on the knowledge that you would gain from preparing for the lab exam.  I was trying to do a bit of cramming from the R&S written exam study guide, but it really didn’t really make a difference for the questions that I received.  Our proctor told us during lunch that these questions only get used once and then get tossed.  So multiple people might get the same questions on the same day.  But after that, they will not be reused.  I’m not really sure how sustainable that is, but that’s what we were told.

Once you’re done with the 4 questions, you end up logging out of windows and logging back in under a different profile than what you were in for the questions.  Your user name is printed on the scratch paper that is sitting at your desk (which also has your name on it).  Once you get logged in, there are shortcuts on the desktop to open up a SecureCRT window for each of your devices (as well as for the access server).  I chose to open each window separately.  There are also shortcuts in the quick-launch area of the task bar for your notepad, calculator, and IE.  Not sure if everyone has noticed, but not too long ago when you’re going through the documentation area, the website started making you log in with your cisco.com account.  I did not encounter this in the lab.  So you shouldn’t need to worry about that.  Also, the IE window has a search bar on the bottom just like firefox has.  It even starts searching the page as you’re typing into the search box, just like firefox.  So it’s a much nicer search that the standard IE search function.

Once I re-logged into Windows after the core knowledge questions, I did a fairly quick read-through of the lab.  My first impression was that it was much easier than I thought it was going to be.  The tasks seemed fairly simple and straight-forward for the most part.  It was at that point that I starting think that I had a good shot at passing.  After reading through the lab I quickly checked the IP assignments to make sure that the initial configs were correct.  The proctor tells you to do this, so evidently it can happen from time to time.  I also perused the diagrams and determined that they were adequate enough for most things.  So I didn’t make my own separate diagrams right off the bat.  There were 5 diagrams on my lab for IGPs, BGP, frame relay, and layer 2/3 connectivity stuff.  I ended up taking all of the lab pages out of the binder and spreading out the diagrams for easy access.  You can take the pages out of the binder, but you cannot take the pages out of their protective covers.

I started off with the layer 2 stuff and made my way through that easily enough.  Then I moved on to the IGP section.  I got through most of that pretty easily as well, but there were quite a few areas where I wanted to get clarification from the proctor since there were a number of things that weren’t specifically stated in the tasks, but were implied by some general instructions in the lab.  I had most of the IGP section done before lunch outside of some details that I had to clear up.  But I did get bogged down a little bit just trying to make sure that I was getting this section really nailed down correctly and that I was achieving full connectivity.  Speaking of full connectivity, it was really nice doing ping tests in the lab.  It probably only took like 15-20 seconds per device to ping all configured IP addresses (where it would take me over a minute per device in my home lab).  Because it flies through the pings so fast, you can pretty much just kick them off on all devices one after another.  It’s pretty obvious when a device runs into an address that it can’t ping.

Lunch time came and I was pretty much all set with my layer 2 and IGP sections.  I had calculated that I had a little over half of the total points (there were a total of 79 points in tasks on the lab).  So I was feeling pretty good.  The proctor gave a warning that lunch was coming in a few minutes, so we had time to save our configs and reload if we wanted (which I did).  Lunch was serviced in a conference room attached to the lab area.  It was a pretty unimpressive pasta/meat/sauce dish with a salad and roll.  There were also some bars along with soda and water.  I didn’t eat too much food.  I just wanted enough to keep me going, but not make me full.  I also grabbed a few sodas to help keep me going.  Lunch only lasted 20 minutes.  The proctor was chatting it up with us a bit, but most of us weren’t in a talkative mood.  I was mainly trying to keep myself relaxed and focused.

After lunch, we headed back to our desks and got back to work.  I ran through the rest of my lab sections without too much trouble.  I really only got stuck on one task that I wasn’t quite sure how to accomplish.  I probably spent more time that I should have on it.  But I did realize that I was spending a bit too much time on it and decided to move along to other tasks.  After I had gone through everything once, I had 3 tasks that I could not accomplish.  They were either things that I had never done, or they were significant twists on things that I was sort of familiar with.  During the second half of the lab, I noticed that I couldn’t find the proctor.  At first, I figured he had stepped out to the use the bathroom or something.  But after a while, I was getting concerned.  I think a few other candidates were also feeling the same way as I saw a few people getting up and looking around without finding him.  I turned out, he had gone into the lunch area and was chatting with someone else (another employee I think).  So by the time that I found him, I had questions on like 5-6 tasks.

Speaking of asking the proctor things, I definitely asked a lot of questions.  Pretty much any time a task could be interpreted more than one way, or any time things were implied rather than specified, I asked about it.  Howard was good about answering all of my clarifying questions.  I think I only had to reword one question because he didn’t think that he could answer it without giving something away.  I’m pretty sure that all of my questions made a big difference in my results.  They also helped in my confidence level as I didn’t have to feel like I was guessing at things too much.

As the afternoon progressed, I had gone through everything that I could.  With about an hour and a half to go, I had gone answer pretty much every task that I could.  So I saved, reloaded, and went through each task over again.  I read each task slowly as if I were reading it for the first time.  I think I found maybe one or 2 mistakes doing this.  After I added up all of my points, I was sitting at 69 points that I felt like I had locked in, 4 points that were “maybe”s, and 6 points that I threw away.  I then did one last round of ping tests to ensure that my connectivity was good.  By that time, there was about 15 minutes left to go.  Since it wasn’t enough time to tackle any of my incomplete tasks, and since I didn’t want to risk breaking anything, I saved my configs, and called it an afternoon.

You just walk yourself out of the lab area.  I left the building a little after 3:00 PM.  I was thinking about going out to dinner, but I really didn’t want to be away from my laptop when I got the email that my results were ready.  So I grabbed some Arby’s and a 6-pack of beer and headed back to my hotel room.  Based on my verifications, I felt like I had a good shot at passing.  But when I did my mock labs, my actual scores and my expected scores were usually quite different.  So I was going back and forth between optimism and pessimism.  After about 4 hours of hitting refresh on my Yahoo mail page, I finally got the email that my results were ready.  So it took about 5 hours after I was done with the lab for the grading to be complete.  One minute later, I was logged into the Cisco site and saw that I had passed.

I was pretty relieved to pass on my first try.  With the combination of the impending lab blueprint changes, there being no open lab dates before the changes happen, and having my first child due at the beginning of August, I was going to have to go through a lot more hurdles to pass at a later time.

The difficulty of the lab was closer to a 6 on Internetwork Expert’s workbook scale.  I was actually surprised at the difficulty level.  I was getting so used to weird redistribution scenarios and tricky multicast RFP issues.  It was almost a little disappointing when my first ping test went off without a hitch.  I got over it though =)

That’s about all of the details about the lab that I can think of (or that I can share without breaking NDA).  Let me know if there is anything that you wanted to know that I didn’t talk about.  Obviously I can’t share anything about specific technologies or tasks/questions that I received.  But I’m more than happy to answer anything about the lab in general or about the facilities or lab process.