My CCIE Experience

Starter.. Written           

   After ExaScale FCS in Feb 2009 and resigning from bachelor life, I was thinking about the next interesting goal And i selected my 5 year old CCIE R&S dream. This decision was made as L3 team lead, wanted to help team members [Actually When my team mates came for help not able to answer L3 protocol questions :) ]. As a first investment for CCIE bought used Routing/BGP/Multicast/Qos/Switching books cost around $600.

   My reading time is mostly  evening 9 to 10:30 and all weekends in  day time. One fine day in September 2009 appeared for Written  which is $350 and came out successfully. When I informed Deva, He was so excited and encouraged me to go for LAB.  

Before the Beginning...

   After Udhay's arrival to Force10, With Deva's magical words started my research on creating CCIE lab strategy. In the initial period had a lot of troubles in playing with GNS. So searched of workbooks/Rack rentals etc and found INE is the cheap one with $1400 compared to other vendors. Lab rental came to $2 to $4 per hour. As a general rule for lab preparation everyone has to practice at least 1000 hrs. It comes around $4000.

   Tried testing different rack rental vendors, which is little bit horrible when accessing labs in U.S. It had lot of restrictions like the number of hrs is fixed i.e. 6 hrs per booking and start time is fixed. Finally dropped the Lab rental and started researching used equipments in INDIA. Finally found a vendor offered 14 cisco devices with cables for $10,000.

  Adding the Lab Exam fee $1400, the total investment came to $12800.

The Approval ....

  First I went to my mom for approval and asked her for support in below things.

  1. Wanted 8 months of Salary

  2. will not participate in any marriage/reception/etc

  3. will not help in shopping

  4. Last one, Consider I am out of Home for 1 year

  The reaction is like silence after earth quake, after getting lot of scolding. I was not able to convince  her for point no.1 , But My Wife encouraged me and asked me to come up with different plan. So after rethinking got an idea and Showed my findings to all CCIE dreaming friends And Finally got fundings from F10/X-F10/Friends.

Preparation .... Studying is Fun

 

   I loved this part, I would say this is the golden period in My carrier and as well as CCIE preparation. Home Lab and my son arrived on same time frame, its time for labbing. The strategy we planned is, find 3-4 Hrs per day in weekdays and 18Hrs per day in Weekend. We found that 6 hrs sleeping time is enough for healthy people so Turned on Alarms @ 4:30 AM and ended the lab session @ 7 AM. In the evening lab session is between 9 to 10:30. we made sure that our study time is not affecting any F10 projects.

   Each day we learnt lot of new technologies which is totally different from theory books, Thanks to INE workbook. It’s like eye opener for understanding different customer deployment scenarios. Each and every questions in the book is tricky and disappointed our confidence level in exam.

   We had hell lot of questions raising each day,To find the answers we search blogs/books/etc and F10 has readymade libraries which helped us to speed up the learning. Special Thanks to Ansari/Saravanan/Vijay for cracking BGP/Multicast/MPLS. Udhay is like cisco doc cd, he knows all cisco feature which i never worked/heard about it, some of the features like DTP/wccp/FRTS/tunneling/OER/uRPF/NAT etc. I have to Thank Gopi/Anandraj for asking n number of questions/Doubts which sharpen our skills.

   Though we set the alarm at 4.00 AM daily, we ended up in starting the session by 5 to 5.30 AM. Thanks to Anandaraj for waking us up so early. The topics we chose at the beginning were something in which we had hands-on experience so that we could keep us on track with full confidence. But the actual fact is it slowed us down and lowered our confidence level when we started the topics which were greek to us :). But again thanks to the posters in forums and blogs and Saravanan (Multicast) Vijay (MPLS) Anandaraj (to check the behavior in FTOS) who helped in clarifying our doubts even it were very basic.

   10 months Ran by completing all the workbooks and it’s time to revise. In Jan 2011 we completed revising all the lab materials and booked lab. My wife was referring to one of the CCIE's wife poem, I was like please be patience for 2 more months. I realized that my average talk time with family is 30 minutes per day :) .

Link to the poem - http://petespacket.com/2010/02/12/a-poem-on-a-ccie-to-be-from-my-wife-interesting/

Failure ....

  

  With lot of support from Murali/Babu/Swamy/Prakash started towards final part. In this we found there is something missing in our preparation and we are not able to find the exact trick to solve few issue. Surprisingly there is no document for that, people who learns it will not tell to anyone. We found that these info will be thought only in boot camps. We didn’t have enough fund so trusted on our own tricks.

when i met swamy the first thing he asked is Do you know how to solve this.... I was like oh my god this scenario is haunting us. Swamy gave the tips :) which have a finishing touch to our preparation.

On the D-Day with 18 months of hard work and almost 6 years of exp. When i encountered with Troubleshooting its like Alice in wonderland, 30 routers with all protocols configured. Topology diagram itself destroyed my confidence and made me to run madly between all routers. Config section went like piece of cake, with swamys tricks helped to complete the lab in less than 3 hrs. The result came as Troubleshooting - FAIL Configuration - PASS

At last .....

   With Murali/Swamy/Family members/Sampath/Prakash encouragement, Planned for next attempt. The strategy we formed is prepare our own trouble shooting tickets to each other. So that I have to solve Udhay’s question paper in less than 5 minutes per question vice versa. This really helped to increase our confidence level. And At last i got my number #28720.

I thank my mom/wife/son/sister/family members/Deva/Murali/Babu/Swamy/Prakash/Gopi/Udhay/Anandraj/Ansari/Saravanan/Vijay/Subba/Rajendra/Team mates for their support. And My CCIE role models Hitha/H.K.Jana/Rajendra/Darshan.

Reference  for total investment J :

Study books                      600
Written Exam Fee              350
WorkBooks                     1400
Lab gears                       10000
Lab Fee - First attempt    1400
Lab Fee - Final attempt    1400
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Total in $                       15150
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Udhay (#28467) connecting Frame-Relay Switch & Anand with phone

Gopi, Kannan, Vinoth (#28720) & Vijay