On My CCIE Lab Exam in 2001 — Day One

My exam was in Sydney and I was 1000 kilo­metres from home. I had flown down the day before the exam to try and get settled men­tally. The date of the exam was not my choice as my employer needed to have the required cer­ti­fied indi­vidu­als for part­ner status, thus they forced me to an earlier time that I would have liked. They were pay­ing, so who was I to argue.

Day One — Morning

In 2001, the CCIE Lab exam was the two day format and most people con­sidered it to have four parts. You get in, get your exam paper for the first day and wait to start. The morn­ing of day one was build­ing the net­work, includ­ing patch­ing, IP address­ing, ter­minal server con­fig­ur­a­tion, and start work on the sec­tions that you had planned to tackle first. We had to patch our own gear, and make it work, then per­form the whole layer 2 con­fig­ur­a­tion and so on up the stack/

At lunch time, we would troop down with some Cisco employee escorts to a food hall and get some food. After lunch, you would then con­tinue on until the end at about five or five thirty depend­ing on your start time.

So you con­figured on through the after­noon mak­ing sure you are pacing your­self against the clock leav­ing enough time to check your work over for mis­takes and rework as needed. Why ? Because the proc­tor would mark you at the end of the day, before you went home. If you didn’t have enough marks, you were told not come back tomorrow.

Its about how many marks you lose

I always con­sidered the CCIE Lab Exam to be based on how many marks I lost, rather than how many I got. When you think about it, an 80% pass mark means that you know almost everything, with a bit for human error. My approach had always been that I would lose 10 marks to human error, there­fore, I could only lose 10 marks to some­thing I didn’t know and thus fail. This type of think­ing made me con­sider that I had to be 90% cor­rect, just short of per­fect, rather than 80%, (which is good enough).

I know that other people think about mak­ing 80 marks, I always looked at it the other way around. Maybe that is just me.

Technologies

In 2001, the CCIE exam still had top­ics such as IPX, Token Ring, ATM, DLSW, class­ful rout­ing and other older tech­no­lo­gies. Even wir­ing the net­work was a chal­lenge in its own way, token ring took some con­cen­tra­tion to get right,

I remem­ber hear­ing stor­ies of people cabling up and mak­ing basic mis­takes, or find­ing a faulty V35 serial cable. Of course, if this happened you had to work it out and fix it your­self. No extra time given.

We didn’t have many pre­par­a­tion resources either. There were only a few Cisco Press books (Doyle!), no boot­camps, and only two com­pan­ies were that provid­ing prac­tice labs and no online labs. The main ref­er­ence was the Cisco CCO doc­u­ment­a­tion, and the Cisco Internetworking Guide and whatever you could glean from read­ing and dis­cus­sions on Groupstudy ( forever grate­ful to my fel­low candidates)

My Routing TCP/​IP Vol 1 was well thumbed and not­ated. Radia Perlman’s book on Routing and Bridging was well used as was Caswell’s Routing and Bridging bok. Groupstudy​.com was about the only forum where you could go to speak with other can­did­ates. I had about ten or twelve text books in all, and spent a lot of read­ing and reread­ing them to get the basics into my mind.

I will always recom­mend to can­did­ates to take time to learn first prin­ciples, it will help more in the exam when you hit a make/​break question.

Building a lab

One of the biggest prob­lems with study­ing in Year 2000 was get­ting access to equip­ment. There were no online labs and buy­ing it was really expens­ive. ATM and Token Ring switches were very rare. Ebay was only just start­ing out and only some equip­ment was even avail­able. For example, I think a Cisco AS2511 ter­minal server cost about USD$2000. A 4MB flash mod­ule for a C2500 router cost USD$175.00.

It cost lit­er­ally thou­sands to build lab, includ­ing cables, and racks. Assuming you could actu­ally get the kit. I was liv­ing in Australia, and the cost of ship­ping the kit made it even worse.

Day One — Evening

So you get back to your hotel. You are tired /​drained, you know you are going back tomor­row but you don’t how many marks you have lost. You can’t help but ask your­self how many more can I afford to lose ? You know the morn­ing of the second day is usu­ally harder than day one, but not always. Did I get the tough ques­tions today ? What top­ics didn’t I get today, right, so good chance of get­ting them tomor­row. Are they my best areas ? Should I study ? Should I take a break ?

You might even get some sleep.

Go to to read about Day 2 of Passing my CCIE.

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