On Passing My CCIE Exam in 2001 — Day Two

This is Day 2, you might want to read Day One of Passing my CCIE Lab Exam.

Second Day — morn­ing session

On the morn­ing of the second day, you were given another paper that covered more con­fig­ur­a­tion on the net­work you had built on the second day. You look around and there were a few new faces, these were the Day 1 people repla­cing those who failed yes­ter­day and didn’t get to come back for Day 2.

So you get star­ted on the morn­ing of Day 2. I knew that if made a good show­ing here, then I could make the after­noon and have a good chance as passing because I felt con­fid­ent on troubleshoot­ing. A couple of the Day 1 folks look out of their depth, and sure enough, ask the proc­tor some stu­pid ques­tions, you know they won’t be com­ing back after lunch. Check the clock, make sure you can check your work and fix if needed. Do I need to triage some ques­tions to make the time ? Yes, which ques­tion can I bypass ?

Break, and its time for lunch. Did I do enough to make the afternoon ?

Exam format and questions

From what I read of other can­did­ates today, the basic format of the ques­tions and the exam approach has not changed much in seven years. The clas­sics are still there e.g.

• The Breaker — con­fig­ur­ing this will break some­thing you did earlier, you had bet­ter notice
• The Simple Hook — the ques­tion reads com­plic­ated but has a simple answer
• The Cracker — A simple ques­tion but has a com­plic­ated answer
• Make /​ Break — what I called a make /​ break ques­tion, where either know a thing or you don’t.
• The Builder — the cumu­lat­ive ques­tion where you will have four to six steps, all of which must be exactly right to get the marks.
• The Herring — The mis­lead­ing ques­tion — the ques­tion where the obvi­ous answer is not the right answer. We called these land mines
• The Time bomb — the ques­tions is not mis­lead­ing, but you need to think it through, suck­ing up time.

Looking back now, I can see the ques­tions are framed this work to make sure that you know your stuff back to front, as well as front to back. Why is this import­ant ? Because that is what hap­pens in real life. Sure, there are ques­tions in the exam that would never hap­pen in real life, or would they ?

People who pass the exam have enough basic know­ledge, plus prac­tical exper­i­ence, to work their way around the ques­tions. Its prob­ably also an IQ test, writ­ten to test your abil­ity to reason and carry a men­tal capa­cit­ies that are use­ful for networking.

Second Day — Afternoon session — troubleshooting

So I come back from lunch in a cafe down­stairs (escor­ted by proc­tors to ensure we didn’t talk about the exam or dis­cuss with people), the proc­tor takes me and two other guys into a room and makes us wait for bit. He returns and tells one guy that he didn’t make it, time to go home. That’s two left out of six­teen starters on Day One.

Then he turns to us, and we have just made it to the after­noon for net­work troubleshoot­ing, we need to score very well in this sec­tion to be able to pass. Elation — a shot at the title, but, how close am I, do I really need full marks ?

So close. I hadn’t expec­ted to get this far, and I was almost there. What a lift! My wife is primed for a phone call about now, if I don’t call, she knows I made it into troubleshoot­ing. She also knows that I feel good about troubleshoot­ing, don’t know why, but I am hop­ing that 5 years of field work will be to my advantage.

We are given a new paper that explains that we have to down­load con­fig­ur­a­tions into our routers and then find, fix and doc­u­ment as many prob­lems in the con­fig­ur­a­tion as pos­sible. You have three hours. Back to the lab.

Instantly I have a prob­lem. I can­not down­load my con­figs. Is this a part of the scen­ario ? I waste fif­teen pre­cious minutes check­ing and then real­ise the con­fig TFTP server must be shared, and that some­thing else is block­ing me. I check with the proc­tor, and, sure enough, one of the Day 1 people is using the wrong IP address­ing scheme is his lab pod. Bad day for him, the proc­tor was not impressed.

So I finally get to load the troubleshoot­ing con­figs into my lab pod and start troubleshoot­ing like a man pos­sessed. ATM inverse arp, Token Ring, OSPF Dial Backup, Network state­ment mis­con­fig­ur­a­tion, redis­tri­bu­tion loops and so on. The proc­tor col­lec­ted the pages of troubleshoot­ing notes to mark every hour or so. I had a feel­ing that he was sur­prised that I found so many, don’t know why, but I got a second wind.

At five thirty it was down tools, and go and sit in the lobby while he marked it up. I saw him go over to other guy doing troubleshoot­ing and tell him that he didn’t make it.

Did I make it ?

It took about twenty minutes for the proc­tor to come down the lift. Every minute was an age, I couldn’t read the look on his face as he approached me. He held out a busi­ness card with my num­ber on the back, and con­grat­u­lated me on passing. Shook my hand, and that was it.

I caught the lift down­stairs to the build­ing exit, and called my wife with the fant­astic news. And that is when it hit me. It was over and I could return to nor­mal life. No more all night study ses­sions, no more plan­ning the next study ses­sion or lab time. Weird to sit in the hotel room, alone, sur­roun­ded by study notes and and text books, and just stare at the wall.

Groupstudy post­ing

When we passed, we pos­ted in GroupStudy and here is mine:

Gentlefolks

I made my num­ber last week on my second attempt in Sydney, Australia.

I had slightly dif­fer­net meth­ods for pre­par­ing com­pared to what is nor­mally pos­ted here. I used a lot of text­books, white­pa­pers and CCO read­ing. My study plan allowed for each hour of lab time to have one hour of book/​study time.

The most dif­fi­cult part was build­ing a lab. It took me nearly 15 months, but once I had it together it was really only a mat­ter of time and energy.

Thanks to all those people who answered my ques­tions. I am off to enjoy my daugh­ter who arrived four weeks ago, and really hasn’t seen much of her dad, and her older sis­ter who rings to tell me to come home and play with her.

Somehow I have the feel­ing that my jour­ney is only beginning.

Regards

Greg Ferro
CCIE #6920

Wrapup

I don’t know if my jour­ney was inter­est­ing, but I hope you get some­thing from it. My best wishes to you if you decide to under­take the test.

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