CCIE R/S: I'm the best engineer I have ever been.

Walking out of the lab exam I can confidently say: “I am the best engineer I have ever been.”

I had originally scheduled my exam for Feb 14 and I am so glad I moved my date to April 2^nd. I am much better engineer than I was Feb 14. I’ve put in nearly an additional 100 hours labbing, I have learned quite a bit more and solved some complex topologies.

During the exam I remember reminding myself to smile, to just take a moment and take it all in. Soaking in the fact that this day has finally come and I’m really here, I’m really doing this. I smiled a few times during the exam, I looked around, nobody else was smiling.

I stayed at the Hampton Inn. It was nice, clean and I enjoyed it. They have a shuttle that will run you anywhere within 3 miles. I used it to grab dinner the night before. It also was the shuttle that took me to Cisco building 5 the morning of.

I arrived at Cisco a few minutes past 8:15am and was one of the last people to arrive. There was around 16 of us of varying tracts. Our ID’s we checked, we placed our lunch orders, received name tags and were escorted as a group to the testing room. It was the last room down a long hallway. Once in the room, our ID’s were checked again and we were assigned seats. There was no babying anyone here. Turn off your phones put all your personal items on the shelving in the back and sit down. Within 1 or two minutes we were told to begin.

Troubleshooting

This first section is “Troubleshooting”. It is 2-hours long with an option to extend 30 minutes. (This 30-minutes gets subtracted from your configuration section) I didn’t feel like I had enough points at the end of my 2-hours so, I chose to extend the additional 30-minutes. What I will say is, it is an amazing feeling when you can get your output to match the expected output. You really feel like you’ve won.

Diagnostics

Next is ‘Diagnostics’. I found this section to be the hardest of all. Out of all the labbing, reading and rehearsing I didn’t not prepare for the diagnostics portion, I don’t know if anyone does.

Configuration

I got started the configuration portion before lunch. I didn’t get too far before the proctor announced lunch time. It was that moment, I remember hearing other’s stories about their CCIE lab experience and talking about “the golden moment”. The golden moment is when everything is pingable(I think), you should achieve this before lunch. Well, I was way off from achieving ‘the golden moment’, but I wasn’t sweating it.

Lunch

When it was lunch time we were lead into the next room where our lunch bags were lined up. I remember seeing most people scarfing down their food and I couldn’t understand why. I was thinking to myself while watching them inhale, ‘slow down, this is your break, for some of us this might be the best part of our day.’ It was Jason’s Deli and well, Jason’s isn’t bad. I tried to take my time and enjoy myself because after all I’ve spent way too much time preparing for this day, for it just to become a smear of a memory. I wanted to experience all it had to offer… I want to savor every cent’s worth of my $1600 sandwich. I remember asking myself while enjoying my ‘deli club’, ‘now that I’ve seen the test, how could I have prepared better?’ and well, I guess I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve already committed all my free time, my weekends and my evenings where am I going to get more time from? Maybe that’s the key, it’s not the amount of time but the quality of studying during that time.

The Highs

Here’s where I was successful, for my first attempt:

• I had a good pace. While I didn’t complete all the sections I never felt panicked.
• I really used my templates. I templated anything that went on more than 1 router/device. I’m comfortable templating things. This comes from doing lots of labs, over and over. I had found some pretty quick ways to get through some large configs leveraging templating.
• The main protocol implementation and deployments I am very comfortable with. I didn’t struggle to implement any protocols (for the sections I completed). This confidence and experience comes from doing lots of labs, and implementing protocols many different ways.

The Lows (Face Palm Moments )

There were 2 or 3 items that I had to do twice. This didn’t take an extremely long time but looking back that was time I’ll never get back.

You might be asking: How could you do items twice?

I would read the requirements and template items out in notepad changing the part that needed to be changed per device and pasted them in. Only to find you forgot to change something like a router-id along the way so all your devices have the same router-id. 🤦

Or one time I was pasting in configs from a template I created and realized I made a mistake. So, to clear-out the entire configs section so I can re-paste it all in, I did a ‘no router [protocol]‘ and removed the whole protocol, only to realize later this protocol was preconfigured on the router so I accidentally removed all the pre-configurations along with my changes. I was able to recover from this mistake, but it took a while to rebuild. 🤦

The Interface is Terrible

I have only 1 complaint about the CCIE R&S lab exam: The interface which has the tickets/tasks, topologies and files is terrible. Over the past year I’ve used a combination of INE and Cisco 360 lab materials. I’ve labbed my own topologies as well as Narbiks material using a variety of EVE-NG, GNS3 or whatever is provided form vendors. All of which have better interactivity with the devices and clearer diagrams to understand.

Even with this being extremely frustrating this will not be the reason I fail (if I failed). I would’ve failed because I didn’t understand some of the requirements. Most of the items were clear but I had a hard time distilling down what was expected in the ‘end-state’.

I felt the difficulty level was below what I was expecting.

What's life all about?

After it was all over I find myself contemplating life. I was in the Uber ride heading to the airport and saw a nice bit of thick green grass in between an exit-ramp and overpass. There were varying patches of wild-flowers coloring the green backdrop. I wanted to get out a roll around like a dog scratching his back.

 I’m wondering why would anyone put as much time into something as I have, just to fail? I mean all the time I spent away from my family. All the event’s I had to declined… and for what? I mean what is networking? Networking is nothing more than pushing around theoretical ones and zeros. What’s the point?

Enough already! Did you pass or not?

People have been asking “did you pass or not?”, to which I’m replying, “does it matter?”. I’m not checking my results for 1-week. Instead I’m going to celebrate with my family and friends and live life. I don’t feel like I passed but at least for 1 week I’m going to walk around feeling like a champion.

You see, if I check my results and find-out I failed, my whole week of celebration I’ll have in the back of my head the stress of labbing more, reading more, watching more videos, missing my family and declining more events. So, I’m putting it off for 1-week so I can celebrate stress free. Then, after 1-week I’ll take a look and see if Cisco invites me back to take the test again 😉

I'm not looking, nope, nope, nope.