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rolande
Certifiable
MVM,
join:2002-05-24
Dallas, TX
ARRIS BGW210-700
Cisco Meraki MR42

rolande to tubbynet

MVM,

to tubbynet

Re: [H/W] ccie "rack"

Best of luck tubbynet See Profile. I feel your pain. It has been 8 years since I passed my lab and I can still vividly recall the mental torture. If you hesitate or think too long, the clock becomes your enemy. You have to plan the work and work the plan. The day I passed, I was done with about an hour and a half to spare. That was almost worse because it gave me time to review too much and second guess myself.

tubbynet
reminds me of the danse russe
MVM
join:2008-01-16
Gilbert, AZ

tubbynet

MVM

said by rolande:

If you hesitate or think too long, the clock becomes your enemy. You have to plan the work and work the plan.

yes. its a definite mental slog -- that much became completely evident.
however -- i didn't think that the clock was a huge factor (call me insane and hear me out).
test is 100 points. 20 come from tshoot -- 80 from config. most sections are 2-3 points -- with 4-6 point sections in there. thats roughly 7-8 point sections that can be ignored and (if you're good) -- you can still hit the required 60 to pass the config. there were about 32 or 33 sections on my lab.
if i had prepped a little better (i.e. not made a decision to say that "x probably won't be on the test, i'll only review it once or twice") i could have swung quite a few more points my direction. maybe i can just type and copy/past fast -- i don't know.

this is -- of course -- comparing apples to oranges. your test rolande See Profile was an 8 hour config slog. they could put a ton of stuff at you in those 8 hours -- and i'm sure they could go deep as well as wide and you had to know your stuff inside and out and be fast on the keys.
the 6 hour test (from as best i can tell) -- is about precision of config as well as idiosyncrasy and nuance. they didn't give me "hard" config material. it was about how well did i understand a certain update message or how to control stp a certain way using vague or obscure references. it wasn't a "tough" config -- you just had to have a depth of knowledge to recall -- you may not even need it.

q.

rolande
Certifiable
MVM,
join:2002-05-24
Dallas, TX
ARRIS BGW210-700
Cisco Meraki MR42

rolande

MVM,

I haven't kept up on the changes to the lab exam. Sounds like they have tried to remove even more subjectivity from it. When I went through it, the key was that there were always "dependent" points on other sections and the global requirements list. If what you applied in your security section broke some other dependency like a routing protocol then you lost both the security points and the points for that particular routing protocol.

In my case, I had a traffic engineering requirement to force a next hop change on a p2mp interface for some specific criteria. When doing ping testing at the end it created a routing loop for one of the transit interfaces, so I couldn't ping that serial interface from one half of the lab environment. I questioned the proctor about the requirement for reachability to the transit interface and whether I needed to go rewrite my entire route map to account for the ping exception. He never gave me a definite answer but he went to the back room to check the exam key and when he came back he said "I don't think we score on that particular aspect".

tubbynet
reminds me of the danse russe
MVM
join:2008-01-16
Gilbert, AZ

tubbynet

MVM

they still have some of that in there.
my security section required the use of a time-based acl applied to an interface that had other interesting things going on. i had to make sure that when i applied the acl -- that other things that vlan were used for weren't broken.
a lot of the points were unique, however (and i'm not complaining). the biggest problem i had was just writing things off and not anticipating them being on the exam.

q.