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[Last Updated: Thursday, 26-Apr-2007 22:19:26 EDT]
 #14618
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I finally PASSED the CCIE Routing & Switching Lab Exam today, May 5th
2005, out at RTP in North Carolina!
I have been studying for the CCIE exam for almost 3 years now. I am proud
and ecstatic to announce that I finally passed today out at RTP in North
Carolina. I just got back into Chicago and found out about an hour ago. So
I am wired to say the least.
I came out of the exam feeling very confident that I had passed it. I knew
I had absolutely nailed it. The worst part was having to endure the
torture of waiting and not knowing the whole way home. I kept second
guessing all kinds of issues that I ran into. The mind can be an evil
thing when it is left to its own devices...
Anyway, I am so happy and thankful that this chapter of my life has
finally come to an end (so are my wife and kids). I already packed my
library of Cisco Press books back onto my bookshelf and powered my lab
rack down. Yeehaw! I can actually have my life back and stop spending all
my nights and weekends studying my butt off in the basement. What a huge
burden off my shoulders. Now I might actually be able to interact with
humans again instead of routers and switches. I never thought I could get
sick of working on this stuff, but I proved myself wrong.
Time to book at least a 2 week vacation to St. Somewhere.
For those that are interested, here is my Lab in my basement. This is where I spent all of my spare time preparing to take the CCIE Routing & Switching Lab exam. Fortunately the whine of the fans on all this gear does not carry throughout the house. The nice thing is I added some APC remote start power supplies which allow me to leave the rack powered down and I can fire it up at any time from anywhere remotely.
I collected a lot of this gear off of eBay and some of it was spare hardware from the office. This is about the bare minimum of equipment you need to run through many of the practice lab scenarios. The only equipment I am missing is an LS1010 ATM switch and a couple of ATM modules for my 2600's. That gets quite a bit pricey, so I just rented lab time for that since it was an insignificant amount of material to cover with respect to all the other topics.
If you think I am an extreme geek, then you haven't seen anything yet. Check out Scott Morris' lab...the only non Cisco employee to have 4 CCIE certifications! The man is a machine when it comes to this stuff.
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I now have a BlueCoat proxy server for WCCP testing. I upgraded my backbone
routers for route injection to 2610's with an additional 3rd one. I added a
second 2523 router to act as an extended frame-relay switch for more port
density. I upgraded R6 to a 3725 with dual FastE's and shifted some of the
routers around. I also added 2 APC MasterSwitches for remote power up and
shutdown capability, so I don't have to run all my gear around the clock
and waste power.
BlueCoat SG400-1 Proxy server Cisco 2523 Frame-Relay Switch (2T, 8A/S, 1BRI-S/T, 1R) Cisco Catalyst 3550 EMI Switch #1 Cisco 3620 (NM-1E2W, WIC-1T, NM-1E1R) Cisco 3620 (NM-1E2W, WIC-1T, WIC-1B-U, NM-1E2W) Cisco 2610 (1E, WIC-2T, WIC-1B-U, NM-4A/S) Cisco 2611XM (1FE, WIC-1T, NM-1V, WIC-2FXS) Cisco 3725 (2FE, WIC-2T, WIC-1B-U) Cisco 2620 AIM VPN/EP (1FE, WIC-2T) Cisco 2610 Terminal Server (1E, NM-32A/S, WIC-1AM) Teltone ISDN Simulator (with 2 BRI U Interfaces) Cisco 2523 Frame-Relay Switch (2T, 8A/S, 1BRI-S/T, 1R) Cisco Catalyst 3550 EMI Switch #2 Cisco 2621XM (2FE, WIC-2T, WIC-1B-U) Cisco 2610 (1E, WIC-1T) Cisco 2610 (1E) Cisco 2610 (1E) 2 APC MasterSwitch AP9225 w/AP9606 SmartCard 8 port rack mount PDU Not pictured... Cisco 2620 (1E, WIC-2T, WIC-1B-U) Cisco 2610 (1E, WIC-2T) 1 x Cisco 2523 (2T, 8A/S, 1BRI-S/T, 1R) 2 x Cisco 2501 (1E, 2S) Cisco 2503 (1E, 2S, 1BRI-S/T) Cisco 2520 (1E, 2S, 2A/S, 1BRI-S/T) 2 x Cisco Catalyst 3524XL Cisco Catalyst 3548XL 7 x Cisco Catalyst 2924 Cisco Catalyst 3920 24 port Token Ring MAU |
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Here you can see the lovely mess of cables stringing all of this together. It is kind of hard to do cable management on the pile of ethernet, serial, and console connections. I was previously using back to back 6 foot DB-60 to v.35 cables which was a nightmare. I have since replaced all of those cables with 3 foot back-to-back DB-60 DCE to DTE cables and DB-60 DCE to SmartSerial DTE cables which cleaned up quite a bit of mess. I cleaned up a lot of this cabling using velcro tie straps last summer before we moved. I never posted an updated picture and I still have yet to get everything fully cabled up again. I'll post an update when I do. |
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Below are a few of the books that I have spent a lot of time reading, memorizing and practicing lab scenarios from over the past 2 years. CCIE Routing & Switching Exam Certification GuideCCIE Fundamentals: Network Design and Case Studies Routing TCP/IP Volume I Routing TCP/IP Volume II CCIE Practical Studies Volume I CCIE Practical Studies Volume II Cisco LAN Switching Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols Cisco BGP-4 Command and Configuration Handbook OSPF Network Design Solutions IS-IS Network Design Solutions Troubleshooting Remote Access Networks Building Scalable Cisco Networks Developing IP Multicast Networks Internetworking IPv6 with Cisco Routers Integrating Voice and Data Networks 
I have since added the following books to my collection:
Internet Routing ArchitecturesBGP Design and Implementation CCIE Routing and Switching Practice Labs Designing Content Switching Solutions CCIE Security Exam Certification Guide JUNOS Cookbook Configuring Netscreen (Juniper) Firewalls |
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