Study Habits Of Ccie

By Author: yvonne
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First, you should print out the Exam Blueprint of your chosen
CCIE Workbooks and get some folders and notebooks. Now, start playing. No, really, I mean it. Play around with the equipment, trying out different configurations and conditions.

Reference books and study guides on the CCIE lab go through, in detail, various protocols and network links and everything else you'll need to know. They often have sample labs or mini-scenarios for each topic.

Need more? How about free stuff? It's called the Documentation CD and it's from Cisco themselves. Look at the IOS configuration guides, or the Catalyst 3550 configuration guides, for example. These provide some configuration explanations of each of the things that IOS has to offer.

That'll keep you up-to-date on all the CCIE-related Cisco technologies; but take it all one step at a time. As I've said before, walk before you run. As you build up your experience, you'll gradually start adding things together.

Start with the basics, then look at what you've built and ask yourself, How can I make this more complicated? ...
... And always remember to redo things—you'll learn things quicker with repetition and practice. Though they might've looked simple and easy enough in your books, real life is tough and things might not work out as they do on paper.

This can be a good thing. Besides strengthening your basic understanding of Cisco technologies, you need to learn what to do when things go badly. Believe me, they will go badly. If you're in the middle of your eight-hour ccie routing and switching lab and things go badly, you'll need the experience—and patience—to conquer these obstacles.

Know your show commands and your debug commands. Your routers will have this obnoxious habit of doing what you tell them to do, which may not necessarily be what you want them to do. But on the other hand, with the proper show/debug commands, the router will also tell you exactly what is happening. It's then up to you to interpret and react to that. Troubleshooting will become invaluable not only for the lab but for real life as well.

So, how well do you need to know your stuff? Remember when I said this wasn't a reality-based exam? I wasn't lying. In real life, we run our networks, but they aren't inherently difficult to maintain. Typically, we'll run frame-relay links as point-to-point subinterfaces. Why? Because, that's the easy way. Things just work! On the CCIE lab, life isn't that simple. Why? Because the proctors are evil? No, not really. But what does it mean for Cisco to put their stamp of approval on you as an expert in the field? I hope it means you can do more than regurgitate configurations using point-to-point subinterfaces on frame-relay links! Though it works, knowing those simple configurations doesn't demonstrate you know anything about how the underlying technology works.

However, if you ever run into a network in real life that's designed like a ccie voice lab boot camp, hunt down the person who designed it and duct-tape that person to his/her chair! Bad lab rat! Bad!