[c-nsp] OT: CCIE Lab

[Derick Winkworth]

You should subscribe to the CCIE groupstudy list.  See
http://www.groupstudy.com/

Studying.  Practice.  Lots of practice.  I purchased the
InternetworkExpert end-to-end program and I completed all 30 of the
practice labs plus a couple of mock labs (Brian and Brian were great!). 
I did the live on-line classes and I watched the prerecorded ones
repeatedly.  I listened to the audio classes repeatedly. I also took the
first week of the NetMasterClass training.  Bruce, Val, and Bob are great!

I took notes in several different forms.  I used a tool called freemind
to make a massive mind-map.  I took traditional notes and highlighted
items in various texts.  I made close to one thousand flashcards for
particular items I needed help remembering.

All said, I spent 8 months, 4-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week preparing
for the lab.  Then I took and passed the lab.

Personally the one thing that helped me the most, more than anything,
was to admit that I knew far less about networking than I previously
thought.  I humbled myself greatly and I approached every topic as if I
was learning it anew.  I had a lot of false notions about how things
actually worked.   Also, you will realize during the actual hands-on
application of the various topics... that there are a lot of dead trees
in the form of books (including CiscoPress books) that are written very
poorly or are just plain wrong.  Even Cisco's documentation is very poor
or wrong in a lot of places.  The only way to really wrap your head
around some things is to read from multiple sources about it AND to then
build it in a lab and debug it.. in various scenarios and environments. 
A particularly enlightening exercise to try and reduce any scenario or
functionality to the absolute minimum amount of commands needed to do
it.  Then think carefully on what you removed and what the actual
purpose of it is.

Then take copious notes.

The end.

Mad Unix wrote:
> Can you please tell me, what *you* did to master Ccie Lab?
>
> your iput really appreciated.
>
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