@showipintbri - CCIEorBust - Attempt #2

hi everybody I'm Tony at show IP interface brief and and I'm here to talk about my CCIE attempt I am nervous nervously shaking and sweating profusely on this side of the camera it has been one hell of a journey for sure but I wanted to try and talk a little bit about what actually sitting for the lab was like for those of you who are planning on sitting for the lab sitting for the lab shortly and and who CCI you might be in your future so you kind of know a little bit what to expect and and what I have seen so so this is gonna be fun so as most people do when they get ready for their CCIE right they arrived the day before right it's almost impossible logistically to to arrive the day of the morning of almost impossible you have to arrive the day before and I like to arrive the morning before and that's so I have enough time to settle in I find my hotel I get my uber I figure out what I'm gonna do for dinner and and that's so important about just like setting yourself right about just like getting yourself ready it's a very nervous ordeal right you got to fly into another state you're so for most of you it's probably gonna be a different time zone you got to deal with new people you're in a hotel room it's unfamiliar so it's important to take that time to sort of settle in because you'll develop you'll become anxious even the day before this so that's my recommendation so fortunately in anticipation for going for this CCIE lab attempt I flew in Wednesday morning my test was on was on Thursday morning and so I had the opportunity to meet some cool people some some folks that I planned on meeting through Twitter and and I know this isn't relevant to my CCIE score reveal but I kind of want to circle back around to this at the end here I flew in Wednesday I had a friend who was taking his exam Wednesday morning excuse me uh Wednesday during the day after his exam he wanted to meet up for dinner and I invited another guy so shout out to Matt and John it was awesome hanging out with you guys meet up with another guy and we all three of us went out to dinner having never met before but we're sort of when you're part of this CCIE effort you're in this sort of brotherhood I mean even for women as well you're in this sort of brotherhood this this group everyone knows what you've been through everyone is sympathetic to one another and it's so important to have to have those those people with you it's this is a journey we're studying for the CCIE is mostly something you do alone you do alone because you sit at your computer and you study alone you read the books alone it's not really a group effort but there are lots of people out there her doing it alone and it's so important to sync up with those people and that's what we did Wednesday night we went we had dinner so shout out to 10:50 BBQ in Richardson Texas that place was awesome that was the most phenomenal barbecue I've ever had in my life I'm on the East Coast so we don't have great barbecue out here but anyhow it was awesome to sync up with those guys and just talk about CCIE attempts and study strategies and how much effort you put in and how do your families cope with it and and just sort of meet people and become friends about over that common bond that sort of stitches us all together that's CCIE and it's so important because you feel like at that moment when you're with people that you're not alone that you're not alone doing this no matter how hard it gets no matter how hard the journey whether you pass whether you fail you're not alone you're not the first person to pass this test and you're not the last person to fail it right you're not alone others have have been through it as well so it's important to sync up I want to give a shout out to everyone in the chat this is really awesome running on empty land taymyr I got Dhawan in there man we got soo folks I have to scroll up it's really really really awesome to have everybody in my corner in fact this was one of the things we talked about when I was with friends Wednesday night well it's about positivity it's so important to to share positivity with one another and that's what everyone gives me on Twitter when I say hey I'm going for my CC IU lab attempt you know wish me luck and everyone's back there just good luck Tony you got this it's so important to surround yourself with positivity it helps your confidence and when you're mine when you're confident in yourself your mind becomes clearer and enables you to perform better you know it definitely does so positivity is important but I want to share something with you I have this long discussion Wednesday night positivity is not motivation those are two different things and it's important to know what your motivation is and surround yourself with positivity the two go hand-in-hand but they are separate things so make sure you share positivity with everybody that's what's so awesome about this group is everyone has been so positive that hopefully that positivity radiates into other groups into other parts of your lives so I hope it it grows bigger than it is all right so let's get down into test day all right that's what everyone came here to find out but I wanted to take some mind time to share the story about test day because as most of you saw it made headline news there was a network outage Thursday morning so my hotel is right across the street from the Cisco campus so the shuttle drops me off right at the front this is my second time at this so I kind of knew the route and I knew what to expect drops me off right out front I go inside there's about eight maybe ten people inside already and the the receptionist at the front desk says hey sorry the systems are down so I can't check you guys in on the computer I just need to see everyone's ID and we'll just do this manually so so we were like okay you know the Internet's down well that shouldn't be a big deal at least I thought it wasn't a big deal I did notice when I tried to get on the the Internet SSID they have broadcasts and the in the campus there that I didn't have internet access I was on it I don't know if that's because I wasn't allowed on the network or what but but I expected to have Wi-Fi there and I didn't so they checked us in and and most people are checking their phones and just you know having small talk and other people had heard that like hey there's a internal Cisco Network outage and it's pretty widespread no one knew the source or the cause but you got to think when you're getting ready to take your CCIE lab exam this is a rehearsed event right this is something that you prepare your mind for you prepare your body for you try to imagine it in your head so there's no mistakes but also you expect that the day itself that they're gonna start on time that it's gonna you know your sections are gonna line up at exactly the right times and you just don't expect a crazy delay now we're not the only group that had a crazy delay other groups have but it was a crazy delay in the fact that like for some reason and I don't know the logistics or the the mechanics of how the CCIE lab is hosted but it knocked out the CCIE lab we could not perform the lab we couldn't start so we were basically just hanging out in the lobby and I don't know maybe there was maybe 20 of us I'm not sure how many people sit in the can fit in the room about 20 of us and we're just hanging out in the lobby and as it you know starts to progress from about 8:15 to about 8:30 the proctor comes out Leon and he said hey there's a network outage so we're gonna try and get everything up and working for you guys should be no more than two hours he says and he says if we can't get it up in in about two hours I'll have my director come out and talk to you guys now I don't know if that was ever the intention and I always heard that they can delay up to two hours and then they have to issue you maybe like some sort of voucher or refund or something I don't know a different test day I don't know what would have happened if they cancelled the lab that day so all of us are anxiously waiting around 8:30 a.m. nothing 8:45 a.m. nothing 9:00 a.m. nothing no one knows really what's going on we're all checking Twitter or some people work for Cisco so maybe they have some friends at other campuses that find out they're like hey they don't have access network access either we don't have access they don't have access so it goes 9:15 9:30 you know I put a tweet out there that said like hey fun fact Cisco's global internal network is down and this somehow affects the CCIE lab and and I just just kind of making a joke because I had time and and thank you JT for pointing it out but TechCrunch actually picked up my tweet and referenced me in saying that the learning portal was down so I thought that was pretty cool I've never been in part of headline news at all so I'm sort of like a subcomponent there may be a very irrelevant small sub component but that was kind of cool so as we're approaching like the 10 a.m. mark we're like we're all looking around like do we have to go home I had planned my Thursday that I was taking the last flight out of Love Field Dallas Love Field back to BWI where I'm from I was taking the last flight to make sure I had plenty of buffer room bid the end of the exam lots of time to over back to the airport get through security get on the plane get something to eat and and and catch my flight but as they keep bumping our schedule down it's 10:00 a.m. and I don't know what I'm gonna do so finally it's getting to the point where I needed to call my wife and say honey I need you to log in and reschedule me a flight I need the next available flight and and we talked to logistics a little bit and I just left it in her hands and and I hung up the phone with her and within five minutes of me asking her to do that Leon came out and said okay we're all ready to take the exam so now we're going into the exam it was I think after ten it was after ten when we when we got started that was really late so my phone was off and I never had time to resync up with my wife to find out if new accommodations had been made so that was pretty hairy and that was something that our group all of us there that we sort of all share that bond you know we're all just you know we got an opportunity to meet each other and talk to each other I want to circle back around to the point after I do my reveal we got to I get to meet some cool people and I found out that one of the folks lives near me you know about an hour or so away but lives near me and that his wife works for the company that is next door to my company so I get to see you know their office every morning and that's just super cool being able to have that human networking experience it's so important beyond all the technical stuff that we do it is really really really cool to meet people and talk to people and so I encourage all of you when you have that opportunity and you guys are all studying for CCIE together you're all it's studying for certifications you share a bond already just start the dialogue and you'll you'll really you really make friends over that so we all have this bond of being late for our CCIE lab but once we all went back to the room it was business as usual we all line up we all sign in we show our IDs and we get assigned a workstation now for anyone who hasn't taken CCIE before it is broken up into three sections there's a troubleshooting section a Diagnostics section and a configuration section the troubleshooting section is where you have to solve trouble tickets there's ten tickets I think I don't know if it's ten every time for everybody but there's roughly ten tickets you have two hours to solve ten tickets some of them are easier 1.2 points some of them are harder three point four point and you can really go deep down the rabbit hole of troubleshooting something and when you do that you waste a lot of time right because you have ten other tickets to solve so it's really about time management and execution that's really where a lot of your professional your expert level skill comes in the troubleshooting section is for two hours but you have the ability to borrow 30 minutes from your configuration section in case you don't finish all your tickets so you can kind of bump it out to two and a half hours well I took my two and a half hours I took it because I needed it while I was working my troubleshooting section I got to about ticket number five and I was only about 40 minutes into my time and I was actually thinking to myself like oh my god this is so easy I'm gonna Ace this thing and little did I know they had a couple of hard tickets buried in there right after I done my own posture assessment to figure out how much time I had left and I got into some tickets that really took my time and they ate up a lot of my time so the point that when the two hours was over I looked at my sheet which is a little notepad that I keep track of my score of what I think my score is gonna be and I realized I don't have enough to pass and if you fail any one section of your CCIE lab you fail the whole thing so I know that I can't just fail this first section or the rest of the day is a bust so I took my extra 30 minutes and continued to work the tickets and I'm so glad I did I'm not sure because I haven't checked yet I'm not sure but I'm almost positive I passed the troubleshooting section by my count I would have gotten eight out of the ten tickets of varying point ranges but eight out of the ten tickets I solved I feel confident about but it took me two and a half hours and I didn't solve them all so immediately after that section bumps you right into diag now I have diag as my most difficult section I absolutely hate diag it's short for Diagnostics it's where they give you some output they give you some configuration snippets some showcase some show command snippets and a scenario that's supposed to resemble like an email thread going back and forth between a user or a network administrator and maybe an engineer and they're asking for help on why a user can't reach from A to B and you're not allowed to log into any devices you can't log into any devices you just have to look at the output and based on your expert level experience make an assessment of the type of question they'll ask you is what device is at fault and what command or what show command can prove it or what command can fix it and so you have to do those both items and I feel like those answers are so subjective it's really up to you and how you process the data and what command would you choose maybe there is a more correct answer I don't know but I feel like you know it's very typical of how people describes Cisco exam sometimes where they'll give you three right answers and you have to choose one but only one of them is the correct answer I kind of feel that way around diag a lot of the time there's many right answers I feel personally feel but maybe there's the most correct one so I can clearly tell you now if I'm making a prediction I have no idea if I pass Dayak I would say probably not historically I've had a lot of trouble with diak after diag the window closes down and a new window opens and you have to begin your configuration portion of the exam and normally you begin configuration and you have enough time to do just a little bit before you have to take lunch and that's precisely what happened to to all of us most of us got started our configuration and and we had to get ready for lunch so as soon as I start my configuration I took tips from a lot of the study groups a lot of the tips come out a router gods it's a great community full of a lot of CC IES who have passed their test all right they've already done it and so you get to learn from their experience and their advice and most of them talk about a building a sheet sort of a grid on a piece of paper and a way to keep track of the tasks the point value of those tasks and whether or not you've completed them so you and your mind can keep track of where you are in the lab in case you need to bounce around or in case you want to target particular tasks so before lunch broke I had enough time to sort of to sort of lay out my grid I looked over the entire lab tasks made some notes on on things and when I saw the configuration topology I almost chuckled a little bit I I saw the topology and I kind of did like one of these where I was like looked around like I was like john travolta and pulp fiction I was like this topology is much simpler than my first time around I'm not gonna break any NDA's I'm not gonna describe it or anything like that but I would say it was a far different style topology and a far I would say just visually a far different difficulty level and so I couldn't believe it I said oh my god I think I'm gonna Ace this thing and so I felt really good starting the configuration I did have a little bit of a slow start start reading through the tasks and you start deciphering the tasks and grouping things and config so that you know you can jump right on devices and start banging it out as fast as you can furiously type and I found myself sort of being a little bit disorganized and this is just one of those things where you can't predict what's gonna happen when you're caught up in the heat of the moment when the lab hits you you know you just you just take it in and the lab had set me up for a little bit of confusion and gave me kind of a slow start and and I checked my time and I realized I was a little bit behind schedule so I ended up something that happened to me on my first attempt and happened to me this time while I'm doing configuration they'll ask you to like you know form an adjacency between two routers you know many routers but you know between two routers or a tunnel or you know all kinds of different sort of adjacencies between two things and if those two things don't come up you spent some time troubleshooting and I have gone way down the troubleshooting hole in configuration where I probably should not have I should have stopped looked at the clock backed out and continued with configuration in hopes that I just catch that that problem but it's just sort of my nature that I want to just chisel away at little problems until I find out you know until I troubleshoot it and solve it and move on so I wasted a little bit of time in configuration solving problems shortly after we went to lunch lunch is provided by Cisco it's a deli sandwich you get to choose your options they give you a sheet you check out what sandwich you want and they order for you and then lunch arrives at whatever time lunch arrives you go into another room to eat lunch a neighboring room and and my very first CCIE lab attempt that lunchroom was dead silent you could only hear the crunching of chips and the in the background no one spoke no one said anything and lunch was over in ten minutes because everyone ran right back into the the configuration room when we were allowed to this time it went a little bit longer it was a little bit slower paced lunch and I'm glad we actually it was silent for about the first ten minutes everyone was just eating and the look on everyone's face and I had the same look to that everyone was contemplating what the hell they just went through and how they can fix whatever problem that they were facing I was doing the same thing I was having an issue before lunch with bpdu guard I misconfigured a bpdu guard problem and I thought I could take it off of an interface and take it off of the config and it would solve itself but for some reason it didn't and in the lab you can reboot devices but if you reboot a device you lose the config and the work that you've done on that device so while I was eating my lunch the only thing that was going through my head was how the hell do I solve this problem and I resolved myself - you know what you have to go back and reboot that device I am so glad I did because when I got when lunch was over I went back in I rebooted the device that I'd planned on it and my problem went away and I put in as quickly as I could the config that I thought was in there that would still yield me points so the I mean rebooting a device is not something that I did on my first attempt I don't know how many different tracks you often how often anyone reboots devices but for me reboot fixed it and I wish now that I did that in the beginning if if they can figure if the CLI isn't responding the way that you want it reboot that sucker put the config back in if they reboot very quickly so you're not losing time and and as I move on for the rest of the day right after lunch we probably had about four hours left to go ahead and and finish our lab it was all configuration I was going as furiously as I could it was it felt very familiar I've used a lot of study material I've used Cisco 360 or the expert level training materials I've done I Andes materials Jazeera labs for CCIE labs and I've even been to NAR Beck's boot camp so I've had a lotta meat I've been working at this for a while so I've had a look accumulated a lot of resources over the years and and if you've done labs from each of those vendors when you approach a configuration land like the CCIE lab there are parts of it that seem familiar right because there are only so many ways you can connect routers and so many problems you can have so some stuff seems familiar and it certainly did this time it felt very familiar I felt very confident about it and I'm configuring along and I think I'm doing ok I feel pretty good my timings ok and and I'm working it and I'm working it and I'm checking the time the tide where I was sitting the clock was up over to my left I kept checking the time making sure I was ok and you find yourself in these troubleshooting holes and I have and I wasted a lot of time with that and it made it so I couldn't complete all of the tasks in configuration and I think that's what's probably going to hurt me right the fact that if I executed all of my components correctly and the couple of tasks that I left incomplete I might still be able to pass but if any of the tasks that I already completed weren't completed correctly or completely as this script or however they grade it expects then the uncompleted task the in completed tasks are just going to add deficit to my points so that's where I kind of am at the end of the day I walked out of there feeling really good on troubleshooting absolutely hating at the at the absolute most the diag section and and not fully completing the configuration and I really think that might come back to bite me so after I completed my first CCIE lab I got a lot of support from the community and I tried to just keep barreling ahead and and I made a little video about this but I fell into a little bit of a depression were actually stopped laughing for a bit and stopped studying and just focused on just spending some time with my family catching up on housework and I kind of just like sat out most of the summer and it wasn't until I met a whole bunch of you at Cisco live who said that following my CCIE journey was really beneficial in motivation for whatever certification you're going through that it really made me think you know what I can do this this is an attainable thing this isn't impossible lots of people have gotten CC II's already in so can i and and that really charged me to get back into it and ever since this go live I've been charging ahead and getting back into it and getting after it and with a new mindset so the the reason I bring that up is because whatever my results are today which I'm almost ready to reveal I'm gonna get logged in whatever my results are today the only thing I want is I don't want it to beat me last time it beat me I got beat up by my results I fell into depression and I didn't want to carry on this time no matter what even if I pass I want to carry on I want to become better than passing and if I fail I want to carry on until I pass but I don't want to let it beat me I want to keep pushing through and let's rock and roll so I'm gonna try and get logged in you guys can't see my screen I think I have a link in my mail okay your school report can be viewed online here I'm really nervous right now I'm sweating like crazy you can't really see it my hands are shaking a little bit and here we go again who knows username in password it's still password one with a capital P I told my kids I would let them do my reveal so I'm not looking at the screen right now I know it's up in front of me I'm gonna go grab them I didn't look yet let's see what's it say here this one okay love you love you and love you too we'll have some we'll have some pie in just a few minutes all right that is a fail so so now so now we now we take some time to enjoy this with the family they got me a celebratory pie so I'm gonna have some some awesome pie and and enjoy it with my family enjoy them this weekend and spend some time with them and then next week we will be coming up with a new strategy and a new way to study and hopefully I can grab another lab date before February 24th and and that's gonna be my plan now I did say I wanted to circle back around to something that I started in this video with and that was about when I went out to dinner the night before my test and about how important that is to to be with people who understand the struggle and then again to meet the people who you're going to sit in the cci you with and meeting them and learning who they are and and trying to talk to most of them in their names it's important because out of all of my studies and all of this effort and everything that I have been through all the technical knowledge and technical things that I've learned about routing and switching and everything has been great but the best part about this is about all of the friends that I've made along the way I've met some incredible people who are thought leaders in the industry I've met some of the top people in this industry through through working through this and and and and I've made great friends along the way so so that's my best takeaway is keep grinding keep studying keep working those certs getting the knowledge but make some friends along the way right enjoy your time learn your peers and have fun and that's what I'm gonna do and I go have fun with my family we're gonna eat some pie alright that's all for me I love you all I got to go put my kids to bed thank you all for for being with me and I am shaped nervously shaking and at the verge of tears but it's gonna be okay and we're gonna get through it thanks guys see ya

Channel: Tony E

Views: 715

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: 100DaysOfLabbing, CCIEorBUST, CCIE

Id: lqLSV_nCAQQ

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019