Hi All,

Since my last post regarding my CCIE# i have received countless unicasts from different professionals asking for advice on how to start their studies and how i did it in the first attempt. Finally since I am still resting and evaluating Job Offers in my mailbox :) , I have decided to write my journey towards becoming a ccie. I couldn't find any better place than the GS itself so pardon me if you don't like the size of it. Here it goes, pardon me for any typos and NO I don't work for any workbook vendor ;), telling ya straight.

I started preparing for the CCIE roughly 4 years ago when i did the CCIE Routing & Switching Training from a local institute during my studies. But then I entered in the professional field, got married ;) and things slowed down to a halt due to my OTHER activities.

I started my personal goal again over 1.5 years ago but things were going very slow, until i finally decided to take CCIE Certification Seriously and devote time and resources to it, i started studying in nights and on whole weekends. For Practicing I was in search of low-cost lab equipment when a friend told me about dynamips as a Cisco 7200 Router Simulator; i was impressed with the performance and its ease of use. I immediately started searching for its features, configuration settings and found a detailed article from Brian Mcghan of internetworkexpert explaining dynamips, furthermore the HACKI's forum was very much helpful in the initial stages of dynamips / dynagen experiences.

I tuned, tweaked and optimized dynamips configuration files and idlepc values for one month while practicing my Routing Techniques on it, and it was in JANUARY 2007. A CCIE Friend told me about internetworkexpert.com. And also about the groupstudy.com, At that time I didn't have a clear view of what to study how to do it and what to practice for the CCIE due to a number of topics being covered in the R&S Program. Brian's detailed CCIE R&S Topics list in their Free Resources section helped me enormously till the last day for tracking my performance and topics to cover.

I already had a strong base in IGP and BGP but i was weak in Advanced Switching, QoS, Security and Multicasting. For getting an edge in non-core topics i reviewed KnowledgeNet QoS and Multicast. I polished my security and Switching skills using the Cisco DocCD.

Afterwards, i started viewing Class on Demand Videos of Internetwork Expert. After digesting that video of several hours in one month by seeing it again and again. I started doing Advanced Technology Labs on Dynamips. It took me another one and a half month to finish them off
completely and tuning Dynamips Topological File for Advanced Technology Labs, i changed the interfaces, switch connections and frame-relay topology to suit my needs. Some Tasks were not supported in Dynamips such as Dot1x Tunneling, VLAN ACLs, RSPAN, Dynamic Trunking etc. so i skipped them and lateron rented a rack several times for practicing those specific topics. During this time, i reviewed the CoD countless times to gain a deeper understanding of
technologies.

My next move was to purchase a dedicated dynamips server to support my topology as my laptop was not enough for it, i purchased an AMD Athlon 64 4400+ with 2 GiG RAM as a dynamips server machine. Here Scott Vermillion came to the rescue as I was using Windows as my primary OS but I failed miserably in running the full topology, Scott insisted and encouraged me to use linux as at that time he was using MacOSX.

You can find my huge post in the GS Archives.

I started doing the Core-Labs as my next move to improve my IGP, BGP and Redistribution skills, additional one month just for the 10 Labs, they surely were hard as i think now :). Core Labs were done easily done on the Dynamips Server that i had purchased because they focused
on IGP, Redistribution and BGP the most. Switching was mostly simple and when i was stuck with an unsupported task, i always skipped it and did them later on a rented rack if I had the chance.

Finally i started R&S Workbook Labs, the first five labs were just warm up labs as the authors said but they looked really hard to me at the first glance, they can be done using Dynamips but some tasks were skipped in Switching. Initially it took me 3 days to finish only one lab with research on every topic. When i reached Lab5 i gained speed, accuracy and got familiar with most of the problems. Lab5 was done in 13 Hours in first attempt on my dynamips.

I continued doing the workbook labs 6,7,8,9 and 10. The hardest of all was Lab 7 which again took me two days to figure out. After finishing Lab10 i almost knew all of the problems and i could solve most of the tasks at the back of my head. Labs 11 - 13 i did with a pencil just to
save some time. Then I did all the remaining 14 – 20 Labs. Next, I rented rack equipment and did several labs on them again. Again My CCIE friend came to rescue and generously gave access to his own rack with 9 Routers and 2 3550's I used it to do Labs again and gained some speed and accuracy. Thanks Ghias for that.

In total I did the IE Labs 3 times on different equipment, 1st time on Dynamips, 2nd time on rented rack and third time on Physical Rack. Finally, in the last month, I reviewed most of the content again, reviewed the Class on Demand Videos to refresh some of the topics such as Catalyst QoS (freely available on internetworkexpert free resources section), IP/IOS Services, Multicasting, Security and BGP. I took references from the DocCD to memorize where to find stuff like Router Menus, WCCP, Nat, Reflexive ACLs, CBAC, IGMP Filtering, Multicast Stub
Routing, IPv6 etc.

I sat for lab in dubai on 22nd Jan 2008 and fortunately attained the number in the first attempt. For the last 2 nights i couldn't sleep and i just kept on praying and building strategies like should i do frame-relay first restart the routers then go on switching or the otherway around etc etc..

Well, I hope this LONG LONG Post will help most of the people who emailed me for guidance on how to start and where to search the material. I specifically used IE Material but I have also seen other vendor's workbooks such as IPEXPERT, IEMENTOR, Soup-to-Nuts etc. and I
have found them equally good for practicing the labs. It's a personal preference and what your company/budget allows you to purchase. Lastly, i would say, this was my technique, i cannot guarantee that following this one could lead you to success but it worked for me. I did the core-labs first, authors dont recommend this way, but i did it.

Regards,
--
Farhan Anwar
CCIE #19871
www.farhananwar.com