There’s been a lot of conversations and much consternation about the verbal portion of the CCIE lab that has been added to the R&S track. To borrow from Shakespeare I think that this is much ado about nothing. As we prepare for a CCIE the motivation is to become experts in the industry – to stand out from the throng of network engineers worldwide. Part of that preparation was a lot of theoretical study for the written exam and a fair bit of rack time to prepare for the lab exam. Theory plus application equals expertise.

So here’s my question for today: what’s the worst thing that could happen to the CCIE program?

My answer is: people who cheat still passing thus detracting from the certification’s value.

Almost every IT industry certification has been compromised due to the nature of multiple choice exams and the natural human desire to pass by the easiest possible method.  The CCIE is one of the few that has remained valuable due to the requirement to sit through a challenging lab and thus prove your skills. Even that process is now in jeopardy, hence Cisco’s new requirement to validate theoretical knowledge during the open-ended questions at the beginning of the lab.

My advice to people studying for the lab is: don’t panic and don’t change your study method. Our students are still passing due to proper preparation and dedication. When they read the books on the required reading list (see my post So Much Information Part One for a list of books to read) and study for the lab with high quality preparation materials the open ended questions are dismissed (as they should be) as easy and not worth thinking about.

I want each and every one of you to go away and think about this: most CCIE’s who I’ve spoken to describe the CCIE as the greatest intellectual accomplishment of their lifetime. In that context, is having to answer a few basic questions to safeguard that accomplishment really something worth worrying about?

Study hard, do labs and we’ll see you with your number sometime soon.

Cheers,

Jared

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Cisco’s documentation site is a wealth of knowledge for CCIE candidates and network engineers generally. The vast amounts of pure information make it the ideal place to build up the breadth in your repertoire of technological expertise. The drawback that goes with such a large collection is document management.

Pretty much every engineer I’ve encountered who uses Cisco technologies loved the UniverCD (www.cisco.com/univercd) website for its intuitive interface and logical method of presenting data. Perhaps a part of that was that this site was also the only allowable source of information for CCIE candidates during their lab exam – so familiarity bred comfort. Times change, companies grow and even within technology companies the logical, analytical approach to presentation subsides and the graphical, right-brained sales and marketing mentality kicks in where form increases at the expense of function.

Yes (for those who hadn’t guessed), I’m lamenting the death of the UniverCD (or at least its slow slaughter). Fortunately, as these things go, a new documentation site was created. Well, a new interface was created to interface with the varied pieces of information and configuration documents that we all rely on to do our jobs and pass our CCIE labs. Sure, the layout isn’t quite as obvious and intuitive as before, but now at least we get to see Adobe Flash transitions on the homepage (as an IPexpert employee, I recognize the irony of this statement) and fancy drop-down boxes. We now get to click our mouse button more often and wait for more pages to load if we are on slower connections. But at least it looks pretty.

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One of my students was talking to me today about BGP and various methods with which we can allow connectivity from within an IBGP cloud to external networks.

Generally speaking, for EBGP peering using the BGP standards, we peer based on the IP address of the BGP neighbors’ local interfaces. However, that brings up some challenging permutations. When peering is done via the external network of a BGP edge router within an AS, a BGP edge router will not change the next hop of for the route from the advertising AS when it receives it but rather will pass it on unchanged to its IBGP neighbors.

If the external network connecting the two AS’s is not advertised into the IGP of the receiving AS, the next hop of the route will presumably be unreachable.

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Well, those of you in the process of studying for your R&S CCIE are probably going through (or have gone through) the challenge of assimilating thousands of pages worth of information. Many of you will have seen Cisco’s reading list and considered it potentially insurmountable. How can one human brain possibly contain all that information?

Often I find that when I teach R&S boot camps, many of my students haven’t read the entire book list. In fact, I haven’t encountered any who have as of yet – and you don’t need to. What puzzles me is when I find that the same areas that students report to be weak on tend to correlate most strongly to the books that they haven’t read. To me, common sense would indicate that if you don’t know something it needs to be researched – lab time is not an appropriate method to learn why things work – just HOW they work. That’s why there are two exams to pass to achieve a CCIE, a written and a lab. Unfortunately, Cisco set a pass mark for the written exam that is far too low, that allows too many people to pass with serious knowledge gaps: this makes it difficult for students to recognize that gap until their lab ends in disaster.

What I’m going to outline here is my suggested reading list. None of these books are authored by me, but every one of them I’ve bought and read in the context of my studies. Not all of them need to be read cover to cover, but some do, so I’ll make it clear which are which. There are many reading lists that are flagged as “recommended” by the author of the list. In my opinion this leads people to believe that certain reading is optional. It isn’t. So far as I’m concerned my reading list is a *required* reading list and like all suggestions I make to students I don’t waste your time by listing books that are redundant.

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The Service Provider CCIE track offers a number of enticements to CCIE candidates. However, it is one of the most overlooked tracks, comprising only about 6% of CCIE numbers (about half as many as Security) and only 2% of R&S CCIEs undertake it successfully.

Looking at these numbers, I find that quite an oddity. Obviously, R&S is by far the most popular track and, like most people, it was the first that I undertook. By far the greatest intellectual achievement of my lifetime was obtaining my first CCIE. However, having done so like many people with the study bug, it is worth considering what to study next.

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