One of the advantages of working for a company like Cisco is access to top grade training materials and courses – especially given that a big goal of the aNCE program is to quickly produce CCIE’s that can fill a consulting role. As a result of this goal, we had our second week of CCIE bootcamp in the week that just passed.

For those of you not familiar with the CCIE, it is a qualification offered by Cisco in several core areas of networking and awards the pupil with the prestigious title of Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert. It is also slated as one of the Top 5 hardest IT certifications in the world. As a result, in the 19 years it has been running, less that 33,000 have gained the qualification. In fact, only 3% of Cisco certified professionals have a CCIE, and out of all the world’s network professionals, less than 1% are CCIE’s.

The idea of the bootcamp is to give us access to mock CCIE lab exams and simulate the lab conditions, with the exception that we can discuss issues with members of our team and with the instructor supervising the class. This means that it’s a really strong learning experience while remaining hands-on and realistic.

In the space of 5 days, we had 5 configuration labs and two troubleshooting labs. The config labs ranged in difficulty and timescale – some labs were made to be completed in 6 hours, others in 4 and one in 8 (it was very difficult). The configuration labs consist of 4 switches and 6 routers which, while maintaining the same physical layout, are arranged into several varying logical network topologies:

Physical

Logical

The goal in this case, is to be able to make every device reachable, but while keeping to a strict set of guidelines and restrictions. The exam is also designed to trip you up – as a result it has never been more important to read an exam start to finish before you attempt the first part. The real exam is 8 hours long – 6 for the configuration and 2 for the troubleshooting. That being said, the troubleshooting is the only one restricted to the 2 hour limit. If you finish it in 30 minutes then you can use all the remaining time for the configuration if you wanted.

The troubleshooting lab is a little different. You are presented with a network consisting of about 28-30 devices. The network will be broken in several places, enough to create 10 distinct problems, which need to be completely fixed for points to be allocated. As a result this gives about 12minutes to solve each problem. The topology looks something more along the lines of this:

which is just total insanity, but someone has to fix it – and that someone will be a CCIE.

The configuration is all text-based so the exam provides you with the design brief, 3 sheets of paper, pens, a copy of PuTTY and notepad. You also have access to some command references in case you need to look for something incredibly obscure. As a result your screen ends up looking like this:

which can make it hard to keep track of things. I am using a tabbed console client here though which is not (unfortunately) be available in the exam. Another useful tool, for Mac users, is iTerm2 which lets you segment your screen into multiple windows.  There are a few linux solutions that can do the same thing, including screen and Terminator.

Hopefully this will give you a bit of a feel for what I have been doing over the last week – my first CCIE attempt is on Thursday, and I will not be passing it. It should be a good learning experience though and I look forward to doing my best for it.