Aug
30
Written Passed!
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Well I got an urge last night to try to get this exam out of the way. I was scoring well enough I thought on the NetMaster practice tests and was becoming concerned that I was just memorizing everything. I got some nerve up and registered for the test last night and took it at 9:00 am this morning. I scored in the 80′s which wasn’t bad. The material from Netmaster was very helpful and the Internetwork Expert COD’s with workbook one helped in understanding everything.
I am just so glad this exam is out of the way for Labor Day weekend. Think I am going to take a week off and get my gear up and running and just relax. I want to thank the groupstudy guys and everyone who helped me through the site here.
Well the real works begins now…
Aug
28
Getting Closer
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I am starting to feel a little more comfort with the material at hand for the written exam. Although I still feel I am far off, I am still getting closer. I picked up some more resources for MPLS, and hoping to pick up one more for some more QOS light reading if there is such a thing. The Netmaster written test is good for testing overall knowledge. I just hate going over practice test after practice test. I start to get mentally lazy and look to just memorize the answers instead of understanding why the answer is what it is. Hopefully soon…
Aug
20
Frame-Relay and IE Workbook I
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Well since I had no rack time tonight to complete the switching labs in the workbook I fired up Dynamips. I was pretty impressed with how everything was running. My CPU usage was very low, I was seeing everything in the debugs I wanted to see. The labs were pretty basic, but they bring back a lot of the commands from deep within! I miss frame-relay, DLCI’s, and point-to-whatever! Brings me back to my first networking job and our nation-wide frame relay network. Things seemed so much simpler back then.
I think tomorrow I will start working on the NetMasters written practice test I just purchased Friday. I really do hate practice tests, especially 100 questions at a time. It is really no fun. I will post tomorrow on how they went.
Aug
19
Well I got through half of the lab tonight I got a slow start tonight as our main database at work came to a screeching halt after chewing up massive amounts of drive space. After we got that working I was pretty flustered, but able to get started.
One valuable lesson I learned tonight after doing my first rack time: always power cycle the rack when first getting access to it. I didn’t do this and was stuck on a configuration for ether channel until I realized there was some rogue commands running. I power cycled the rack and redid my configurations and the ether channel finally came up.
I was on Rack 12 over at IE, but some of the lab scenarios in the workbook didn’t match their hardware. Switch1 wasn’t connected to Router6 as in the workbook so I had to move past some routing on a stick and so forth.
Working on some ether channel configurations though really helped in understanding the material better.
Hopefully I can complete the switching lab and move on to the rest with Dynamips.
Aug
19
Internetwork Expert Lab Book One
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Well I got through all my readings, but a lot of the new material such as Multicast and QOS is still very fuzzy. I am going to start going through IE’s lab book I tonight starting with switch material. Internetwork’s lab book I is broken down by subjects. This way you can concentrate of each section while you go through the configurations. I am thinking I really need to go through some hands on with the QOS and Multicast to really get a good grasp of it before taking the written. No reason not to build the solid foundation now.
Aug
12
OSPF and the Cisco Press Guide
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I got a little bored trying to read over the whole OSPF chapter tonight and decided to open up some of the BSCI 3.0 stuff I had laying around. It helped give me a good refresh of all the OSPF material. Odom’s guide seems to be just a quick review (which it very well is probably supposed to be.) I have all the material to do for my Internetwork Expert class on demand, but wanted to save those for the lab prep. I want to at least do the full 80 hours twice and would rather not be bored it it by doing it three times.
Aug
8
Written – Journey Status
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Completed!
