Ten years ago today the first batch of SpiNNaker chips arrived back from packaging and we got the first chance to test and try them out. Remarkably the tens of years of person effort that went into their development came to fruition, and a number of bottles of champagne were opened, and contents consumed. The original SpiNNaker team are now to be found all around the world, many still in Manchester, and the team has been augmented by many others during the journey to the 1 million core machine and beyond, plus being part of the Human Brain Project. It was a really special time for so many of us, so I thought I’d share some photos of that day. Steve Furber The University of Manchester

• Part 1 Part 2 (this one) Part 3 Part 4

Hunkering Down

People often ask how I prepped for the practical lab, as it still exists in this form today. As well as the training and bootcamp (this was before the days of INE etc.), I had dedicated 6 weeks off work before taking the exam. This was immediately after the turn of the millennium, so one of the last things I did at work before was to be on-call for the Asia-Pacific region for Y2K, and their non-calamitous dip into the 21^st century.

In true procrastination style for the final-push a revision timetable was created to prepare a programme of work to lab through.

As mentioned in the previous section I had a stack of kit running for about 5 months, which I managed to fit onto the top shelf of a built-in wardrobe – leaving the door open for ventilation when it was running.  It was important to be able to ‘switch off’, so powering-down and closing the door temporarily gave some respite. It was always on your mind though. I was living in a shared house at the time, so I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to Kath whose room backed onto the other side of the wardrobe!

The stack comprised a load of 2500 series devices, including the seminal 2511 which is still doing the business today as a console server, all borrowed from stores, maxed with RAM and flash upgrades.

Interconnection was via Ethernet, Token-Ring, X21, V35 and RS232 (although no FDDI!). I think there was a switch, but to be honest switching wasn’t an enormous part of the test – there were many more exotic things to do on routers like learning Banyan Vines (although I don’t remember that being on the syllabus if I’m honest!). I went through all the testing specification and the documentation CD, learning and labbing pretty much all of it.  You could be tested on almost anything that was documented in here. 

One of the key characteristics needed to pass CCIE, as it is today, is the speed of your work.  I saw plenty of really good people through the years fail to get over the line as they weren’t able to move accurately at pace.  The restriction of the speed of the documentation CD at the time was a real-limiting factor too, and it was drummed into you that you should memorise everything, with this only to be used in the lab as a last resort.

Travelling to the Test

I arrived in Brussels the day before the test, staying in the same hotel that most of the test takers used, and I did a recce to the Cisco office so that I’d be ready for the next day (no Google Maps in those days, nor phones that could even have run it!).  Then a bit of light reading/revision, something to eat, setting a couple alarms and enjoying a broken night of sleep before turning up to the lab the next morning.  My memory from here starts to go a bit hazy – it was quite a stressful experience.

Format of the Lab

The way the 2-day lab would work was that on the morning of Day 1 you’d firstly sit down with your test paper and do a network design with an IP addressing plan etc.  I can’t remember if this was on paper or electronic, but this would be assessed/marked (worth 1 point) with the rest of the questions.  All of day 1 was IP (and setting up the underlying transport), whereas day 2’s morning was designated ‘multi-protocol’ and the afternoon ‘troubleshooting’.

The score was out of 100 as I recall, with a passing score of 80. If you dropped 20+ marks on day 1 or in aggregate with the morning of day 2, making it impossible to score 80 or above, you’d be binned. Only those who had the possibility of passing would start the troubleshooting section on the afternoon of day 2 so attendance thinned out.  The exams were hand-marked, section by section by the proctor at the end of each session, so you’d have to wait to find out how you had done (and if you were coming back).    

Day 1

Everyone taking their CCIE lab congregated in the break-out / canteen awaiting our start.  The bootcamp was pretty good in making sure that the environment wasn’t completely alien, so I was happy for that. However, I did seem to remember having a worry that we’d have IP phones ringing and people test talking into handsets – but thankfully this didn’t happen – perhaps that wasn’t on the syllabus by then.

There ended up being 6 people in my lab, and I think (told you about the haziness!) there was another lab of 5 – so eleven in total starting their CCIE lab that day.  My abiding memory here was that it was true that you could just help yourself to cans of Coke, which was important to keep a non-tea/coffee drinker sharp!

Day 1 morning went well, I was able to set up the network and get a good number of the questions ticked off. I was on track.  We all sat around the breakout area with sandwiches and buffet food for a common lunch, not saying much.

Panic

About a third of the way into the afternoon of Day 1 I knew I had a big problem. I could not for the life of me get my OSPF routing protocols fully up and running across my Frame Relay network. Everyone who did the lab around this time will instinctively know what the issue is from what I’ve just said.  This is due to it being drummed into everyone incessantly – about making sure you add the ‘broadcast’ keyword where necessary, depending on the OSPF link types configured at each end and the medium.  Except I didn’t remember it in that session, and I watched the time drain away. Also draining away was the colour on my face.  I started breathing heavily and getting dizzy. I informed the proctor I wasn’t feeling great, and went and had a seat next to my friend, the free drinks fridge.  My CCIE, and all the preparation that had gone into it felt like it was slipping away.

I managed to pull myself together, got back into the lab – did some other questions and took another look and still couldn’t work it out.  I checked it dozens of times and just got nowhere.  I stuck my hand up again, the proctor came over and I said I thought I was experiencing a bug. He ran a few commands and told me there was no bug.  I pored over the command history to try and work out what he’d checked to point me in the right direction, but I’d blanked the fundamental advice which had been drilled into me.  It got to the end of day 1. I felt certain that I’d failed at the first hurdle. I was gutted.

How did it turn out? Tune in to Part III…

• Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 (this one) Part 4

Day 1 Verdict – Half Way Stage

I awaited my fate at the end of day 1; I was late in the marking list and downbeat (see part 2 for why). Eventually I got to sit down with the proctor as he ran over the checks and marked the questions, and the missing part of the map command was laid out bare for me. I was gutted, all-over again. But… even though I’d dropped a fair few marks on this question and its dependencies, I’d nailed everything else, so I was still in the game.  Three in my lab were not.

It was a quiet evening in the hotel.

Day 2 Morning –  Multiprotocol

A quieter lab, only 3 of us were still there – the others hadn’t made it past day 1.  Brutal. The first thing I did was to instate the missing ‘broadcast’ keyword in the relevant places in my configs, and ping, ping, ping – everything was properly up and running. For the rest of the morning it went really well, with the only thing I couldn’t get working being an SNMPget for an undocumented MIB entry, which was irritating (it’s 21 years ago – so I’m not giving away any lab secrets with that!). 

Afterwards, again, we sat and waited for the proctor to mark our work and deliver his verdict. I’d lost a couple more marks due to the non-working SNMP stuff and something else very particularly worded in the questions (the nuance is very important and the Cisco questioners are renowned for their trickiness here). The results were that I remained in the running, albeit I’d need a pretty damn good final afternoon’s troubleshoot to pull it off.

It was then that I found out that one of the guys in our morning lab had actually failed his first day. He’d been allowed, at the proctor’s discretion, to have a go at the 2^nd day’s morning session for unmarked practice. He therefore bowed out and went back to the hotel (the other three hadn’t even come back to try).  The only other remaining candidate in the centre after lunch worked for Cisco, so it was just us two who remained going into the final session.

Day 2 Afternoon – Troubleshooting

I knew I couldn’t afford to drop many more marks given the ones already confirmed gone. The proctor in advance had loaded the ‘faulty’ configs onto the devices in the lab and set us to work. There were all sorts of issues here, log messaging going bananas, incorrect/duplicate IP addressing, OSPF mismatches (not going to get me again!), serial cables forced in upside-down, password recoveries required etc. Basically, everything that you’d done over the last 2 days had been broken, and you had a couple of hours to fix it all. 

I saw panic both in the eyes and actions of the Cisco candidate quite soon after the start.  You have to work really quickly to resolve the myriad of problems inserted into the network, but he kept going through to the lab equipment room and messing, costing him time. I tried to ignore it.

Again, it was a pretty good session, settling things down overall in the first hour and then working on the details piece-by-piece.  I thought I’d pretty much got everything up and running again, except for a pesky ISDN ppp call-back that just didn’t seem to want to play. I thought it’d be borderline with those marks lost, plus anything else I’d not spotted.

We again waited in the canteen to be called in for marking – and I was able to have a chat with the Cisco candidate.  He confirmed what I’d seen him do and he already knew his fate.  I was honestly gutted for him – we’d gone into battle together and he’d been doing really well up until that point – but the troubleshooting had thrown him completely off. It seemed common at the time for more ‘theoretical’ candidates with less practical hands-on day-to-day troubleshooting experience to struggle here.

Results Time

I was called into the lab and sat with the proctor as he went through the devices.  I remember asking if I’d wasted time reinstating my original IP addressing scheme from my original design.  He confirmed I had.

And then – the ISDN call-back worked straight off the bat.

I think I ended up with about 84 marks. And, safe-to-say, I was overjoyed.

Swag & My Number

The other members of the UK AT&T lot who had passed their CCIE came back with a cap.  The proctor applied for your CCIE number when submitting your marks, and then wrote that inside the hat – so you were able to tell your boss, your better half, your mum, the UN etc. your ‘CCIE number’.  But they’d run out of hats.  I got my number on a bit of paper, and a small holdall printed with the laurel leaf on it. 

I was really elated with the pass and my having recovered from the day 1 mess. So I attempted to stagger back to the hotel to make sense of it.

How to celebrate? Beers for one? A final wrap experience in Part IV…

• Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 (this one)

Pass – Back to the Hotel

I wandered back towards the hotel with the realisation that I was the only person who had passed in those 2-days.  That’s when I came back to earth. Here I was – on top of the world, genuinely bursting with the joy of passing something so tricky, going back to an identikit hotel on an industrial estate knowing there was no one there to share it with – all the others having failed.

In the end I only ever saw one of the other people from the labs again. I bumped into the French chap who had come back on the 2^nd morning for the practice, and I shared my good news with him.  We sat at the bar in a massive, airy hotel lobby clinking beers, experiencing a weird awkward mix of feelings as he hadn’t had the same success. As we chatted he shared that he’d largely come to terms with it, and was genuinely pleased for me.

I don’t know if he knows how much of a friend he was to me right there and then, it would have been a very lonely hotel that night otherwise. I wish we’d stayed in touch… Did he go back and try again and get through?  We ate together that night – I remember having fish.

Return to Work

My CCIE certification number meant I was probably one of about 4,000 or fewer people at the time who held the active certification.  Looking for stats there were websites (including Brad Reece’s and the ‘CCIE Hall of Fame’) that gave rundowns on where in the world CCIEs were based to give some sort of flavour.  At the time I think around 10% of CCIEs were based in the UK, so I was one in a few hundred. Given my relative youth I also figured I’d be one of the youngest.

Work took care of us, we got genuinely chunky pay rises and a bonus to say congratulations on passing. They got to use our CCIE status to get their kit discounts and marketing messages out, so it kind of balanced out. I also received a Montblanc pen, which I was too scared to use as it was about £200 or something (for a pen!).  I’ve no idea where this is now – one day I’ll open the right box and it’d be interesting to see if it still works after 21 years of stasis, but given it’s price, I say it should!

Key to the Door

Achieving my CCIE undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the opportunities and doors that opened to me, and it has been key to a significant part of my career.  I stayed with AT&T for another 5 years before spreading my wings, and since then I’ve spent time in many sectors contracting, in R&D and in MSP and Enterprise IT leadership roles. Even 21 years on it can still get me towards the top of the list when I’m seeking a new role – it still holds that cachet.  To this day I see why CCIE is still attractive and highly sought after.

Recertification across so many years has been a bit of a chore, but overall more than worth it.  I decided not to go for emeritus, but deliberately stay active on the CCIE track. Rather than make this 4-parter even longer I’ll do another blog on recertification, and perhaps my thoughts on the CCIE as a whole and its future.

In my new role I’ll be drifting away from the core of CCIE, and as I mentioned I’ll give some more thoughts to this new world, putting fingers to the keyboard to talk about it future postings too – I look forward to writing about this as there’s genuinely a seismic shift for network engineering going on.

Postscript

I still have one thing about CCIE after all these years that still needs closure. I never did get a personalised CCIE leather bomber jacket, with my name and number sewn into it.  One day, one day – maybe I’ll treat myself on my 25^th anniversary 😊

11th Feb 2021

I’d seen a few people getting this certification, and it’s been on my radar for a month or so to start to get my feet under the table with Microsoft’s public cloud offering. I had a bit of time on my hands, plus here was a target to kick-start my learning: passing the associated exam. In my career I’ve found many people struggle to get going on something without a tangible goal, and I’m no different here – so passing the exam it is! The kicker is that for now it’s also free. There’s no outlay to attend the Microsoft training days sessions (2x half days in this instance), and that attendance comes complete with a no-cost AZ-900 exam attempt! Sold…

Where to Start?

You can find a link to the UK Microsoft training day sessions here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/events/training-days/ There are also many other training day sessions linked on Microsoft Dynamics, 365, Power as well as Azure – some with their own aligned free exam attempts too. 

Here’s another tip that works at the moment – you can take a look at the European sessions too, with loads more available date options, which is what I did. My free exam voucher still did the trick after I’d attended one of the more numerous EU (Republic of Ireland) sessions: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/training-days/ (I tried Ireland just to be sure I’d get an English language session! NB. careful of CET timezones vs. UK if you go this way).   

Cost (in terms of time and activities)

Although it might be zero-cost in terms of cash, it needs your investment in time to get to know the Azure technologies, concepts and services. So how long does it take?  I’m really pretty new to Azure as mentioned, but I’ve got a bit of experience meddling with AWS so that probably helped a bit particularly with the concept pieces, and I’ve got a few years on the clock with IT infrastructure and particularly networking. Here’s what I did (your own mileage may vary, depending on your background):

Learning Path I took

The Microsoft ‘Training Day’ sessions linked above were about 3+3hrs in reality across two days (no recordings are made available so ensure you take notes). This 6 hours invested was NOT enough to pass the exam by any means for me. 

I then tried the associated Microsoft self-paced training referred to in the Training Days sessions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-900?tab=tab-learning-paths. These 6 learning paths seem fine, but I struggled to maximise the training windows, and I saw multiple versions of things when clicking around. That threw me off using just them, and they were dry, so I explored a bit wider too…

I found and completed the free ‘A Cloud Guru’ path: https://acloudguru.com/course/az-900-microsoft-azure-fundamentals on their free plan, which took a day or so and was coherent (and really engaging with Lars!) – again making notes throughout.  I’ve seen some of their other materials, and ACG seem consistently good. I think the notes I took from this were the best of the bunch when it came time to prepare for the exam.

Both these latter options allow you to stop and start video to make notes or look something up, whereas the training days sessions don’t and just plough on. You can also change the playback speed on the latter option videos if that’s your thing!

How Long (time invested)?

The path I took probably all added up to about 24 hours (ish!) in total.  I also looked for a legitimate practice test. There was a (costly) Microsoft one via Mindhub, but I have a Pluralsight annual subscription (tip: always purchase/renew on Black Friday!) – and I’ve got access to the tests linked there. I found that they didn’t really match the training materials I’d watched, and seemed to be too involved, so gave up and thought “how hard can a fundamentals exam be?”

The Exam

I booked and took the exam (remotely), my wi-fi remained stable – they got me to take photos of the room, my ID and of myself (and locked-down hair) before setting off on the exam itself. I reckon this was a couple of hours in total to prepare, settle down, do the questionnaires and other admin, with the exam itself being 60 minutes. I also spent about and hour before the exam going through my notes. For me, my test was 45 (ish) questions and many of these were multi-part with a mix of styles. Can’t tell you much more than that, but for my exam it wasn’t split into sections, so I could mark and return to all questions across the whole exam. I guess it’s only an hour (and a fundamentals exam) so that makes sense, but I wasn’t expecting to be able to do that.

I ended up with a slim pass. The questions were a mix of cloud and Azure concepts, and specifics. I did a first pass across all questions in about 30 mins, and then returned to the 19 (yes nineteen!) questions I’d marked. These were largely related to the specifics I mention. I struggled more with this type of question having only completed the above training, and after doing the exam I now feel like they’d been skimmed over in those materials. The only saving grace was the fact I’d used multiple training sources, and I think this helped guide my answers a bit where I didn’t know up-front.  I finished with about 10 mins to go, finalising my best guesses, and didn’t feel I was struggling for time.

Lessons Learned

If you’re coming at this cold – and are self-studying like me and about the same level – I think I’d recommend an additional day of effort over and above what I did. This would give some more comfort in the exam by having explored more of the details. This would probably total around 30ish hours in all, allowing that extra time to explore each of the services on the syllabus in more detail. I felt I left a lot of marks on the table for details that some more reading and self-study would have assisted me on.

So that’s my AZ-900 certification story. I thought it might help if you’re new to Azure and fancied getting onboard, but have already a decent slug of general IT experience. Trickier than I had thought! You may find some of the same! I was going to just post this on LinkedIn, but realised there are waaaaaaay too many words, so let’s try it in an article :).

Next?

I was always just after an overview of Azure at this point, and aiming at the cert has helped me get this – but it really feels like just a skim of the surface. I guess that’s not unexpected. I’ve got some more challenges to come in my next role that I’ll take the same approach to going forward: setting a specific target to help drive learning and focus, I find this works across a technical team too. If it makes sense to document in the same way and post these other paths, I’ll write them up too.