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 2nd 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…
