Certification Goals for 2016... What Are Yours?

[deanwebb]

I always enjoy bonus certifications.

[that1guy15]

CCIE RS, passed yesterday in Brussels 

WOOT! congrats dude!!! Well done.

[that1guy15]

Got the dreaded email this morning. Looks like its time to ramp up my CCDE written studies.

[deanwebb]

March or die convert to emeritus status.

[that1guy15]

March or die convert to emeritus status.

Emeritus is only available after 10 years. Im at year 1

[deanwebb]

Well, in one more year, you'll be at 10. In binary.

[wintermute000]

Got the dreaded email this morning. Looks like its time to ramp up my CCDE written studies.

I'm reading dat OCG right now. Its good stuff and you'll enjoy it, esp. as a veteran you will already know most of it intuitively (but its good to read it clearly stated in one place with the official big C stamp of approval), well, at least the Enterprise stuff anyway. I haven't gotten to the SP side yet (and yeh will need to bone up on ISIS... the stuff I did to bum rush the written and the JNCIS-SP is probably not enough), I'm sure I need to go back and read a few more MPLS books esp. re: L2VPN and MPLS-TE (i.e. all the stuff we didn't do in RS syllabus).

I can see how someone who studied hard but hasn't got a lot of real life XP would gain a ton of value out of it but 70% of it is just 'common sense' for an experienced set of eyes (e.g. summarisation good, but watch out for black holing esp. in failover scenarios - duh. Bad placement of OSPF areas may lead to suboptimal routing -ORLY? Link state protocols are bad in hub/spoke due to flooding and spam LSA data to spokes - you don't say.... etc.). It IS very useful to recap and train to be able to articulate clearly and in one place. And the 30% yoh ain't seen before may of course prove very useful down the track

My main gripe ATM is that there's some stuff I don't actually agree with LOL - its all shades of grey in real life as you know. WTF is with the obsession with the good old loop free inverted U access topology, its the best except you can't span L2 between switches - guess that 100% of my field XP and customers I have seen have a requirement for.... 


/rant on
I also have a SERIOUS bone to pick with them re: the 'stack/VSS good, traditional pair bad' mantra. Its like they've never been in a comms room at 2AM trying to rescue a VSS meltdown or a stack  meltdown or a Nexus 7k ISSU gone bad before.... five words: SHARED CONTROL PLANE YOU MOTHERF-CKERS). If HA is a requirement, give me good old HSRP/VRRP + RPVST+ and OSPF/EIGRP (heck, tune the timers if you want) any day. I can take either core out of action (for any reason... upgrade... HW fault.... fun...) in a second flat, bring it back, works every time. Guaranteed 1 second outage every time is better in my book than its magic pixie dust seamless most of the time, except that one time.... and oh if you hit a software bug, it bits both your behinds at the same time, woohoo. Having said all that, again IRL it depends LOL

don't get me started on the 'tune STP timers' recommendation, WTF are you serious... and I quote:

" All the Layer 2 design models in Figure 2-4 share common limitations:
The reliance on STP to avoid loss of connectivity caused by Layer 2 loops and the
dependency on Layer 3 FHRP timers, such as VRRP to converge. These dependences
naturally lead to an increased convergence time when a node or link fails. Therefore, as
a rule of thumb, tuning and aligning STP and FHRP timers is a recommended practice to
overcome these limitations to some extent. "

/rant off

[wintermute000]

 A revision to my rant above re: the CCDE OCG: The Service Provider stuff is a lot more interesting (to me anyway), though I have no idea if an experienced SP guy would roll their eyes.

However, downside is that it is definitely very high level to the point where if you had no understanding of the technology you would be completely lost and none of it would make any sense.
e.g. In around 30 pages they blitz through the entire L2VPN stack - AToM/E-Line, ELAN, VPLS (LDP vs BGP signalled), H-VPLS, PBB-VPLS, PBB-H-VPLS, EVPN, PBB-EVPN. I suppose that's not the point of the book (i.e. there is a strong presumption of knowledge) but there is somewhat of an 'uncomfortable middle ground' where its presuming fairly in-depth knowledge but at the same time staying high level which is kind of contradictory in my view.

[deanwebb]

Looks like I'm going to a ForeScout CounterACT FCSA class in October. And it looks like I'll pick up another 4 letters from that.

[that1guy15]

A revision to my rant above re: the CCDE OCG: The Service Provider stuff is a lot more interesting (to me anyway), though I have no idea if an experienced SP guy would roll their eyes.

However, downside is that it is definitely very high level to the point where if you had no understanding of the technology you would be completely lost and none of it would make any sense.
e.g. In around 30 pages they blitz through the entire L2VPN stack - AToM/E-Line, ELAN, VPLS (LDP vs BGP signalled), H-VPLS, PBB-VPLS, PBB-H-VPLS, EVPN, PBB-EVPN. I suppose that's not the point of the book (i.e. there is a strong presumption of knowledge) but there is somewhat of an 'uncomfortable middle ground' where its presuming fairly in-depth knowledge but at the same time staying high level which is kind of contradictory in my view.

Havent touched the CCDE OCG but I had this exact feeling with the CCDP ARCH OCG and cert.

[wintermute000]

yeah I hear ya.

If I wasn't a super geek who read up on MPLS outside of what my job required (or even what the RS syllabus required) I would be a bit at sea with the SP architecture stuff, but I understand it perfectly at a high level, even if I have no clue re: the syntax or any actual hands on XP or real life considerations. Having done a JNCIS-SP helped as well esp basic ISIS and Metro-E knowledge


You'll kill the enterprise section for sure thou

[icecream-guy]

TSHOOT Booked  9/30/16

[Otanx]

Just got the IXIA BreakingPoint Systems Specialist Certification. Actually really cool gear that I wish I had years ago.

-Otanx

[deanwebb]

Just got the IXIA BreakingPoint Systems Specialist Certification. Actually really cool gear that I wish I had years ago.

-Otanx

[wintermute000]

VCXN610 passed!!!!!!

I have seriously no idea how that happened. I walked out thinking I failed, and ended up with 382/500 (300 is the passing score... haha vmware is so loose).

Its an absolutely brutal exam with the slowest, most crash prone environment in the world, complete with questions so vague it makes the CCIE lab exam look like webster's dictionary. Burnyd will know the score. Its also even more time pressure than the CCIE due to the super slow GUI


I swear 2 out of the 18 questions I didn't even end up doing as they literally bugged out on me (e.g. I had a distributed logical router to fix, the GUI literally wouldn't let me edit the interfaces, the mouse icon was swapping between arrow and edit hundreds of times a second. So I deleted it and redeployed it, and NSX just kept tearing it down unable to establish a control plane, WTF).


Whatever marking script they use is insane as I had the result within 30 minutes of walking out. I wonder how much the marking script got wrong, coz I am still amazed at how I got that score


Next target: CCDE written (for recert lulz). Still undecided whether I want to follow through - the heavy carrier content is interesting but irrelevant to my job and large swathes of it is being rapidly obsoleted by SD-(insert buzzword). I have a feeling the current syllabus will go EOL in the next 12 months.