hello. i m back.

Its been a few weeks since my last post.  not much going on, other then work/study work/run errands & then repeat.

My goal was this month is quite short. I am trying to cover bgp,  and then hoping to make it into switching before the month ends.  My original goal was to go through, BGP, Switching, & Multicasting as the new topics that i would cover for the month. But since i am painstakingly working through each of them, thus i have come up short.  Not to mention i have had a few lapses due to the daily rouine of day to day life coming up and kicking me in the behind.  No excuses. I still feel like i accomplished a decent amount, tackling a beast like BGP is not an easy task.

Lately i have been following and stalking ( viabits/bytes  )  some of the blogs whose owners/participants have attended Narbiks  boot camp, and well the reviews have been great. I am under a month away from attending my session, and i am not only excited but a bit on edge since this will be my first bootcamp experience.

Ip summary who what how?

I am working through my 2nd session of the STN workbook. No i havent covered all of it, just some sections such as FR, Ospf, Rip, Eigrp, ACLs, GRE which i am going back over now. This past weekend/week has been spent repeating Eigrp.  Last night i was looking at one of the questions that said create a default route but dont use global or router eigrp command to answer the task. I sat there twisting my already warped mind wondering how  am i m going to answer this one. Visions of route-maps ran through my mind, i thought distribute lists, hmm no dont be silly. No wait ip default-network, ahh cant use that its a global command.  Eventually tired from the 10-15 minute brain bash, surfing the Doc Cd command set for eigrp/documentation i looked up the solution and it surprised me  as it had done so last month when the answer was ip summary eigrp 100 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0. It still throws me to think that was the answer, but after verifying it, and it worked i can say yes thats the solution. Glad i got a question like that now and can ( hopefully retain it ) for the big one.

Tonight i am moving on to complete leak-maps and be done with Eigrp. Tomorrow starts Ospf once more. My goal this month is to cover Bgp/Switching the forementioned Ospf & multicasting.  Lofty goals but i know it has to be done.  I dont plan on showing up at the bootcamp without properly preparing. Lately i have been going at the cli till midnight from 7ish in the night minus  hour for family time.

I usually check GS every thursday for weekly tidbits on who passed,  latest news and problems that other engineers are working on.  I was expecting to see a new post about the new modification to the R/S CCIE track and my expectations were confirmed.   A post named Open Ended questions was started and had several good replies to it. It was interesting to read.

Superbowl weekend update.

Not much of studying this weekend, and i cant attribute it to the superbowl since i only watched the 1st quarter and then the most interesting part last 2 minutes of the game. I tried to study as much as i could.  Our daughter was sick, so my wife had our day/s set for us.    Saturday night i mostly worked through the Reflexive ACLs and completed that.  ACL portion of the STN workbook is completed. Now i am going back at eigrp a second time and am hoping tonight, well the rest of the week will get me through all of eigrp and in to Ospf.  I did complete lab 1 from the Eigrp portion last night.  Sunday i did only a couple of hours, the forementioned Eigrp lab 1 was tackled and completed then. I needed to refresh myself on the metric weights command once more.

Study wise I have six more sections of the STN workbook to complete.  I am not looking at any other workbooks for now, and wont do so until i have had my fill of the STN workbook/bootcamp.

Before i forget,  big congrats out to Carl he passed the CCIE lab. If you browse my blog then do browse over via the link and send him a congrats.

Todays the day that the CCIE lab will start the question portion added in to the lab prior to the actual lab.  Thus i am going to take a snip of the total worldwide CCIES as of 1/6/09.  Lets see how many people post in Feb 09 of passing. I am sure GS will be on fire with that, along with sadikhov later on in the month.

Total of Worldwide CCIEs:		18674 (last updated 01/06/2009)
Total of Routing and Switching CCIEs:		16399
Total of Security CCIEs:		2007
Total of Service Provider CCIEs:		1120
Total of Storage Networking CCIEs:		140
Total of Voice CCIEs:		872

Multiple Certifications:

Many CCIEs have gone on to pass the certification exams in additional tracks, becoming a “multiple CCIE.” Below are selected statistics on CCIEs who are certified in more than one track.

Total with multiple certifications worldwide:		1885
Total of Routing and Switching and Security CCIEs:		706
Total of Routing and Switching and Service Provider CCIEs:		472
Total of Routing and Switching and Storage Networking CCIEs:		35
Total of Routing and Switching and Voice CCIEs:		250
Total with 3 or more certifications		302