On Friday, and for the fourth time, I took the CCIE R&S Written exam (350-001).  For the third time, though, I failed.  Let me tell you, I am absolutely devastated.  I worked my buns off for the past few weeks, but I’m obviously missing some important piece to put me over the top.

Not only was I disappointed with my overall score, I was disappointed by my score in some of the focus areas.  For God’s sake, I made a 50% on each of the routing and switching sections, which is just absolutely embarrassing.  I mean, this is my bread and butter here.  This is what I do all day every day, and I could only muster a 50%?

Yes, I failed.  I think it’s pretty typical when you’re at Cisco Live, you stay out drinking and smoking cigars until 01:00, then you sit the exam at 08:00 the next morning.  Considering the situation I put myself in, I wasn’t very optimistic about passing, but I figured I had maybe a 40% chance to pass since I didn’t really even study.  Are you sensing a theme of ill-preparedness and self-sabotage?  Yeah, me, too.

The wife and I had a romantic day driving several hours to a small town to take Cisco exams.  If this doesn’t get me some action, I don’t know what else to try.

I’ve already used the phrases “skin of my teeth” and “a pass is a pass” on Twitter today for good reason.  Passing is a score of 790, and I blew that away with a 790.  One more lapse in concentration and I would have been making up more excuses instead of smiling.  I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have this weird reaction to taking exams where I don’t get nervous at all until after I’m finished.  Walking into the testing center, I was fine.  Walking out, I was shaking like Northern Virginia.  It was so bad that I could barely hold on to the door knob when trying to leave, so I guess that I’m really prouder than I thought I was.

It’s been a long time, eh? I’ve spent the last month or so with my nose down in a book and my mouse in a Google+ Hangout window studying my rear off for the CCIE R&S Written. Too bad I didn’t pass it.

The exam consisted of 77 questions over a 2 hour window. That’s plenty of time to finish; I think I had 48 minutes left when I was through, so time wasn’t a problem. There were only 2 or 3 questions where I was totally lost, so the technology wasn’t a problem. The big problem, like always, was the usual crap questions that are in these exams. Some didn’t provide all the required information. Some were impractical examples of deployments you would never use in the field. Some were on deprecated technologies. Hell, I had one that involved CatOS. Really? CatOS? Since I only failed by about 2 questions (like I always do), these shenanigans are magnified in my mind. It really irks me how these exams are being done; foggy questions don’t really measure ability.

• Tagging provides a way to mark common or similar routes to manipulate later.
• In redistribution scenarios with mutual redistribution on two different routers, any routes that gets redistributed from one route process to another are tagged.
  • When the other router sees those tags on the route, that route to keep from adding non-optimal routes to its routing table.
• Tags can also be used to do other manipulation such as setting higher metrics or changing ADs.

OSPF

I’m scheduled to take the CCIE R&S Written exam on 10 July at Cisco Live, and I’ve been asked by a handful of people on Twitter exactly what materials I’m using.  I figured it would be a good idea to let everyone know so that we all can determine whether or not I’m on the right track.  I may get to the exam and find out that the books I’ve been reading aren’t even close.  It’s happened before.

This is required blogging…and reading for that matter.  A good chunk of this is taken from my CCNP posts from last year.  Corrections, please.

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How does a BGP router decide which BGP route is the best?

Next-hop : Does the router have a route to the next-hop?

Weight : This is a numeric value where bigger is better.  Weight is not passed onto other peers and is a Cisco proprietary feature.

Yes, it is inevitable that I cover these.  I’m sure network types will be next.  Per my usual request, please correct my stupidity.

Type 1 - Router : This LSA type lists all the routers by RID as well as the networks to which that router connects.

Type 2 - Network : These LSAs represent broadcast network where more than one OSPF router may live.  Think Ethernet or multipoint segment.  These LSAs are flooded by the DR for that segment.

My prediction about covering network types was wrong.  I’m going to puke out some information about neighbor states for now.  As is always the case, corrections are welcome.

Down : No hellos have been received from this router.

Attempt : This state only applies to manually-configured neighbors on an NBMA network.  In this state, a router has sent unicast hellos to the neighbor but has not received any back from it.

I have had my nose deep in several books in preparation for my CCIE R&S written exam, so I haven’t been blogging much at all.  Now that I’ve made it to the more familiar topics, I’m hoping to get some notes posted.  I’ll start with OSPF message types.

As always, please feel free to correct me here.  I’m learning just like the rest of us.

Hello : These messages are used to establish neighbors and serve as keepalives among other things.