If anyone is willing to share, I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on the best way, or good ways, to approach the pre-configuration analysis when doing a lab.
If anyone isn't familiar with what I'm talking about, there is lots of INE wisdom against just sitting down and hacking away at the gear without a plan. Also, this seems to generally be frowned upon universally by anyone who knows about the CCIE lab.
In the past, I've been drawing tracking tables (tasks and points) and making my own L2 diagram and L3 sketch diagram. Then I've gone through the lab and kind of "skim" it. After all this analysis and prep, which takes about 20-30 minutes, I start configuring and track my points and minutes per point.
I've been trying something a little different lately and I'm curious if anyone has any experience with my old way (above) or the new way (below).
The new way of analysis and prep I've been doing is the same except for the "skim." In the new way, I have notepad side by side the lab scenarios and I type a really rough translation from the scenario into notepad. On the good side, I have to look at the scenario less and can just focus on converting my sketch notes into actual commands. On the bad side, the prep and analysis is taking about 45 to 50 minutes instead of 20-30. With the new way, I also feel like I have a better grasp of the overall lab as a whole before I start configuring.
For example, I asked myself "why not do 1.3 of the Vol2 Lab2 right at the begining so the switches can reboot? I can work on 1.1 while they are rebooting."
Does anyone have an opinion about the two approaches? 50 minutes seems like a lot of config time to give up vs 20-30 minutes if people have found it doesn't work well.
Here is an example of a few notes I made from one of my Vol2 Lab2 run throughs:
1.1 --------------------------
19 - 21 on sw1
13 - 15 on sw4
one l2 link
sw4 respond to sw1
sw1 is decision maker 802.3ad
isl for logical l2 link
2.1 --------------------------
ospf 1
r1 r2 r3 r4 no DR election
no neighbor command
r1 and sw1 clear text pw CISCO
Another way to ask my question is, would it be more efficient just to expand those notes into commands right as I'm reading them first pass. I guess this would be a 3rd option, vs the old way and the new way.
Any thoughts or input would be helpful and appreciated.