Hi everybody here.
Last week I failed on my fist attempt for the Lab R&S exam in Brussels. After four years of study and passing the written exam twice (i had to renew it), after my family and me changing our country of residence, and after some personal issues that needed my time and attention, I finally took my way to Brussels to go for that Lab. It has been a long way till here.
I wasn't confident enough about passing on my first attempt. First, only 10% of newbies make it. Second, I wasn't fast enough. In fact, I thought I was going to have a good troubleshooting anf have trouble on the config side. How wrong I was!!!
I am really disappointed about how I performed in TS. Really far away from how I was performing in my preparation. I am almost 15 years working in networks. I have troubleshooted huge networks brought to their knees during my professional life, while phones and walkies where exploding around. I can presume about having really good clinical sight on what could be wrong depending on the fault and where to look first. Guys, nothing of this was of help in the TS part of the Lab. I found it really harder than I expected. I knew I was failing the TS part before attempting the config section.
Then I decided to rebuild myself, to be humble and to really do my best in the config part. Let's see how far you can make it, I thought.
Opposite to the TS part, I found the config part easier than I expected. But really time consuming. Deliberately time consuming I would say. I knew I was not going to be able to do all the config part, but everything I made it was almost completely right. I didn't need to look at the Doc CD at all. Although there was a "gotcha" in almost every task of the exam, there was only one question in the entire exam in which I had no idea about how to deal whith that trap. That was the only time I looked at the Doc CD.
I didn't see any way of saving time on my configs, even though I was using notepad as crazy, and my TCL scripts... I used the management strategy approach from INE, and during the exam I was having a really good sight about what was going on there. I performed faster than in my preparation, but even I was faster I still spent more than three hours in getting all the core tasks including redistribution up and running, and verified. But at that point I was pretty sure that my core tasks were 100% right. Then I went for the services and optimizing tasks, I flied there, I completed 20 points in slightly longer than an hour.
Then I came back to my BGP tasks, and they showed me that my IGP and redistributions were right. But that was my limit. I dind't have a chance to get my hands on the MCAST section, or IPv6, even though I knew what they were asking for, I also knew they were giving very few points for a huge piece of work, like configuring tons of IPv6 addresses. To be honest, I don't think that this lab could be completed in 6 hours, and there's no point in my opinion for adding difficulty making candidates configure a ton of IPv6 addresses or thinks like that (there were several tasks clearly designed to make the candidate waste time). The rest of the IPv6 portion was really straight forward.
Now it's time to relax. And to remember that I have a family and a life and enjoying them. Then after some rest, I will begin my preparation for version 5.
I don't complain about my failing. I really believe I need to be better prepared, and faster. I need to find out how to be fast enough to get a sufficient amount of points. And I will for my next attempt. But that will be a different story ;)
In the meanwhile, best of luck to all of you on your studies!!!!
