Hello friends,
So I got my test results exactly 2 hours after its end. Kinda weird...
My official CCIE number is "Not Certified".
This is my 2nd attempt, previous one was in October, last year.
I was ready for the "no pass" this time. Last year I had two months of full-time preparation, this year, less motivated I had only about a month. Which were from my vacations time after a very stressing year, so yeah, bad setting for 8hr ccie exam.
Yet I was given go by management even with all odds loud and clear, I admit I even requested permission to reschedule, management said go for it, worry about it later. Good management? I'll let you be the judge of that.
Anyways, I wonder if this is anything amusing to you. I guess not.
Troubleashooting had 10 tickets. Clear descriptions, less crazy restrictions than
V4. I gotta say, it rocked. Tickets made more sense. But my brain was lagging behind. On v4 which I thought tougher I got 68%, this time I got 33%.
As far as NDA goes, I can only applaud Cisco for making the exam a real life (or at least closer to it). My 1st attempt has crazy scenarios asking cisco doc magical keywords.
This time I saw questions about technologies working together in close to life professional topologies. Again, I cannot go deep in details, but if you took v4, it was nothing like the v4 crazy questions. I had questions that challenged recalling my personal experience. I had a few moments of "Oh I saw that in real life".
But 2 hours fly easily when you are unprepared.
I spent my 30 extra diag minutes. The exam notifies you. You cannot use them "accidentally".
The diag. Oh man I hate it. And I passed it, it was sort of a consolation prize.
What I hate about it is that I had the exam zoomed to 100% and my frakking screen cropped the ticket counter.
I saw four fields to fill, I assumed these were the four tickets. How stupid I was. To make things worse, tshoot takes you as an active tshooter, right? You type commands and you fix problems.
The insight came in at the end of the first ticket. Diag forces you to recollect other people's work. I would say the real life experience counts A LOT. First of all, take previous analysis with a grain of salt. Does it counts on diag? YES! And I forgot it, because I was into the given analysis until I realized this was like real life, you cannot ever start diag by assuming the last person was right. That suspicion is what makes people trust us.
So that was 15 minutes. I was so happy that I got the four fields in half time, even after knowing I had blew tshoot. Then I hit next and ANOTHER TICKET SHOWS! Then I looked again at the page, this time at 75% zoom and I see the frakking ticket counter. 2 of 3... Short version, I took 10 min. Last ticket was the more complex of the 3. And by the way, given the already known public facts about diag, I really hate drag and drop, that was low of you Cisco, shame on you for that.
Now for the config. Yeah, it is big.
Brian Dennis said on my config bootcamp in April last year... If you can get one of our (v4) tshoot scenarios, and build it from scratch, in less than 6 hours, you are ready. And there you go. I am damm sure BrianD is right, even though I did not pass this section too.
Back in the tshoot bootcamp, June, this year, Dave Smith gave me the same exercise on the 1st day. I didn't complete the scenario in time, a warning I did not ignore. Config is exactly (well not literally) the same size as a INE V4 tshoot scenario. Change frame relay by dmvpn and knock yourself out.
I went better this time, of course, not enough to pass config either. But last time I had a bad L2 score. This time my L2 was 86%, I needed 100% (yeah L2 must be 100%, in case you didn't knew)
Was L2 easier in v5 than in v4? Yes. Was it smaller? NO. There was a lot of L2 to type. Easier yes, but very time consuming, and once again, ot made sense. Not much sense, after all it makes no sense to group several routers to the same switch, but given v4, it mades perfect sense.
Ditto for L3, it was well designed, almost real world. You can say it is a simplified global network. And having said that I am saying Cisco, you are right. This is what CCIE is about. About having people creating complex networks which work respecting real life restrictions, like some crazy turn of life that left a network with a weird part of the network. That weird part that I saw on my exam, I saw many networks that evolved into that weird designed. It was weird, it works, not the best design. But it respected my experience (didn't respect my speed though).
The exam time flew short. I had the craziest experience. There was a fire alarm simulation and for 30 minutes I kept hearing a siren. The proctor told us to stay and continue.
Also, this time the keyboard was a standard US dell keyboard. Mouse would only be worst if it still used a ball (do you guys remember this or I am too old). The screen was 1080p. In theory. The VM didn't support 1080p. I had access to display properties and I was able to change it to 1280x720, which was marginally better than the default whatever that was. I was also able to activate anti alias. (Yeah, that was during config).
Putty had only current session properties enabled, so not many toggles. Cisco doc access was okey-ish... Technologies books were available which was a pleasant surprise for me.
Proctor, Mr Nagaraja, a very smiling gentleman, was much more friendlier than the other one I would call Mr Grumpy. But Mr Grumpy was okey too, just didn't go any extra mile.
So that's it.
Given current time constraints I am not sure I want to give it another shot. It will probably think different come tomorrow, but if I cannot devote time to study (I travel too much), I would rather save my sanity and marriage. Last of all I have no intention of breaking NDA, Btw dumpers, I hope you never crack this version because it is a great exam, and until I sat today on the lab chair, I had completely lost value of the cert. Cheers to you Cisco. This time I failed because I was not ready. Not because the exam asked me stuff designed to break cheaters legs. I considered myself collateral damage before. Today I believe I was tested as a candidate for expert level.