My CCIE Lab Rack Overview

Cisco Certfied Internetwork Expert

I finally PASSED the CCIE Routing & Switching Lab Exam today, May 5th 2005, out
at RTP in North Carolina!



I have been studying for the CCIE exam
for almost 3 years now. I am proud and ecstatic to announce that I finally
passed today out at RTP in North Carolina. I just got back into Chicago and
found out about an hour ago. So I am wired to say the least.



I came out of the exam feeling very confident that I had passed it. I knew I had
absolutely nailed it. The worst part was having to endure the torture of waiting
and not knowing the whole way home. I kept second guessing all kinds of issues
that I ran into. The mind can be an evil thing when it is left to its own
devices...



CCIE Plaque Anyway, I am so happy and thankful that this chapter of my life has
finally come to an end (so are my wife and kids). I already packed my library of
Cisco Press books back onto my bookshelf and powered my lab rack down. Yeehaw! I
can actually have my life back and stop spending all my nights and weekends
studying my butt off in the basement. What a huge burden off my shoulders. Now I
might actually be able to interact with humans again instead of routers and
switches. I never thought I could get sick of working on this stuff, but I
proved myself wrong.



Time to book at least a 2 week vacation to St. Somewhere.

For those that are interested, here is my Lab in my basement. This is where I
spent all of my spare time preparing to take the CCIE Routing & Switching Lab
exam. Fortunately the whine of the fans on all this gear does not carry
throughout the house. The nice thing is I added some APC remote start power
supplies which allow me to leave the rack powered down and I can fire it up at
any time from anywhere remotely.



I collected a lot of this gear off of eBay and some of it was spare hardware
from the office. This is about the bare minimum of equipment you need to run
through many of the practice lab scenarios. The only equipment I am missing is
an LS1010 ATM switch and a couple of ATM modules for my 2600's. That gets quite
a bit pricey, so I just rented lab time for that since it was an insignificant
amount of material to cover with respect to all the other topics.



If you think I am an extreme geek, then you haven't seen anything yet. Check out
Scott Morris' lab...the only non Cisco employee to have 4
CCIE certifications! The man is a
machine when it comes to this stuff.



My preparation path:

Realistic Exams Question and Answers with explanations

Testkingdom’s Advance Technology actual Preparation material and vol 2 (68 labs)