Certification on Network Janitor

Eventually - My JNCIE-ENT Success!

Wed, 22 May 2013 01:45:26 +0000

Finally… it was bound to happen. My three year journey is complete.

It was about this time last year that I posted about my second JNCIE-ENT lab attempt, and sadly it didn’t go the way I wanted it to! Due to work commitments I was not going to be prepared to sit the 2012 Q3 round of lab offerings, so I resolved to sit the December / January round.

I picked up my studies again and worked on my weak areas noted during my first two attempts. I paid particular attention to areas of multicast and switch security as these two topics were areas of weakness for me last time. I was lucky enough to work on a project at the end of last year that included nearly 1000 ports of 802.1x with dynamic VLAN allocation, so that proved to be an excellent “lab environment” for me.

Juniper Lab Experiences - My second attempt at JNCIE-ENT

Sun, 27 May 2012 04:17:01 +0000

As many of you know, I had the honour and good fortune of being able to take part in beta testing the JNCIE-ENT lab in August of 2011. The day completely wiped me out and I was walking around in a daze for the remainder of that week. While I knew the technologies I was unprepared for the time-management skills required to pass this lab. Needless to say it was no surprise when I received my fail-mail advising me that I was unsuccessful.

First Step Down - Written Complete

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:57:35 +0000

I havent blogged at all for March (and this is only a very brief one) because I have been very busy studying and it seems to have paid off! I managed to get the first step towards my CCIE R&S exam out of the way last week - I passed my CCIE Written exam :)

I made the commitment back in December to sit the exam while I was at Cisco Live Melbourne 2011. If you have been following any of my tweets so far this year you may have noticed that I have spent nearly as many days out of the country as I have in. My work travel schedule was pretty hectic for January and February and I didnt have as much time dedicated to study as had hoped.

Exam Review: JNCIS-ENT (JN0-343)

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 03:50:01 +0000

As you may have heard, Juniper has been shaking up their certification program - and all I can say is “It’s for the better!”.

In an effort to consolidate the disparate certification tracks (which were previously product based), they have moved towards being more centered around the market segments (and by extension the careers of the engineers going for the certs).

The first change was migrating the M track to becoming the Service Provider track. This is actually the track that would have made the most sense for my 9 to 5 (also 5 - 9) job, but as usual I don’t like to follow convention.

Exam Review - JNCIA-ER (JN0-342)

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:30:34 +0000

As a Network Janitor, I spend a lot of time mopping up other peoples mess! When called in for a consulting job, it doesnt pay to be a vendor bigot. This is why we decided that staff at my company would need to get trained in the key vendors in the networking space. We identified our first 3 targets as Cisco, Juniper and HP. We then started working towards improving our partner levels with each of these vendors, and this is a process that is still underway.

Reflections on Juniper Training

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:01:56 +0000

If you follow my @networkjanitor twitter feed than you may know that I spent 3 days last week in training provided by Juniper and the local distributer Avnet.

In the old tradition of “free training for channel partners”, I signed up for “Junos Routing Essentials (JRE)” and “Junos for Security Platforms”. There was an “Introduction to Junos Software” course on the Monday that I sent one of my engineers along to, but I didnt attend personally. I have included below my review of the two courses.

CCIE Assault - Part 1

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:50:13 +0000

Im currently working on my plan of attack on the CCIE R&S and I need some advice. I finally finished my CCNP in June after years of putting it off (I first got my CCNA in 2001!), and now I am trying to determine the best course of action moving forward.

So far my plan is this:

Buy CCIE Written Certification Guide - Check!
Improve my Skills in QoS, BGP and MPLS - Sit each of the CCIP exams associated with these subjects as confirmation of understanding of the base knowledge.