Eventually - My JNCIE-ENT Success!

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

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

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.

CCIE Assault - Part 1

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:

1. Buy CCIE Written Certification Guide - Check!

2. 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.

   Continue reading