Amazing 2014

Hi Everyone,

It was long time since I haven’t writing for this Blog, many things happened for me in this year, 2014. First of All I want to thanks to Allah , that I’m now a part of Cisco Systems family, I Joined Cisco as a System Engineer.

The people in Cisco are passionate, highly motivated, and all of them are diligent, I’m very-very motivated in here ;)

I’m also glad to say that I’ve passed the CCIE-SP Lab exam several days ago, in Mobile Lab. It was my second CCIE Attempt. I watched the Incredible INE Video, understanding the fundamental concept and practicing the SP Workbooks (old version and the latest version), since the old one still contain a great resources such as QoS, Security (RTBH), Internet Access, Etc. I was Practicing the Full scale Lab, where lab 1-2 was a warming-up lab, since I could get above 80 on both lab on my First Attempt ;), Lab 3 was quite great, since it was becoming more complex, and finally Lab 4 was totally complex in limited gear fashion and there were so much restriction on the task requirement, CCIE Lab style, hehe.

After finishing the INE Workbook, I used the CCIE-SP Sample Lab Exam, which was available on the Cisco Partner Education Center (PEC), the lab task seems straight forward, but the devices were bigger L.

In My opinion, strategy to tackle SP is slightly different from tackling R/S, since in the SP everthing was related, from building your IGP/BGP/MPLS Backbone Infrastructure to delivering Services to Tier-2 and Tier-3 small SPs, so what I did in the exam were:

·         The first 60 minutes I read the task requirements carefully and making the Diagrams (there were a bunch of devices involved), making correlation between IPv4 & IPv4 IGP/BGP/MPLS related Task, keep track the RD, RT, and the related Routers, and finally make the aliases for both IOS & IOS-XR. I did this because once you nail the lab task requirement, the deeper you config the more you would lose sight of what may happened in your IGP/BGP/MPLS, so that was why I preferred to look the Big Picture and predict what could happened in the first 60 Minutes of reading & Drawing Diagrams.

·         I didn’t trust the Initial config, So I configure the whole IOS/IOS-XR config in every task requirements, eventhough it only mentioning about some expected result was not there.

·         I found bug on some feature, where I did the verification, I detected somekind ‘unidirectional’ status on my routers on one side but the other-side it was Ok, I try to shut and no shut the Interface, but it was still the same. The Only option for me was to reloading the GSR Box, but with that PRP in place, it could took 50-70 Minutes to booting up, So I just leave the task at it is, and I have to sacrifice some points >.<

·         I managed to finish almost all the task and still have 1.30 hours to did the re-verification on all the tasks I finished, and counting the points I had earned.

·         I used the tclsh to verify all the prefix could be reachable, but unfortunately you couldn’t do that on XR Box, I used manual method instead >.<

I Thought the result would be fast like R/S, but I just got it next morning, Since I was very tired and oversleep right after getting home. I opened up the OLSM, and Alhamdulillah I passed the Exams.

On short I’m very grateful from what God has given me, My Family who support me in this Journey, Mr. Himawan whom gave me Insight on Cisco Systems, and all of you.

Let’s do the Best in this amazing years.

Cheers ;)