David Kelsen, CCIE #35920

Hi Guys, Just writing to let you know that I passed R&S in Sydney on Friday 6th July. My number is 35920. It was my second attempt, I'd failed approx. 5 weeks earlier on Friday 1st June. I used mostly INE training materials (like most people who post in the Success Stories forum), including all of the workbooks, ATC video, and I'd taken 4 mock labs, which I'd recommend doing because it puts you in a 'time pressure' scenario. The troubleshooting section had a couple of tickets that were very basic - a single line of config fixed them in each case. I also got two tickets with multiple issues that took me much longer. There were some tricky tickets where it wasn't easy to spot the cause of the issue, but they were solved within 5 or 6mins. I got stuck on one ticket, but I moved on after 15mins, completed the rest and returned to it. I finished the troubleshooting section (incl. verification, and re-verification) with 5mins left on the clock. Config section was quite tough, but ironically the routing and switching sections weren't too difficult, except for one task in layer 2 where I wasn't sure of the solution until I'd completed the config and I could verify it. For the L2 section I just did exactly what they asked even though I had some doubt in the back of my mind. The L2 section was huge, for the most part it wasn't difficult, but there was a lot of config. The same goes for L3, not too difficult, just loads of config. All in all it was a tough lab, mostly due to the workload (huge configs) and some difficult Advanced Services and Optimise the Network tasks. Dave.