Deepak Arora, CCIE #29353

NEAR GEETA BHAWAN, Dear Friends, Finally With the grace of God, countless hours of hard work, and a little bit of luck I passed the CCIE R&S Lab on 21st June, 2011 Over 2000+ hours of practice on CLI finally paid off :-) Now I am Evil CCIE#29353 Now before going back to idea about preparation and stuff I used, I would like to thank few (may be :-O ) people. So here we go: First of all I would like to thank Sushil Sharda, he was the guy who asked me to go for Cisco Career back in late 2005 and few months later I got my CCNA :-) Next I would like to thank Mrityunjay Rai, he is one among most brilliant guys I ever met during my journey, the guy helped me allot during my CCNP whe I was working through my CCNP. Can't thank him enough actually for his help and motivation. Now I would like to thank My family for all their support for last 15 months . Next is gonna be few Mentor names starting from Brian Dennis, Brian McGahan, Scott Morris, Vikas Kathuria, Amandeep Singh, Kanwal Chawla. They are simply gr8 people and without their help and support I couldn't have done this. 9 months back I formed a CCIE Study group and all guys Mike, Abel, Johan, Das were simply amazing guys. I also found couple of other good friends around at ieoc like Jakub, Adam booth, Nabramov, Nicolas Michael, Amit JP etc.... thanks to all of you. Now coming back to idea of preparation. Ummm..... I used following products : 1. INE AOD Week 1 2. INE ATC 10 Day version from Both Brians 3. INE CCNP COD 4. INE TS Bootcamp and TS Bootcamp Labs 5. Few of INE OLS on MPLS and MPLS Troubleshooting 6. CCIE ver 4 Exam Cert Guide 7. Jeff Doyle Vol 1 and 2 for few topics like BGP, Multicast, RIP 8. CCNP BCMSN Book 9. MPLS Fundamentals 10. Most important once - CCO Technology pages for each technology Now you gonna say what about workbook ? :-) Nahh... I didn't use any of those from any vendor. I had INE Vol 1 outline from INE website along with CCIE Extended Blueprint. I labbed up all those topics and technologies on either gns or on my own rack. I made hundred of small and big labs some of those which has 1 router only and others as upto 25 routers. You can find many of those at my own blog - http://deepakarora1984.blogspot.com In my first attempt I missed my digits just by 1 TS ticket since I scored 72 in TS. After first attempt I knew I need to get better with MPLS VPN troubleshooting and also need to make little better strategy. So I went through this great "MPLS VPN Troubleshooting" lecture from Brian McGahan from OLS and it was exactly what I needed. He is certianly one among best people in training industry to teach you CCIE. Also his Troubleshooting COD and TS Bootcamp labs were very good and those are the labs I used from INE. About exam, hmmmm.... expect the unexpected :-). Make a good strategy specially for TS. Exam is though little unfair in some areas IMHO but who cares :-) Also try to learn and troubleshoot control plane issues . Also filtering show commands output is a key for example sh ip ospf | i ID to find ospf router id, you cant go though all output in this short time. In last ... hope for best but prepare for worst :-) HTH... Deepak Arora http://deepakarora1984.blogspot.com