Hrvoje Sostaric, CCIE #20006

During the spring of 2007, after Ive passed written for the second time I seriously started gathering equipment needed for R&S lab. Seven routers, four switches, one PIX and one PC later, I was ready to go. Two weeks of training in Vienna gave me a motivation to go as hard as I could. I continued my 10-12 hours a day hell for two months which proved as not enough so on August 31st I scored 72% in Brussels on my firs attempt. After that I had to pause for almost three months because colleague of mine took all of mine equipment for his SP lab. I used that time to collect some more knowledge in areas I seriously sucked in August. In November I went to Ljubljana on three day workshop organized by Cisco for second kick start for another round of endless labs. Two and a half months later, after almost 2000 hours of reading and practicing I was again on my way from Zagreb to Brussels thinking how cool it would be to have #19999 or #20000 and hoping for #20006 since 6 has always been my lucky number. On that cold February 12th morning after hearing for second time what I can do and what I can't do I opened my exam at 8:05. I was quite surprised when I realized that it was only 11:00 when I was finishing routing part of the exam considering that I thought I will be lucky to finish that by lunch. Without any delay I rushed with BGP, security and half of QoS before lunch time at 12:05. With plenty of time to think about couple of things that bothered me, I returned to my exam at 12:35 and again on my surprise was done with everything at 14:45. I had plenty of time to check everything three times, reload all of the equipment twice and to clean up macros and tcl scripts from routers and switches. At 16:40 I left for the hotel and that waiting till 17:26 to see #20006 next to my name. That was longest 46 minutes of my life :). Without INE and two other lab vendors this story of success would not happen so I'm grateful to all of you guys. Hrvoje Sostaric; CCIE #20006