Marco Lolischkies, CCIE #29599

Hallo INE, I had finished the CCNP half year ago and decided to go for CCIE. For it was a taff decision, because I heard about all the horrible things, like having no social life. So I talked to my girlfriend, not to convince her, but to talk about my plans and to get some support and understanding , not having so much time. First I need to prepare for the written exam. I googled some stuff about being CCIE and how to get the magic number. I found the expanded blueprint from INE and was really scared about all these topic. I mean I had make the CCNP certification, but there were so much things that I never heard about. I started to read some book about general network theory. After I took some Cisco CCIE preparation books to get deeper into Cisco technology. I tried to make notes for all the stuff in the expanded blueprint. After reading a lot of books I felt very crazy. It is very difficult to remember all the little thinks, without practice. I bought the INE Vol.1 to get more deeper into the network technology. For the first time I had the feeling, that sometime a can make the CCIE. The Vol.1 starts very easy and becomes more difficult. It helped me a lot to remember all the thinks I have written in books. At the end, I had a very good feeling about all this Cisco stuff, so I passed the written exam. For Lab Preparation I bought INE Vol.2 and Vol.4. I used four 3560 and dynamips to simulate the routers. It was really perfect for preparation, just copy/paste the config and start. The VOl.2 Workbooks are a must for preparation. In the end, I made every lab at least four times. First I tried Lab 1-10 to solve as much as a possible, but I only solved less the 20%, because some questions are really difficult. Again, I made many many notes to understand the technology. The second time going through the labs it was much better. I did the same with labs 11-20. After finishing all the labs I tried the ts vol.4 and thought that this should be easy with experience of vol.2. But ts is not easy, I was happy to get the experience. In may this year I had the first try for lab and failed because of ts. I was really nervous in lab, not sure why ☺ I specially prepared for ts. I used the final configuration of Vol.2 and a friend of mine maked some errors into it. I also configured all the labs with difficulty of 9. In the end, I got my number.