Shiling Ding, CCIE #26178

I am one of the luck one who was notified failed but two weeks later email from Cisco notified that further internal review changed my lab status to pass. 5 years working experiences in university Core group, deployed MPLS L3 VPN on campus last year. Two V4 lab attempts. Total preparation time is 1 year for the lab. First attempt, December 2009, OEQ passed, troubleshooting passed, configuration failed. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family for their understanding, support and sacrifice. They have to put up with me not doing any housework, not taking care of our daughters, and very moody sometimes. I did it for you all! Thanks to my coworker who got the number two months ago. He has been an invaluable source of encouragement, motivation and inspiration. I really appreciate it. You are the best coworker I have ever had. Thanks all for the good materials INE has put out, they are invaluable. I read all the blogs on blog.ine.com and used all the mock labs with their rack rentals. I am now studying for CCIE Security and you bet that I used INE again and bought the Premium Bundle of the security already. CCIE Routing and Switching Review Kits shared from Krzysztof Załęski, CCIE #24081 RS is a very good review kit. http://inetcon.org/blog/ The more your practice, the better you get! For these who are still trying, please don't give up and keep going, you can do it! And there will be a time for you to share your accomplishment. Take notes and review your notes, know where the topic is in the DocCD. For troubleshooting, it's what your do during the lab preparation. Just remember, only open the ones you are concerned with. Find the source and destination routers, go from there. Once fix an incident, just wr mem and exit out that terminal. I have the incident on one little side of the screen, topology on the other big side of the screen. Just drag the opened terminal window around not covering the topology, but still position correlated, so it will easy for you. I used a lot of sh run | b r eigrp|ospf|bgp and other show command, it might be faster to run some debug command. Pay attention to your source and destination even in your verification command. For configuration, use terminal server, ctrl+shift+6+x, this is essential! You can have your notepad, tasks, diagram open on the same screen window while terminal server is only on the top right corner. Practice as you do your labs. Once you are used to it, it's hard to live without it :-) After finish some vendor's workbooks/mocklabs, rewire your lab to be the same as your previous attempts, just to get familiar with the rack topology and ctrl+shift+6 numbering. The real lab topology is different from other workbooks. Build your own rack, I shared lab equipments with my coworker, the money is well spent. I redraw L3/IGP, L2(physical, vlan, trunk), BGP and Frame-relay into one page, it saves me time not to look back and forth. I even have space to put multicast, ipv6 on the same page :-) Other things on another page, I don't use two sided, otherwise, you have to flip back and forth and easily lost track. Use notepad for repetitive or minor change template like ibgp full-mesh etc. Give up to gain! You can not have everything 100% percent sure, just give up some points if you have no clue about it, focus on something you might be able to make sure by looking up command reference or configuration guide. Shiling Ding CCIE Routing and Switching 26178