Good day all!, I'm Walter Nakatana from Namibia

My goal is to achieve the CCNP Enterprise and not only pass the exams but to gain an in-depth understanding of the technologies and how the protocols work.

thank you for the affordable and state of the art training

regards

Hello Walter and welcome to NetworkLessons!

It’s great to have you with us. It’s nice to see your philosophy of not just passing the certification exam, but to also obtain useful and applicable knowledge and skills in the process.

We’re glad you’ve chosen us to help you on your certification journey.

Laz

Hi Laz,

thank you for the warm welcome

regards

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Hello Walter,

Welcome!

That’s the right mindset. Learn how everything works and the certificate will be the final reward of your journey.

If you need any help, you know where to find us.

Rene

Hi Rene,

thank you for the warm welcome. one more thing i logged a call earlier regarding the monthly bill cycle,i subscribed today but i want my monthly bill deduction to start tomorrow ? hence i want the monthly bill to be on the 26th on every month,
can you help?

regards

Hi Walter,

No problem. I just sent you an email before I read this post. I’ll change it now for you.

Rene

Hi Rene,

can you please advise what is the best way to master a technology?, what do you do if you have mastered ospf for one month and move on to eigrp, and study eigrp but end up forgetting some stuff you have learned about ospf?. what study method did you use when you passed your CCIE (my ultimate dream)

your response is always highly appreciated.

Hello Walter

I think that the phrase “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it” is very important. From my point of view, I believe that the number one thing that makes the information I learn stick is to employ it practically. This means labs, labs, and more labs. When I learn a new technology, I do as many labs as possible, and I have found that this helps me to understand the intricacies of the technology much better than just reading about them. It also helps to maintain the knowledge in my brain for longer periods of time.

Over time, we will still lose some of what we have learned, but if you learned it well initially, a short review should be enough to refresh your memory sufficiently in order for you to get back to the same level of proficiency.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz

2 Likes

Hi Walter,

In a nutshell, studying for CCIE R&S looked like this:

phase 1) Go through all topics one-by-one. This is a combination of reading, watching videos, and labs.
phase 2) Practice full labs (configuration + troubleshooting)

The goal of #1 is to go through all topics, learn the “core” material and to at least have seen some obscure topics just once.

When you go through a topic, everything is fresh in your mind. Leave it alone for a few weeks, and you forget a lot of details. This happens…there are no methods to work around this:

  • Make notes in your own words. If you have trouble understanding something, once you figure it out write it down. Also keep configuration snippets. If you are unsure how to configure MPLS VPN PE-CE OSPF, you don’t want to browse through articles or blog posts. You need a quick example that you stored somewhere.

  • Once you start doing full configuration and troubleshooting labs, you run into each topic over and over again. It always starts with L2 (VLANs, Trunks, STP), then L3 IGPs (OSPF, EIGRP, redistribution), then BGP. Afterwards, it’s “decoration” with multicast, MPLS, security, etc.

When you start with phase 2, the first time it takes you 20 hours to do a lab with a score of 40 points and you feel awful :sweat_smile: Once you do it a couple of times, you get better at it. Since you are exposed to all topics over and over again, it’ll be easier to memorize everything. After a while, you can configure these full labs in a few hours.

10 weeks after you pass the CCIE lab, you’ll have the same problem again…you’ll forget about a lot of details. That’s ok though, it’s like running a marathon. You have your notes and you learned something valuable…how to study, and where to look for information when needed.

I hope this helps!

Rene

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thanks Laz for taking time for explaining. will surely put that into practice…

1 Like

wow what tremendous insight!!!, more than excited to pursue my CCIE in two to three years after i complete my CCNP enterprise. i do like the fact that you said it becomes easier with repetition.

are you also planning on adding troubleshooting/configuration labs? (I understand you already said its hard to provide pre-configured labs but i am taking about like the small labs you already provide with the configuration at the end of each lesson)

Hi Rene,

I am building my own pre-configured labs, I copy and paste the initial configs than save the configs before solving the problem or configuring the task after that I don’t save the, I just do a reload so that it takes me back to the saved initial configs

please see attached!

Hi Walter,

Good to hear it’s helpful :slight_smile: In the beginning, CCIE feels very overwhelming. For now, my goal is to cover all blueprint topics. I will add configuration examples, like we have now.

I probably won’t add complete configuration/troubleshooting labs. I’d love to, but we can’t do everything. I can recommend the workbooks from ine.com though. You can do a lot of studying on your own but there is a moment where you have to sit down and only do configuration/troubleshooting labs, that’s when the workbooks are useful.

Rene

Hi Walter,

That is a great idea. Saving your own labs also helps when you want to look something up or verify later. You boot your topology, run some show commands and continue. You don’t have to rebuild things from scratch over and over again.

Rene

Here is one with configs

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