New Member from Chicago

Hi, I’m Richard! I work for a Cisco Partner. I’m fortunate in that I get to work side-by-side with a lot of other great network engineers and 95% of my time is actually spent working on as an engineer on Cisco equipment.

I’m studying for my CCIE and it’s pretty daunting. I have a family and so I need to be efficient in how I spend my time. I’m tired of using Cisco documentation to learn how to do something new as it’s both horribly written and often only understandable if one is already very familiar with the subject. I also often need some help in deploying new solutions for customers.

The other day I had a client who needed to filter traffic over a transit VLAN linking several VPLS linked sites. I couldn’t get an outbound ACL to work for the transit VLAN and the CCIE sitting next to me said only inbound ACLs would work for SVIs. He recommended a VACL, which I had never deployed before.

A quick search on the web and I came across Network Lessons with a very clear and concise example - all the other websites and especially Cisco documentation had written paragraphs and paragraphs and doing a very poor job of explaining what I wanted to know. It seems writing well is a lost art.

I joined up here because I often need very clear, easy to understand examples that are well written. I save the Cisco command reference for seeing all the options for various commands and Cisco support forums for those weird corner cases for which other people may have a solution.

Thanks!

Hello Richard,

First of all, welcome on board! :sunglasses:

Working daily with Cisco equipment and having other engineers around is definitely a big help. CCIE is a lot of work…it’s not like the CCNA/CCNP exams where you can study on and off for a few weeks and try an exam. It’s a long-term commitment and you’ll need the support from work/family. It’s like training for a marathon but at least you’ll be at home, grinding labs at the console :smile:

I agree on the Cisco docs, there are some very good examples there but when a topic is new to you, it can be very difficult to learn how it works. Usually, they are very complete so once you have a basic understanding of a topic, it can be useful if you want to know what a specific parameter does or if you have to look up some limitations.

I’m a big fan of using Evernote to keep track of command examples btw. I use the web clipper a lot and format everything nicely with the CTRL+SHIFT+L combo. Not just for Cisco but also for some other stuff I have to do every few weeks (messing with MySql, Nginx, Linux, etc).

Good luck studying!

Rene

Hello Richard!

Great to have you on board! It’s good to hear that you and others are finding this site useful. CCIE is daunting especially with a family and a job! I wish you success in all you do and I look forward to your questions, comments and participation in NetworkLessons!

Laz