6th Mock Lab - 90%

This was the only lab i finished 1 hour before its actual end (8h), but i spent another 2 hours afterwards reviewing my configurations. Luckily i found and corrected 2 issues, which would probably mean 2 lost tasks.

Besides that, i lost 5 tasks in this Mock Lab (level 8):

1) I lost 1 task (2 points), because i forgot to configure the ip address for a loopback interface!

2) I lost 1 task (3 points), because the proctor though (?) that i did the same mistake as in the previous mock lab (using default class to match in MLS). But, according to the solution provided, i was correct this time!!!

3) I lost 1 task (2 points), because i used a /20 for summarization instead of a /21. I just shouldn't have put into summarization the loopbacks of switches that were not supposed to be part of the routing domain.

4) I lost 1 task (2 points), because i used a little bit different statement:

My solution:

redistribute maximum-prefix 80 warning-only

Proctor's solution:

redistribute maximum-prefix 100 80 warning-only

My solution produces 2 logged messages, one at 60 (75% of 80) prefixes and one at 80 prefixes.
Proctor's solution produces 2 logged messages, one at 80 (80% of 100) prefixes and one at 100 prefixes.

The task was asking to generate a log message whenever more than 80 routes are redistributed. I guess both solutions should be correct.

5) I lost 1 task (3 points), because i used a different technique from the solution! According to the proctor i had more configuration on a router, than it was asked for ("use the minimum amount of statements").

My solution:

!  1st router: moving routes from RIP into OSPF
!
router ospf 1
 redistribute rip subnets route-map RIP->OSPF
!
route-map RIP->OSPF permit 10
 match metric 11 +- 5
 set tag 512010
!
route-map RIP->OSPF permit 20
 set tag 512005
!

! 2nd router : moving routes from OSPF into RIP
!
router rip
 redistribute ospf 1 route-map OSPF->RIP
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 10
 match tag 512010
 set metric 10
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 20
 match tag 512005
 set metric 5
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 100
 set metric 1

Proctor's solution:

!  1st router: moving routes from RIP into OSPF
!
router ospf 1
 redistribute rip subnets route-map RIP->OSPF
!
route-map RIP->OSPF permit 10
 match metric 1 2 3 4 5
 set tag 5
!
route-map RIP->OSPF permit 20
 set tag 10
!

! 2nd router : moving routes from OSPF into RIP
!
router rip
 redistribute ospf 1 route-map OSPF->RIP
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 10
 match tag 5
 set metric 5
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 20
 match tag 10
 set metric 10
!
route-map OSPF->RIP permit 30

I still don't understand how proctor's solution is supposed to work for the OSPF routes that don't match any tag, when they don't have a metric configured for redistribution under RIP. It's very well known that RIP expects a metric to be defined.

I guess, the best way would be to use "redistribute ospf 1 metric 1 route-map OSPF->RIP", or even better don't use the " match tag 10" under the "route-map OSPF->RIP permit 20" statement, so everything else (including the ospf tagged 10 routes) gets a metric of 10.

If you count the number of points i lost, you'll come up with a sum of 12, which means i should have gotten 88. The strange thing is that the whole lab sums up for 102 points!!!

This was the last Mock Lab. From now on, i'll keep on practicing on my PC using dynamips, trying to recreate all the difficult scenarios that i met in the online labs. I definitely need to speed things up.


10 days left till the REAL LAB!!!!

5th Mock Lab - 94%

Unbelievable!!!

I got my 2nd biggest grade (94%) in the hardest Mock Lab (level 10)!!!

I lost only 2 tasks in this one, but i spent 2 more hours from the normal 8-hour lab:

1) I lost 1 task (3 points), because i couldn't find a way to do ip accounting for traffic destined to a specific ip. I tried ip accounting, netflow, policing/classification, but neither one was correct. The answer was IP Source Tracker.

Router(config)#ip source-track 1.2.3.4

Router#show ip source-track

2) I lost 1 task (3 points), because i didn't know that the default class is useless with MLS; you have to classify traffic somehow. i.e. if you want to police ALL incoming traffic on a L2/L3 switch for a specific interface, then you can create an aggregate policer and use it under 2 different classes (one IP, one non-IP) under the interface's policy-map.

mls qos
mls qos aggregate-policer POLICER-1MB 1000000 8000
!
ip access-list ext IP
 permit ip any any
!
mac access-list ext NON-IP
 permit any any
!
class-map IP
 match access-group name IP
!
class-map NO-IP
 match access-group name NON-IP
!
policy-map POLICY
 class IP
  police aggregate POLICER-1MB
 class NON-IP
  police aggregate POLICER-1MB
!
int F0/1
 service-policy input POLICY

Generally, this lab didn't have many tasks that were depending on others. So if you made a mistake in a task , you're probably going to lose only that task. Surely there were many tasks that were quite strange or tricky, but with a trial & error method, you could solve most of them.

4th Mock Lab - 82%

That was a strange one.

Last Saturday i had my 4th Mock Lab; level 7 this time.

This is how i lost my points:

1) I lost 1 task (2 points), because i didn't read it well enough. When the task says "do NOT configure this on that router" it doesn't mean "you should configure it on that router". A task, that costed me 15-20 mins to solve, was actually lost because i configured a single command on the wrong router; the router that i was asked to not configure.

2) I lost 2 tasks (3+2 points), because i didn't understand what exactly was asked for. As it seems, "area 0 adjacencies" means "area 0 interfaces", so regardless of whether an interface has any peer, it's still an adjacency (by itself?). Also, "forbid transit services between 2 AS" means "forbid prefixes learned from a specific AS move to another AS" and not "forbid prefixes originated from a specific AS move to another AS". In other words, "allow only local traffic". I believe an actual proctor would actually clarify such things.

3) I lost 1 task (3 points) , because the IOS on a specific router had a bug where it didn't allow you to enter spaces into a rmon event description, although the description was put inside quotes. Probably the proctor didn't even test it on the same router, neither he read the banner i had enabled after logging in, informing him of this "bug".

4) I lost 1 task (3 points), because of an RPF failure, which while i was testing didn't seem to exist. This time i tried not to use static mroutes, so i could experiment with the unicast routing table. Although i'm sure i configured unicast routing in such a way, that there was no mroute needed in the multicast path (all pings were working), the proctor had another opinion.

5) I lost 1 task (2 points), because the question was written wrong. When someone asks to allow a user to shut/not shut only a specific interface, it doesn't mean that the user should be allowed to shut/no shut all interfaces. In order to do the first, you have to use Role-Based CLI Access (which i used, without success as it seems), while in order to do the second you can just use privilege levels (something that the solution used).

6) I lost 1 task (3 points), because i though that "ip dhcp-server x.x.x.x" works the same as "ip helper-address x.x.x.x" for dhcp requests. As it seems, "ip dhcp-server x.x.x.x" doesn't forward the dhcp requests to the dhcp server, unless it's coming from an IPCP negotiation (i.e. if "peer default ip address dhcp" is configured under a PPP interface).

Finally, i guess that the IE's proctors who grade the mock labs, do not necessarily load the configs into the same equipment, neither they do try to configure the provided solution into it. Otherwise they would have noticed that some of the solution's commands couldn't be applied (possibly due to a bug), while some other wouldn't work as expected.

Of course, the support through their forums is still gone. Nobody is actually looking the mock lab sections in there. I still wonder about their reason of existence...

Next Mock Lab coming tomorrow... Difficulty Level 10!!! One more till the actual lab.

3rd Mock Lab - 97%

This was the first mock lab, i finished in about 7,5 hours! Of course it took me another 1,5 hour to review all of it and correct 2 "mistakes". But generally, i'm quite satisfied by the result.

There were 3 topics i had to look at the DocCD; one of them was complete unknown to me (MVR - Multicast Vlan Registration). I just knew there was a feature which provided the functionality i was asked for, but i didn't know, neither its name, nor its configuration. As it proved out, it wasn't so difficult.

Finally, to be honest, i believe i should have been graded with a 91%, because there were another 2 tasks that i didn't complete 100% according to the solution provided. I know that sometimes there are many correct solutions to each task, but i think (after looking the vendor's solution) that my own solutions weren't so correct.

On the other hand, there were 2 tasks that my solutions were correct and the ones from the vendor were probably wrong. That's because one task was influenced by changes near the end of the exam (new routes introduced) and the other one wasn't meant to be tested (full reachability while a backup link was active). If i hadn't checked all the questions one more time, i wouldn't have found them. Especially the second one, it took me some time until i come up with a solution; i was trying to find out why an OSPF router was load-balancing between a correct path and a "wrong" path, when the "wrong" path was through a totally NSSA area which was having a default route back to this router. So i was getting a loop there. I finally changed the cost in order to avoid the NSSA area and everything worked fine.


Today i'm having my second CCIE Assessor Lab... hoping for something >80% this time.

2nd Mock Lab - 72%

That was HELL!!!

The 2nd Mock Lab from IE was a lot more difficult from the one i took one week ago.
Which was actually nice, because i wanted to test my strengths. I feel satisfied by the result, but i'm not satisfied by the time i spent in order to finish the whole mock lab...almost 11 full hours! I spent around 1.5 hours on a single ospf question, designing & trying all possible virtual-links (total 5), trying to find the smallest possible number.

Lastly, yesterday i found out that the 1st Mock Lab i had taken was rated as level 6, which is easier than CCIE (level 7), while the 2nd one was rated as level 9. So i decided (since their price went down; someone must have heard me) to take another 2 labs on January, rated at least as level 7.

For the next 2 days (Thursday & Friday) i have booked 2 rack rental sessions, because i want to try some strange L2 scenarios (some i met on these 2 mock labs and some other i have in my mind) on the 3550s/3560s. Dynamips is great for L3, but it lacks a lot of functionality on L2.

I also booked 2 CCIE Assessor sessions (Cisco's online CCIE preparation labs) during the next 2 weeks, because i read somewhere that they resemble the real CCIE lab, especially the style of the questions. So i decided to give it a try.


It's a shame that although the IE's ML scenarios are very clever, the post-sales support is non-existent. Nobody seems to actually read the forums, or if someone reads it, he/she answers mostly the pre-sales questions.

IE Mock Lab dissapointment

Taken from http://www.internetworkexpert.com/iemlcod-rs.htm

Manual Grading

The CCIE Lab Exam is not a multiple choice exam. Instead, it is a highly complex exam with advanced protocol interactions that more often than not result in subjective answers. For this reason we do not run your configurations through a grading script to simply compare them with the solutions that we came up with. Each of your solutions are meticulously checked by hand by our highly skilled CCIE instructors. Once your exam has been graded you will be sent a detailed score report from our CCIE instructors. Sections that are marked incorrect include detailed feedback as to why there were incorrect, and typically include additional links to outside resources.

detailed score report : It was a simple 2 page report with some comments on my errors
detailed feedback as to why there were incorrect : The largest feedback on a section was 27 words, the smallest 3
additional links to outside resources : I wish i could have seen them

Solutions Guides

In addition to the detailed score report and lab breakdown you will receive a solutions guide broken down on a task-by-task basis for each Mock Lab Exam that you take. With this solutions guide format there is no need to sort through long configuration files to guess which configurations correspond to which task. The solutions guides show you not only the configuration for each task but also give important "show" outputs and explain how you can verify that your configuration is functional per the lab requirements.

lab breakdown : nice to have it, but not when some sections are out of date (refering to 2005)

Post-Lab Support

Once you have reveiwed the Mock Lab Exam and solutions, it doesn't stop there. Internetwork Expert also offers free support for each of the Mock Lab scenarios on our CCIE Support Forum. In the real CCIE Lab Exam there is no outlet for getting more feedback on your performance. With our CCIE Mock Lab Exams you'll have the opportunity to ask our instructors why your work was graded a certain way, 24 hours a day!

the opportunity to ask our instructors : ...Still hoping to get an answer...


The good part: Excellent diagrams! Clever scenarios! Tough Tasks!

1st Mock Lab - 74 %

On past Friday i had my first Mock Lab attempt, which proved easier that expected.

I was expecting IGP redistribution in multiple points, IPv6 BGP/OSPF/RIP routing, DVMRP, etc, but most of the sections where quite "easy". That of course doesn't mean that i passed. I missed 10 whole points in the Bridging & Switching section, which is one of my favorites.

The reason? I was in a hurry to finish the first sections which i have more experience with, in order to have enough time to do the rest. But, many questions were tricky and passing through them in a hurry, proved to be the wrong method. I missed 3 points on a simple task (because i didn't configure a vlan) and another 4 points (in two other questions) because of the first error.

There were only 2 sections that i didn't know at all and i had to improvise (one proved correct with a minor error in an acl entry, the other totally wrong). Also there were another 4 sections that i had to look into the Doc CD. At least i have now learned to use the Doc CD more efficiently. It's surely invaluable in such situations.

Also, when i finished, i had only 30 mins left (according to the actual 8-hour lab, because in the mock lab you're allowed to exceed this time by 3 hours). So instead of looking back all the sections in order to verify them, i decided to reload all routers! What was even more disastrous, was the fact that i reloaded them all at the same time and i didn't look at their logs while booting.

The result? After the reload, something wasn't working as expected. After a quick search i found one router which seemed not to be running OSPF. I checked its configuration (thank god i had saved all my session locally) and i found that there were two "neighbor" commands missing! I added them and reloaded again. This time i watched the logs and there was an error message saying that this particular command is not supported on this kind of topologies (a bug? command is accepted while configuring, but it's rejected after reloading). So i saved my configuration and warned (through email) the proctor about this behavior.

The answer from the support department the next day was to post my "problem" on the forum and i'll get an answer there. Of course, after a week there's still no answer there. And after a quick search on their forum, i found out that many questions remain unanswered. Too bad, because i have heard a lot of good words about InternetworkExpert's training material. I wanted to test their Mock Labs and maybe buy their Workbooks, but this kind of support made me rethink it. If i have one question in the Mock lab (and gets unanswered), i 'll probably have tens in the Workbook labs. Anyway, i still have one Mock Lab from them. If they keep the same -high- price and/or wrong "attitude", i'll have to look at a different vendor.

Let's hope this Friday, i'll have something tougher. The goal still remains for something >50%.