Just a quick post today.
It's been a bit of a slow month.
I am on chapter 11 of the Odom book, getting into BGP - as you'll see from some of the posts last month, it was fairly BGP intensive. Still got some way to go with it yet, but it does feel as if when something new gets learned something else gets forgotten. I guess that it's just a case of solidifying knowledge through practice, practice, and more practice. The blog posts do help, but I know I need more hands-on time, so it's time to start using my lab hardware.
I have picked up a couple more books through eBay and Amazon, hopefully I will actually get time to read them!
I have taken a bit of a side-step and am listening to CCDA audio in the car, it's only a short series but hopefully will help with the basics on sometings that I am not familiar with, such as MPLS. I have more audio lined up (IPv6, BGP and QoS) after my brief foray into the world of design.
CCIE lab hardware
The lab is now complete, all cables purchased, now I just need to make some space at home and start setting it all up. I will post pictures of it later on.
CCIE and home life
I managed to get a bit of study done when we went away to see my Father-In-Law over in France. He's not completely up to date with all the latest technologies, and back in his day the internet was still evolving from ARPANET. But he does know a lot, in fact he wrote a book on it called The Architecture of Small Computer Systems. he even dedicated to my wife. Despite the long travelling the boys enjoyed their trip away, they got to pick hazelnuts!
It is however hard to do as much study as I know I should, but after staring at a computer all day, coming home to play with the twins before I put them to bed, then eating, its already about 8pm or so and quite frankly I am tired. But there is the rub. When it comes to actually practising the exams I know I will need large blocks of time. I can split the troubleshooting and configurations, but we are still looking at finding a 5 1/2 hour block somewhere during the weekend.
But I can figure that out later. Need to finish the reading first.
CCIE and work life
Hopefully the company will be paying for me to attend the INE bootcamp course next year, can't do it this January unfortunately but there is another in April, which if my original goal of completing by October 2014 pans out, should be good time-wise. I havn't managed to get as much done at work as I would have liked.
It's been busy in the office working on a Lync 2013 rollout, it's been a bit painful, we have had a 2010 set up for sometime, but we are aiming to have external (non-vpn) access available - so with the aid of a Microsoft IIS with ARR its working, though every time I got the desktop client working the mobile client would stop connecting and vice versa, until yesterday when everything seemed to fall into place.
Hopefully now things will lighten up so I can continue reading and making notes.