15 July – CCIE Quickies

Internetwork Expert – IE has a page up with learning profiles for customers who passed the CCIE R&S lab using their products.  The five profiles show the products used, the approximate time spend studying, as well as (this is the part that interests me the most) the mock labs taken and the scores on those mock labs.  We were given some of this information in the Mock Lab Workshop.  The scores on the mock labs made me feel a lot better about my scores.  I’ll touch on this more when I (finally) get around to posting the rest of my Mock Lab Workshop review.

Graded Labs- Graded Labs is the vendor who manages IE’s rack rentals.  They’ve redesigned their webpage and have announced some upcoming improvements.  Brian Dennis mentioned that they will be letting you name your saved sessions soon (which is good because decoding ‘2008.07.14-S2-13.37-RSRACK13′ to ‘IP Multicast Basic ‘ is a bit rough).  They recently announced something that I suggested at the workshop (I’m sure they had the idea long before I brought it up):

Workbook Scaffolding – Currently in Development
Starting with the labs in Internetwork Expert’s Routing and Switching Workbook Volume 2, you will be able to one-click load the starting configurations for any task in the workbook. The purpose of this scaffolding is to increase your productivity by giving you the option to by-pass content that you have already mastered.

You will be able to load the configurations up to a certain section (task?) in a lab.  That way if you want to work on Multicast you can load the configuration prior to that section and start the lab from that point.  This is also great for when you get stuck.  You may have fat-fingered something and can’t troubleshoot it (I’ve done more than my share of that).  You can save out your configuration and then load the IE configuration and use that to find your problem.  This will also help out when people post issues in the forum.  They (or the forum mod) can load the configuration up to the previous section and then quickly address the task (instead of configuring the entire lab to that point).

Internetwork Expert Blog- Petr revisits a very popular post about private VLANs:

Due to the non-decreasing interest to the post about Private VLANs, I decided to make another one, more detailed – including a diagram and verification techniques.

Ethereal Mind - A nice ‘blessay’ (blog + essay?) is up concerning auto-negotiation and why you should be using it. 

Network World – Off topic, but funny/scary (depending what side of the fence you fall on).  I know that we’ve all wanted to pull a stunt like this, but 99.9999% of us are not ballsy/stupid enough to do it. (ht: cyberat)

So You Wanna Be A CCIE Blogger?

So you wanna be a CCIE blogger?  Live large.  Five cars.  A big house.  Rent charged.

Okay, my apologies to Cypress Hill (“rent charged?” – really?).  If you want to jump into the glamorous world of CCIE blogging, now may be the best time to do so:

CCIE Candidate – Ethan put up a post a little while ago asking for contributors to his very successful blog.  If you want to reach a vast audience, then blogging on CCIE Candidate is the way to go.  With the last two bloggers passing the lab on the first go, you might even be able to tap into that magic. 

CCIE Talk – The blogger over at CCIE Talk is asking for others to join him in blogging your CCIE journey. While I don’t know a lot about the site, it looks great and has some good content up already.  You might get to rub elbows with Eman Conde (his blog is here) which could benefit you careerwise.

CCIE>blog_ – IPexpert will be (re)launching CCIE Blog very soon.  As I posted earlier, they will be “handsomely rewarding” the first 25 blogs registered.  Since then, IPexpert has announced (via Twitter) that the first 10 blogs registered will receive an IPexpert end-to-end package (this includes two weeks of boot camps – see more details here).

ipexpert PASS THIS TO YOU FRIENDS (Ask them to follow) – When we announce CCIEblog.com – the first 10 people to launch a blog will win an E2E Program   09:19 PM July 12, 2008  from web

As I stated earlier, you can go to CCIE Blog and enter your email address and they will contact you when the site goes live.  If I’m reading the tweet correctly, you’ll probably want to follow IPexpert on Twitter in order to have a shot at the 10 end-to-end prizes.  You may want to contact Mike Down at IPexpert if you are interested, per his recent tweet:

Looking for bloggers! If you are interested in blogging about your CCIE Journey, please email me @ mdown@ccieblog.com – Mike about 21 hours ago from web

CCIE Magazine – CCIE Magazine is a new site by no other than Arden Packeer.  While not technically a blog, the site is asking for writers:

If you are interested in joining the crew and writing for ccieMagazine.com, please send an email to write@cciemagazine.com outlining a little bit about you, what topics you would like to write about, and possibly a sample article or two to give us a better idea of your writing style.

This would be a great idea for those who don’t want to deal with the updating a blog on a regular basis or those who already have their digits.

Anyhoo….It’s great to see more CCIE blogs popping up everyday (I’m waaaaay overdue for some updates to my list of CCIE blogs).  I started blogging only because when I Googled “ccie blog” back in the day there were very few active CCIE blogs out there.  The diversity of blogs and websites really helps the CCIE community out.   If you feel that you can contribute to the community (and trust me – if I can blog, anyone can do it) then starting your own blog or joining one of the existing sites mentioned above is a great idea.