Cisco in ‘Cisco
Sorry about not updating. There’s been lots to write about but no time to do so.
I’ve gotta say, flying from Phoenix to San Francisco is like travelling from Arrakis to Caladan. It might seem odd, but the first thing I noticed about San Francisco is the water. It’s everywhere! Imagine that.
I registered for the convention late so I ended up in a different hotel than my co-workers. They’re in a hotel about a mile closer to the convention Moscone Convention Center but I got a room larger than a broom closet and in a place that serves a great steak. I figure I got the better deal. Both hotels charge for internet, though. $13 a day when I’m only awake in my hotel room for 2 hours a night is pretty crappy, even if it does go on the company card.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Kindle instead. Can’t say that I mind all that much. I think I actually read faster on the Kindle, but I’m not sure. I do know that I’m almost done with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I’ve only been reading it for abut three hours.
So far the convention has been pretty awesome. On Monday I took a mentored CCIE routing and switching practice lab, which was a great experience. I learned a bit about some areas where I’m weak, specifically IPv6 and multicast configuration. I’ve got a good grasp of IPv6 concepts, but there’s so seldom an opportunity to actually configure and troubleshoot IPv6 that it’s going to be a significant hurdle when I take the CCIE Lab exam in a few months. I also got a good look at the format of the exam and the sorts of ‘gotcha’ scenarios Cisco puts on the lab exams. Normally I’d have had to pay $1500 to fail the test to get that kind of experience.
This morning I attended a session on deploying scalable OSPF in a service provider network. The Open Shortest Path First routing protocol is the most common routing protocol in the world, because it’s easy to configure, every vendor supports it, and every engineer learns it forward and backward. It’s a lot like IPv4 (or VHS) in that it’s not the best tool for the job, but everyone knows how to use it and everyone supports it. It was a good lecture but I spend all day hip deep in OSPF at work, and I didn’t really learn anything new. I’m not sure what I expected. . . I think I was hoping that there was some secret OSPF juju that I don’t know about.
Of course, as I mentioned before, I took the CCIE written exam a couple of hours ago. I failed the exam by 14 points out of 1000. In other words, I failed by one difficult question or two easy questions out of 100. It’s the worst way to fail, in my opinion. The earliest I can retake the exam is Monday, so I’ll study over the weekend and hopefully pass then.
This afternoon I have a class on IPv6 security and tomorrow I’ve got a couple of sessions on multicast deployment and MPLS. These are my weakest subjects, so hopefully they’ll also do some good both on the certification front and in my job, where we’re currently designing a multicast video deployment.
I’ve got to run to the IPv6 session now.