Hands-On Experience

Almost all CCIEs will tell you that hands-on experience is an invaluable part of preparing for the lab exam. Never pass up an opportunity to configure or troubleshoot a router. If you do not work with routers and switches on your present job, get friendly with the network engineers and technicians in your organization. Explain your goals to them and offer to assist them whenever possible.

If you have access to lab facilities, take full advantage of them. There is no replacement for the experience you can gain from working in a lab, where you can configure whatever you want to configure and introduce whatever problems you want to introduce, without risk of disrupting a production network.

Several online companies provide remote access to practice labs for a fee. The usage fees can vary widely, usually dependent on the rack of equipment available to you.

Another option is to build your own lab. Although this option is expensive, the salary you can command as a CCIE might make the investment worthwhile. Many sources sell used Cisco equipment at fairly reasonable prices. Subscribe to the Cisco newsgroup on the Internet, at http://comp.dcom.sys.cisco, or a study group such as groupstudy.com; people frequently post used routers for sale, and you can find some good deals. Most of my own lab routers, used for developing the examples in this book, were purchased on eBay. Although even two routers are useful, you should try to obtain at least four, one of which should have four or more serial interfaces so that you can configure it as a Frame Relay switch. Remember that you don't need top-of-the-line equipment; obsolete routers are especially good buys because no one wants them in a production network.