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.

In some large cities, the local Cisco Systems office may have a customer lab available that you can use by appointment. Ask your local Cisco representative.

Another option is to build your own lab. Although this option is expensive, the salary you can command as a CCIE may make the investment worthwhile. Many sources sell used Cisco equipment at fairly reasonable prices. Subscribe to the Cisco newsgroup on the Internet, at comp.dcom.sys.cisco ; people frequently post used routers for sale, and you can find some good deals. 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 or X.25 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. You can obtain an AGS+, for instance, for $800 to $1500; it's an excellent lab router if you can stand the noise.

The configurations in this book were all built with five 2500s of various models and one AGS+ equipped with Ethernet, Token Ring, Serial, and FDDI interfaces.