Anyone who has passed the lab, or even taken the lab can tell you that one of the absolute necessary essentials to success is a plan of attack. The only way to approach the daunting beast is to try to conquer it in sections. And the way that you order those sections is something that you can experiment with in the beginning but as you approach the lab you should stick with your plan. Even if you decide to revise your strategy after your attempt, the lab is no place to second guess your tactics. Undoubtedly the lab will throw you far faster curve balls than Roger Clemens could ever produce but those have to be the things that you you build into your plan by being 150% proficient in the things that you KNOW will be in the lab. You can look at the blueprint and be confident about 50% of the crap that they will throw at you. Even if something in the lab throws you off and makes you question your plan, STICK TO IT! No one flys by the seat of their of pants in this test. If one of the many distractions in the test make you question that, hold true to the months of prior sacrifice that got you to that point and press forward!

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I have my first lab attempt scheduled in three months. As doing lab questions in sequential order appears to be a rookie mistake, I’m trying to figure out a better approach.

As a place to begin, I’m looking at the two approaches Mark describes on the DVD classes: #1 is by device and #2 is by technology. By way of judging them, one criteria emphasized heavily through the classes is that you don’t want to touch anything more than twice and preferably just once.

According to this criteria, the first approach is the most efficient. However, it strikes me as more prone to mistakes since you’ll be dealing with pieces of different tasks outside of the context of its own narrative.

Questions:

1. Is an approach by technology inherently less efficient than an approach by device?
2. Is an approach by device any more prone to mistakes than an approach by technology?

If these questions are unclear, just say what is unclear about them and I’ll clarify. If I’m making any assumptions that make the questions off-base or ludicrous, feel free to say that as well.

Finally, two newbie questions.

1. If you ask for additional plastic sheets/paper to write on, will you be given it?
2. Are points awarded by question or by section?

**********************************************8

I will try and best answer your question.

Firstly, there is no one-size fits all. I have heard people saying they wanted to tackle the Q’s sequentially and then pass with that strategy. I have heard people have what I think to be a completely crazy strategy and surprise me and pass. One thing for sure, whatever your stratregy is (you should have practised implementing it 10 times before the real thing) STICK TO IT in the lab- do not deviate from it.

Now, a rookie error is thinking you can go through the lab not making mistakes. Unlikely! You (and I) will probably make a few mistakes if we sat the lab tomorrow, 1 month, 1 year, whatever. Human nature! Hopefully you are in a position whereby you have only made 1-5 mistakes and not more than 5. The trick is to be profficient in troubleshooting and verification.

Now to the two strategies proposed. It depends on what type of person you are. Some people like to have the comfort of having things registered and completed by technology before moving on. For example, if you configure a conference bridge on an IOS router, you HAVE to have it registered in CallManager- this means switching between the router and the CallManager server a couple of times which could consume time but the positive side is once it has registered, you have confirmation that what you have done is correct.

I would say that you need to play around with what works best for you before deciding on what the best plan of attack is. What is also important is the order you tackle the questions. A lot of people like to get QoS out of the way early since it can be quite tedious after 7 hours. A lot of people like to leave dial plan till after lunch or do it as early as possible. You have to experiment.

As for your last two question, (1) I don’t see why they wouldn’t gie you more paper and (2) point are awared by question. So you could have the Qos section be comprised of 3 x 2 point questions. You either score 0/2/4/6 in that section.

If I missed anything, let me know.

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Vik Malhi
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Hi Ben,

If we want to send a FB/FNA to a CUE mailbox how many dial-peers is needed. I read somewhere that we must use two dial-peers to overcome a bug. One with session target pointing to the actual VM pilot extension (4 digits for exampl) and another pointing to the ten/seven digit PSTN number. Is this true.

Thanks,
Imad
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Thanks again Ben,

I was refering to DDTS CSCee57422
http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/Support/Bugtool/onebug.pl?bugid=CSCee57422

http://www.ciscotaccc.com/kaidara-advisor/voice/showcase?case=K13756179

Are we still faced with this bug in the current lab exam.

Thanks,
Imad

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Hi Imad,

Thank you for taking the efforts.

Yes, we are running 12.4 mainline which is still impacted by this defect. Therefore beware of it and its workarounds, which are relatively well documented in the URLs posted by you.

The take-way is that any software versions we select to run in our production lab is not defect-free. We always try our best to make sure our lab exercise is not impacted by any defects to begin with.

However, if there is a defect which we could not avoid because it impacts basic functionality, then the CCIE content development team have some choices to make:

1. If there are no workarounds within the same version, we will have to pull the version.

2. If workaround exists, we evaluate the complexity and feasibility of the workaround. If the workaround too complex or no applicable to implement in our lab, then we will pull the version.

3. If the workaround is easy to discover and implement, then we see it as a good validation of candidate’s troubleshooting skills. In this particular case, a simple debug would reveal the fault of the IOS and hopefully lead to a workaround.

If I was a customer encountering this problem in my production IPC network, I would prefer my voice engineer to identify the fault, come up with workarounds (if any)so I can be up and running again, and then make upgrade suggestions.

With that being said, the impact and implication of each defect is different. When drafting test contents, we also take into account that candidates in the lab are under time and workload constrains, so it’s never our intention to give candidates a lab full of defects. However, we do see the value of occasional usage of known and workaroundable defects to validate candidate’s troubleshooting skills and understanding of the technology, not to mention assement the non-technical skills such as maintaining calm in a stressful environment.

Lastly, let me see if I could rate your post for sharing the information with the rest of us.

-ben