THE JOURNEY BEGINS

My name is Eoghan Treacy I am from Dublin in Ireland. I have held various different IT positions in the last 12 years. My main interest is networking. Vmware interest me also. My current certification status I am Microsoft MCSE 2000/2003, Vmware VCP and I hold Cisco CCNP  + CCIP.  I am begining studying for CCIE R&S and the purpose of this blog is to track my progress through this exam.

My CCIE R&S Journey began  15th of November 2011. I finished CCIP the end of August. Then was on holidays then took a break, got a bit lazy
but i have now got back and  I have began with  the ine CCIE R&S self paced cbt. Personally i am much prefer labbing and watching cbts than sitting down reading books.
I  do have the CCIE official press which i have started just reading over aswell. But as much as possible i am going  try watch CBT'S on topics and lab then use reading as a fill in the gaps exercise.
The ine self paced cbt is a review covering the bulk of the new ccie course. Not sure on the exact running time approx 30 hrs. Now at
the end of November i have nearly got through my first watch of it. It is good  overview watch but definetly lacks the detail for me just starting. I want something that goes into the topics a bit more indepth. It had a few things that i had not covered in my CCIP/CCNP  I have to be honest though the cbt has scared me a bit just on details that i have forgotten from CCNP/CCIP particular NP  studies.
My knowledge on multicasting is non existent at this stage bit freaked out by it. Vaguley remeber learning The review of this topic  on this INE series was way too quick for me
it will be back to basic on this topic and then work up to the review.
Overall i need a more indepth look on everything. It is amazing how much you forget. It is like one new thing goes in the old one goes out.
I am still finding my feet with the study materials. I have just found an 80 hour ine advanced technologies 4.5 which appears to be a more detailed look of the cbt that i just covered. This will be my next port of call. I am starting to look at planning my next few weeks.
  This weekend i have a DR test in work on saturday so that pretty much saturday gone. I will be happy by the end of this weekend if i have my physical lab setup with base config hooked up to access server and have wrapped up the cbt i am currently working on.

Next week i have to step it up.By next weekend I want to be at least 15 hrs into the ine advanced technologies  on demand 4,5  and have spent at least 5+ hrs labbing the technologies covered.
This will mainly see me doing alot of  switch work  in detail  (vlans,vtp,etherchnnel,router on stick,svi, and whole heap of STP )