The worst part…
I’ll apologize in advance for the rant.
The worst part of studying for the CCIE (and ESPECIALLY the CCIE R&S) is that the beginning of the course is a major review. It may be that I’ve done too much IRL or that I just got out of my CCNP bootcamp… but it’s hard to wade through the tall grass of the chapters and find the valuable new material hiding in it. The worst part is the tall grass.
I already know how VTP works (it’s pretty simple) or how Trunking works (I’ve used it a good deal between routers and switches). After the CCNP (and CCNA!) it’s pretty old hat… There are some new things (the actual frames used in ISL and 802.1q), but it’s primarily rehashed stuff. For completeness however, everything I think I should know for all time is being studied (and supermemofied). This makes for LOTS of flash cards and very slow going.
That’s the end of the rant. To make up for it, an anti-rant… Even though I’ve had a lot of exposure to the basic elements of R&S, it’s of utmost importance that I solidify these fundamentals. Kageyama speaks to the importance of fundamentals in Go; the same is true for internetworking.
It’s actually fairly amazing that I’ve already been able to use some of these fundamentals! It’s good to know things off the top of your head (with just a bit of time for recall). I’ve had someone ask me to get back to him with info on a basic ethernet frame, and I was able to draw it out for him directly. Talk about a good way to impress people! I feel obliged to issue one warning: This does not work for picking up women!! At least not unless she’s also a network engineer. As proof, I’ll make this attempt on my wife tonight… maybe 802.3 with SNAP will be enough.