WoW it has been a long time

As the title of the post says it has been a long time since I have posted anything or been on this blog at all. The reason I stopped studying was that I was heavily into my CCIE study and with work and personal commitments I just did not have the time to do any blogging. I was to busy labbing away and not taking any notes, naughty boy.

Anyhow a couple of months ago my CCIE study came to an end not because I passed the lab unfortunatly but because the kids were to much of a handful for my wife to handle on her own on weekends. I do hope that not everything has fallen out of my head and that I can pick it up again sometime in the near future maybe in winter where I can trick my kids into believing it is bed time at 3pm in the afternoon :-) It will not be any time soon though because my lab is in pieces as I have decided to move house. Not only have I decided to move into a bigger more expensive house when interest rates are at their lowest levels in hundreds of years but I have also decided to move jobs and take a pay cut at the same time. Nothing like making life difficult for yourself hey? As you can see I am going stuggle with that CCIE as I am not the brightest lamp on the street :-)

On the job front I am moving away from the large enterprise and my chance of finally attending Networkers or even getting on my first Cisco course to go back to a small enterprise. Back to the land of being a jack of all trades as I will have to go back to doing Microsoft and VMWare. However maybe this I can get on the VMWare course and actually do my VCP. Also although I remember Greg Ferro saying that he thought IP Telephony was over (http://etherealmind.com/ip-telephony-over-no-cisco-voice/) (which I tend to agree with) there is a chance I can get involved in an IPT rollout and have even less focus on my R&S CCIE :-)

Talking about Greg Ferro I decided I should catch-up on all my reading and visited his blog. I noticed he is obviously a very bored man as he has now launched a podcast http://packetpushers.net/. I managed to listen to one episode and I must say it is amazing so I would highly recommend you take a listen. Also juding by his accent Greg is an Auzzie (or at least still sounds like one) I should have guessed it by the fact that he did his CCIE down there. So they must do something to the water down there because all the best CCIE's I have met have some sort of Australian connection.

So life has been pretty hectic so studying has all but died although since I only had one exam left for CCIP I thought I could at least do that and finish something off. Only trouble is it turns out my BSCI is over 3 years old now and so does not count anymore. So now I have to do the new ROUTE exam as well as MPLS to finish CCIP argh. It turns out that my BCMSN expires next month so if I did CCDP I would have to do SWITCH as well, I do not remember anyone tell me this. By the way does anyone know if the QoS exam has a time limit on it?

So thats where I am at the moment and hopefully once I have settled into my new places (job and house) I will be able to update my blog a bit more.

Distractions

As I sit here typing this after another long day at work (it is past midnight here) I am wondering about all the pulls on time people face in trying to achieve their goals and particularly the ones I am facing.

The are my usual ones work, family, Xbox/Wii (I have cut these out now) and all that stuff but then there are also other pulls or distractions (which I term as unwanted pulls on time, family = mostly wanted pull, Xbox = distraction).

I always want to learn new things and so I start to filter with different things, this distracts me from my original goals. There are so many other Cisco tracks Security and Voice to name a few that interest me and will pull me (or distract me) in another direction. In fact doing a lower level Cisco track in another subject like Security might actually help my career more than doing a CCIE in R&S at least at my current job. No wonder so few people who start out on the CCIE path actually finish it, it is probably not because they can't do it so much so as other things come along in the meantime (jeepers I should have been a rocket scientist for figuring this out on my own :-) ).

The reason I am thinking about this is because I may have the opportunity to take on some of the firewall stuff at work. I might be able to specialise in firewalls and make that become my thing, become the go to guy for firewalls and then use that as my opportunity to launch myself further up the corporate ladder. Or firewalls might be my distraction something that pulls me off in a different direction and leaves me in a no man's land half way between my original goal and some new place.

Thinking about this I should probably stick to the R&S track for now and distract myself as little as possible with the firewall side. I have spent enough money on R&S training materials and need to show some return on investment to my misses.

I will still have to look after Checkpoint and PIX firewalls at work. I can probably get by on the Checkpoint side with what I know already but I have no idea on PIX. I have been given two PIX firewalls and will need to be able to support them. So does anyone have any recommendations on good books about PIX that will be able to get me up and running pretty quickly without sucking up to much of my R&S study time? Also so I can better judge how far I should let this distract me, I understand PIX is end of life so would I be able to apply what I learn for PIX to the ASA stuff?

The path ahead looks very long and hard indeed

Today has been a pretty hectic day and a soul destroying one in that. The path to my CCIE is looking very long and hard at the moment. Stuff that should be bread and butter for a CCIE is just not going into my head. The time I need to study just is not there, what with family commitments and work getting very busy again. At moments like this I do feel like giving up and I have only just started the journey. I remember reading a stat some where that only something like 3%* of the people who start out on the CCIE journey actually finish it. I have felt like this before when I was first doing my CCNA and I could not figure out the CiscoPress book or when I was doing my CCNP when I felt it each time I started studying for a new exam. My strategy for coping is to remind myself that I have felt like this before and it does eventually get easier and things fall into place. However at the moment this mind trick is not working. The stuff I read is just not sticking, stuff I learnt I have forgotten and now have to re-learn. Then just to top off my depression you meet people who passed their CCIE's a long time ago and have actually gone inactive because they do not rate the CCIE anymore. They can knock up scripts that can get a router to do anything you could ever want and produce project plans and documentation that is simply out of this world. I get stressed that I will never be as good as them and that my dream of one day working for myself will remain just that a dream. However I must pick myself up and get back on the horse tomorrow is a new day and I cannot afford to waste all that money I have sunk into training products.

* For some reason 3% sticks in my head but I could be wrong if anyone knows the correct stat please let me know.

San Fran Network Admin Saga Not Quite Over

I thought the San Fran network saga was all over. Well it appears I was wrong and stupidity is indeed endless. Click here to head over to cciepursuit to read about the latest chapter.

Hectic Day

Today was a pretty hectic day in work. Things were going fine just had a few bits of QoS configurations to look through and then just as I wanted to go get some lunch all hell broke loose. My Networking Monitoring (NM) application on my machine hung so just as I was about to reboot my PC thinking it was a local problem, then other people started complaining that they could not access their servers. Soon after reports that certain users and several sites could not access their servers started to flood in. It was a really confusing problem we could ping our servers but no Telnet, or RDP access and as I do not have permissions to the servers anymore (I am fully a network guy now no touching servers anymore boo hoo :-( )I could not use the Remote Command Shell to try access any servers. The problem got even more weird when I discoved I could access our NM server again and that there were no alarms showing any network problems but my colleagues right next to me could not access the same server. I found it really frustrating not having full permissions anymore, in my previous job I could have tested up to the application layer by trying to jump on to a server with RDP or telneting on port 25 to an Exchange server. However no such luck anymore I am not the man anymore just another cog in a very big machine. So I am learning you have to really on other people and work much more as a team. I do miss my old job in situations like this but I needed a change and prehaps I was becoming a bit to much like that San Fran network admin who thought he owned the network so good thing I did not go down that road. Anyhow the problem was eventually tracked down to only affecting TCP traffic and after 5 hours the culprit was found. However it did mean I was starving to death and I am a grouchy boy when hungry and only eating after 3 in the afternoon is not good for my mood. It also ment I did not get to do any reading in my lunch hour and my luck did not change when I got home. My wife is sick and so is my child so it looks like any ideas about doing some reading at home are out the window as well :-( Oh well no one said this was going to be easy.