Updates and News...

Well, for anyone that reads this, you may have noticed I have not posted in quite some time. This is partially due to the fact that I'm traveling a lot for work, and partially because when I do have time to study, I don't have a lot of time for much else.

I've been working on my BGP workbooks the last two weeks. It's going pretty slow, with the travel and all, but at least I am still getting some study time in. BGP was a weak area when I started my studies, and unfortunately it is still one of my weak areas. Hopefully by the time I read the BGP section in the DocCD and double-up on the workbook labs, I will feel much better.

In other news, it looks like Cisco has released the CCIE 4.0 blueprint with BIG changes hitting in October of this year. The good news is I already have 6 months of CCIE study under my belt, with 4 of those being Lab study, the bad news being that if I don't obtain my CCIE before October, I may not achieve it this year. This is not to say that I am overly worried. I did move my date back to August 3, 2009. I did this so that I could attend a 2nd Narbik bootcamp in July, and leave myself enough time between the end of the bootcamp and the exam to really cram on some mock labs. I've got less than 90 days, which means I really need to get cracking. The exam is now paid for, so my August 3rd date is pretty firm. I've scheduled out two weeks of vacation as to not be distracted from my goal.

If I am not fortunate enough to achieve a passing score on the first attempt, I plan to immediately schedule another attempt as soon as I can. I can only hope to get in three attempts before the October date. The changes to the blueprint are pretty massive. They are splitting the exam into two pieces - a 2 hours troubleshooting section and a 6 hour exam. The core knowledge topics remain. They are also changing the hardware, the IOS version, and adding things such as MPLS, MP-BGP, advanced IPV6 routing and other topics. These changes in themselves are not terrible - I think they properly reflect todays networking world. Unfortunately, these changes will drastically adjust my studying.

So overall, I am still happy with my progress and still feeling pretty good about the exam. I've got some ASET labs scheduled for next week, so I'll post my feeling here.