Countdown starts...58 days left...

Today i am officially starting my lab study. I just did my first home lab and it took me more than 11 hours to finish it, but i spent a lot of time on fixing INE's GNS3 topology and configurations.

Unfortunately INE's full scale labs do not include any initial configuration for GNS3, so i had to create my own from their rack rental configs. Also i had to create mappings between rack rental devices/ports and GNS3 devices/ports.

I'm satisfied from the end result in this first lab. I graded myself with 69/100, but i could definitely achieve a higher score if hadn't done some silly mistakes in a few minor tasks. There was only a single task that i spend around 2 hours without any success, because i couldn't think of any viable solution; and that was the Multicast BGP. Lesson learned...

From tomorrow i am planning to start writing down my notes like i did in the past, but this time i'll do it on this blog (so other people can take advantage of that too). So while i read and test things on my home lab, i will be documenting everything that i feel is important as a note or as a reference. Then these notes (to be found under "Notes: The Series" as a summary) will be transfered on my MP3 recorder, so i can have access to them any time, especially during the last days of my preparation.

I have also created a countdown at the right side of my blog, just to keep me (and all readers) informed about the deadline (58 days from now). My aim is to be 100% ready (in terms of taking notes) at least one week before the lab exam, which is on 10th of February 2014. The last week will be spent on doing labs and reviewing things.