Countdown continues...30 days left...

There is one month left till the lab exam and i have almost finished my first round of studying. I have read at least once everything referenced to the exam checklist, i have labbed most of it and i have done all full scale labs from INE's workbook.

The previous week has been a exhausting one, because i wanted to speed things up and judging from the result i am satisfied. I also did the last full scale lab, which was the most time consuming one. It took me almost two full days to finish it, because for every issue met i was spending a lot of time trying to resolve it, without resorting to any external help. I also did (and then expanded upon them) various tasks from the workbook, especially the ones that my practical experience was limited.

During the last days there are moments where i'm thinking that i'm already prepared to give the exam (after just one month?), but after a second thought i feel this happens because i'm eager to finish this marathon and get back to my "normal" daily schedule.

Regarding the blog, i finished the re-organization of the information in various parts and i hope now it's better cataloged. I also updated the progress page, where i added a graph showing my daily study time (it's something i keep a track on, so i thought it would be interesting to share too). As you can see, there are some days where i spend half of the day studying for the lab (with blog time included too). As time passes by and lab date is getting closer, i am expecting to see such days becoming more common.

For the next days, i have booked a 8,5h rack rental session this Sunday where i'll try to re-run the 1st full scale lab. This time i'm heading for a much faster time compared to the one i had while doing it on GNS3, while improving my score at the same time. I'm planning to do an 8,5h rack rental session every Sunday until the lab exam.

I also booked a few of 3h PEC Gold Labs, the ones that are related to the CCIE SP exam. Everyone working in a Cisco partner company should have free access to those and judging from their content they seem quite similar to the actual exam (plus the fact that they use the same virtual routers). My first impressions about the accessibility of the Gold Labs aren't the best ones, because i had to try many times to access the specific pages and schedule the labs. I hope the actual Gold Lab is much better in these matters.

Hopefully by Monday my readiness score will be around 65% which is good. After that i'll start repeating most of the core stuff, until i am sure i'm able to configure all of it in a timely manner.