Robert Williams, CEO of Certguard, the self-proclaimed “I hate braindumps” vigilante organisation has publicly defamed Ethan Banks on this website

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28444

Mr Williams has claimed that Ethan has used Testkings to study for his Written Exam and as such Ethan should have his CCIE Status revoked.  Now, anyone who has pursued CCIE, is in the process of CCIE, or has otherwise supported someone in their pursuit, knows how long and arduous the process is.  Ethan has only said the content in these dumps is what the exam material is based on, not that he used it as his only study guide.

I reviewed some of the older TestKing material during my final review, although it wasn’t a major focus. The good news is that the TK stuff has a lot of the concepts you need to know. But if you’re looking for actual questions that will show up on the exam, I didn’t see that in any of the TK material I looked at.

Now…  Can anyone see in this quote where Ethan advocates using this material?  All he says are the concepts are there.  Nothing more.  If he only relied on Testking to study, as opposed to knowing the material, then he would not have been able to pass his written.  I think that is pretty simple.

The beauty of CCIE is you cant pass it by dumping.  I am sure we have seen vendors promoting their “real” labs…  But can you memorise eight hours of typing?  If one question about L3 changes, then that will ruin your whole topology!  You must know the material… Simple as that.

I can understand the crusade that Certguard are undertaking, and what the deal with dumping for exams does.  They even have a section where sites are combed to see if they promote dumps or not.  Have a look and see what he thinks of my site!   www.certguard.com However, I think the attack on Ethan is unjustified and is nothing more of an exercise to scapegoat a hard working individual and generate traffic/income/hits/interest in a site that people may not have known about before.

Now… on to EIGRP!

Back in the saddle again.  The past week or so I have been working on switching and frame-relay mainly.  I feel I am pretty much across these topics.  Trouble is, and what scares me is they (especially frame-relay) just seems a little too easy.  Last thing I need is to settle into some complacent state thinking I know everything when really I am leaving something out.

I have been looking a lot at these topics because if your L2 is broken nothing else will work.  I will put a similar amount of effort into OSPF/EIGRP/BGP too.  If I lose (say) 5 points because I completely screw multicast then that’s too bad.  If I screw IGP then I have the potential to lose a hell of a lot more.  This does not mean I will ignore QoS/Multicast/IPServices, but I think these topics are a hell of a lot more granular and also don’t have the dependency that L2/L3 does.

Now… onto EIGRP for the next few days then I will drill OSPF more than a couple on their honeymoon night.

I slept in this morning…  I was exhausted last night.  I know I havent updated my notes for two days.  I’ll need to sort those out later.

Today we are doing QOS, Security and tips & tricks.  Plus anything else left over.

My beloved Chelsea lost the European Cup final this morning on Penalties to Manchester United.  I woke up at 4am to see this… After staying up all night doing BGP labs.

Today we are doing Multicast, RIPv2 and IP Services.

If we won I would see if I could make the drive down to the Cisco office and do the lab today I would have been so high… But alas Chelsea falter again.  I have been supporting them way too long and should have expected this.  Hopefully I last the day.  Hopefully I don’t see anyone wearing a United shirt too.  For the record, my Chelsea shirt is staying in the drawer today.

I cant sleep.  What a fantastic opportunity!  I can do more labs!

I’ll do the rest of the frame-relay labs now.  If I have time left before class (we are doing OSPF and EIGRP today) I might see if I can squeeze in RIPv2 and/or IPv6 before Narbik beats us about the head with LSA floods and Not So Stubby Areas and the like.

Why is when I am halfway through an 8-hour lab I always want to type:

redistribute yourself!

metric $@#@!

route-map &%^@!

I finished Narbik’s book today. Pretty happy with that I might add. Certainly picked up a few gotchyas on the way through there. I just hope I remember them all for the upcoming months. Tomorrow I will go over the things I had trouble with on the InternetworkExpert CoD. Then I will repeat those sections of soup-to-nuts again and see if I do better.

One thing that has an incredibly high suck factor is the fact IPv6 does NOT WORK over frame-relay on my lab setup.  I tried various methods of configuring (point-to-point, multipoint, frame maps) and nothing.  I’m not that fussed though…  I went through the answers thinking “I would type this line here” and there they were were I wanted them.  A few things were different but thats all good.  I havent done enough testing to see if it is a problem with the IOS I am using or if it is something else.  My guess is IOS rather than being a dynamips/GNS3 problem because the frame mappings work fine with IPv4, as well as running IP across the links.  So Im saying IPv6 IOS bug…

Im going to be generous once again and include the startup-configs I rewrote to work on my dynamips setup.  I improved the configs as I went through the lab so some of them might not be a straight copy and paste, also some labs I did not edit as they had the same initial config as a previous lab.  You will find these here and there.  So if these things save you about 15-30 mins on the start of 90% of the labs I am sure you wont be complaining to me too much

initial-configs

Now to open a bottle of some fine Barossa Valley Shiraz.  mmmm

Probably wont get much study done this weekend. My friend is getting married and I have his stag do to go to today. Shooting each other at paintball then doing other male-tough-guy things is on the cards today…

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Miss at your own peril. Mother does not stand aside for CCIE.

Have a top weekend!