At the end of last year (2018) I have started preparing to what I consider the most challenging test in the networking industry – the expert level exam. Back in a day when I was attending the CCNA course and then started my job as a network engineer, my ultimate goal was to pass the CCIE level certification. Since I mainly work with the Juniper Networks equipment, it was obvious that I started working to gain my Juniper certification. After several years when I finally got my first JNCIP certificate, I started to think about taking the JNCIE (JNCIE-SP to be precise), which is a Juniper’s CCIE equivalent. From the beginning, I was looking at JNCIE only as an exclusive achievement, and I still am. But time went by and I started to look on it more as a proving ground for myself. The expert level exam, for me, is a way to prove to myself that I actually know something.
Fast forward a couple of months and here I am, starting the preparations… again. The reason for doing this all over again is that previously I had lost my motivation and got very frustrated. It was because I work for the integration company and in my daily work I usually don’t use many advanced technologies and protocols. Also, I am often the engineer of “every vendor” and every technology – a Universal Soldier. That is why a huge part of my preparations involved the learning (or mainly RElearning) the protocols that I haven’t used recently or those that are new for me. This is by no means an excuse, but I started to feel very frustrated when I didn’t remember some trivial aspect of IS-IS or MP-BGP. During my career I participated in a few SP projects and had to prepare and deploy rather advanced topologies and concepts. But ever since I don’t have much contact with the SP technologies on a daily basis, I felt very unfit for this exam.
Also, a few months ago my son was born, so obviously my priorities have changed. But now, as he finally sleeps more than he cries, I have thought this is the best time to start over. This time for real and with a different approach and attitude.
I’m writing this post to document the entire journey. I will also try to create some technical blog posts about protocols and technologies that I will be refreshing or learning. I think that the best way to learn something is to pass that knowledge to someone else. That is why I will try to write about it and maybe it will help somebody along the way. Besides the technical posts, there will also be a few posts about learning methodology and my learning path and problems that may occur.
As for the exam itself, JNCIE, for those who might not know, is the highest possible networking certificate which concludes the entire path of certification. JNCIE-SP in particular, revolves around service provider technologies. I have chosen this one because for me it’s the most interesting one. Currently Juniper has four main certification tracks and Service Provider Routing and Switching is one of them – more information here. To take this exam you need to go to Amsterdam training center(among other places), which is the same site as the POC lab of Juniper technologies. The JNCIE exam is an eight-hour hands on lab where you need to complete several main tasks which are divided into smaller ones. Fail one of the tasks and you fail the entire exam…very comforting.
The requirements and exam objectives provided on the Junipers site are quite extensive. So with that I started to create my reading list and collected any materials and resources I considered useful. We will see if that works, but hey, you have to start with something. As for materials which I will be using during the preparation process, there is of course the Juniper documentation. But you may ask, where to start, what do I need to start learning first?
My methodology is to start repeating and labing the technologies that I already know, but have to refresh in some way. Some more than others. I have the luck of having many of the Juniper official workbooks. Also, my employer was kind enough to buy me the iNET Zero course books (this is not an ad :)), which have the same structure as the real exam.
So, my physical “library”, as for now, consists of the following printed materials:
Juniper MPLS and VPN Coursebook
Juniper Advanced Enterprise Routing Troubleshooting Coursebook
Juniper Troubleshooting in the NOC Coursebook
And
MPLS in SDN Era O’Reilly book by Krzysztof Szarkowicz and Antonio Sanchez-Monge
My digital library consists of:
- The above mentioned Inet Zero Workbooks
- Several Day One and This week PDFs, which are a great source of specialised knowledge in a condensed format.
- A few books published by O’Reilly (like my favorite one – Junos Enterprise Routing by Harry Reynolds, and others)
- Several other Juniper PDFs about specific technologies like IGP (OSPF, IS-IS), multicast routing and QoS.
As for my action plan, below is the draft, but of course it may change along the way. I divided it into sections and I will start refreshing/learning it in this particular order.
- IPv6 – have to refresh some of the concepts there
- IGP – OSPF, but especially IS-IS
- BGP
- MPLS and VPN’s – especially MPVPN’s and Interprovider VPN’s
- Multicast
- QoS
I know that each point here it’s a huuuuuge topic. Some of the nuances I already know, some I have to lab again to refresh it and others I just have to learn from scratch. The most difficult for me are the multicast and QoS sections, since I have very little experience with them. As intended, I will update my status from time to time along with posts about progress and with technology-oriented entries. In the meantime, I’m very impressed that you have reached this far and may the #LabEveryday be my and yours motto for the next couple of months 🙂