CCIE LAB Exam Success Report! Strict Design and DOO standards ensured I passed on my first try!

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I had already been exposed to networking in school, where I studied Huawei's technology. Due to my interest, I studied CCNP by combining books and videos, and even started a short period of CCIE theory learning. In between, I participated in Huawei's competition and won first prize in the provincial competition. However, after gaining an understanding of the overall environment and the industry, I ultimately embarked on the path of taking the postgraduate entrance examination for a top computer science university in Xi'an. From this point on, my life was put on hold, and I continued to descend into a bottomless abyss of darkness. I took the exam for two consecutive years during the peak of the postgraduate entrance examination season and the height of the pandemic, but ultimately failed to achieve my goal. After that, I found a software testing job and hurriedly entered the workforce. I originally wanted to switch to embedded software engineering, but I accidentally saw Teacher Wang's article on Zhihu. After a period of observation and understanding, I discovered another path for network engineers that was beyond my knowledge. I learned about the combination of networking and English. Since I liked these two things, I decisively started to screen CCIE training institutions. After researching, I finally chose the well-established WOLF-LAB through Teacher Wang and began my exam preparation journey.

Thanks to my prior experience at Huawei, I completed the CCNA course relatively quickly. I then began studying the CCNP, which covered the largest and most crucial part of the entire learning process, focusing on various routing protocols (including important aspects like Layer 2 switching and security). However, like a spring, the diligent study during my university years and two consecutive years of preparing for postgraduate entrance exams took a toll on my mental and physical energy. My theoretical studies for the latter half of CCNP and the CCIE stage were repeatedly delayed and interrupted. This lack of continuity and consistent effort caused me to fall further behind my original plan. Throughout the theoretical learning process, I could feel the enthusiasm and meticulousness of Professor Zhao, who was in charge of CCNA/CCNP lectures, and I could feel the profound technical expertise of Professor Jin, who was in charge of CCIE. With this, my theoretical studies came to an end.

The CCIE written exam includes theoretical multiple-choice questions and several independent small experimental questions. Learning is convenient and efficient through a mini-program and experimental topologies pre-built by the instructor. Some questions require complete mastery of the knowledge points, while others can be answered simply to pass the exam. With a step-by-step approach, there should be no major problems. The only troublesome part is scheduling the exams with Professor Yang (including the CCIE lab). Later, I studied CCIE LAB (Design + DOO), which is the most crucial part of the exam preparation. Teacher Yue had high standards and strict supervision (whether it was speed or quality, you only realized the importance of Teacher Yue's high standards when you were in the exam room, after all, the exam fee is not cheap). This has to be said to be the comprehensiveness of the WOLF-LAB exam preparation system. It has an extremely convenient reservation system with a large number of racks. You can reserve a suitable rack for 3-4 hours at any time of the day to practice a specific version of DOO. It also has a report function, which can compare your configuration with the standard configuration to identify your mistakes and make improvements. In the early stages, learning primarily involved videos recorded by Teacher Jin, the institution's own solution documentation, Teacher Yue's patient answers, and assistance from group members, along with continuous practice on the rack. Progress might be slower in the first month, as you need to understand the overall topology and the principles behind each part of the knowledge, but this is also the month where you learn the most. Later, it involves constantly repeating and comparing reports to improve speed and quality. After practicing for a while, you might feel that you understand the whole experiment quite well, but the speed and quality of the experiment often don't meet Professor Yue's requirements. It's normal to doubt yourself. People with more time can practice on the rack and then repeatedly look at the solution documents or even practice the commands in Notepad until they can think of the corresponding command when they see the problem and type it out fluently. After becoming proficient, some problems can be solved faster by copying and pasting from the pre-configured adjacent devices (such as the pre-configuration of R6 in EIGRP and BGP). SDN in DOO, especially in DOO2, seems to have a lot of templates to add. However, by comparing the differences in device requirements between DOO1 and DOO2, and combining this with videos, I sorted out the underlying logic, and found the preparation process to be more interesting and simpler. I practiced DOO1 for 2.5 hours and DOO2 for 3 hours, and after that, I was basically making no mistakes, so I started scheduling lab sessions and preparing for the design. Design practice is usually done in the week before the exam. There are dedicated VCE practice materials available. The first few days can be quite challenging because you might feel pressured by the large number of practice questions and the approaching exam. However, by comparing and contrasting the questions, you'll find that many of the questions in the V1/V1 plus versions (including V2/V2 plus) are actually repeated. Once you've summarized and organized these questions, you can then focus on VCE practice in the following days, combined with daily review of the documentation. You can complete a set of questions in less than 20 minutes.

The CCIE LAB exam was finally approaching. The afternoon before the exam, I arrived at a hotel near the exam venue. After dinner, I also took a stroll around the area near Tower C of the Yintai Center, the exam location. Before the exam, Professor Yue mentioned that there might be changes to the design V1+ and DOO 3.1 questions (and indeed, 3.1 was changed as Professor Yue predicted during the exam). He explained how the questions might change and how to solve them. At the time, I felt that as long as DOO3 didn't appear in Beijing, I should be fine.

As usual, or even a little early, I prepared to go to bed around midnight. The next day, I got up a little after 6 a.m. to review for almost an hour and had breakfast. I arrived at the examination hall around 7:30 a.m. and then the exam started on the 8th floor at 8 a.m. The examiner was very friendly and told us that the latest version was relatively stable. He asked if we had any dietary restrictions for lunch and advised us to communicate with the examiner promptly if any special circumstances arose during the experiment, as he would make up for any time lost due to non-human factors. And so, the five of us (including those from other institutions and other specializations) began the exam. Although the design section should only take 20 to 30 minutes, I still finished it in nearly 2 hours at the teacher's required steady pace. The extra time was spent reviewing the design topology and checking the email format (for each design question, you need to click the red dot on resources before selecting, as the requirements are presented in email format). I immediately told myself to pay attention to which design set it was, but I still chose the wrong one. After selecting and clicking confirm, I immediately felt something was wrong. Fortunately, I was more confident with the other questions. During the DOO exam, a girl across from me encountered a problem and called the examiner. After a lengthy conversation and investigation, it turned out that the issue was with the girl; it was almost as if the examiner had assigned her the wrong score. I made a mistake here for a while, listening to their conversation, which made me even slower than I was, and I had to pause my work for lunchtime at 12 noon after only a short time (so it's different from my usual practice of immediately starting the rack and working through the lab). After the exam started in the afternoon, many people submitted their designs after a while because they had submitted them early in the morning and typed quickly. At that time, I thought I had enough time and didn't encounter any special situations, so I continued to type slowly (typing too slowly also foreshadowed the continuous errors I encountered in 3.1 later, which caused me to be unable to find them due to time constraints, and the pressure started to increase as everyone submitted their designs). I've finally reached section 3.1, and the exam is almost over. As the teacher said, there were some minor changes in the questions, but during my practice before the exam, this part was basically standard for DOO2, and I never made any mistakes, so I feel okay at this point. But it turned out that something went wrong. At first, I typed eem as emm in guestshell and found out. Later, I couldn't delete it with rm, so I directly vi created a new eem. After typing it, only half of the result appeared (after I changed it, the result didn't even appear anymore...). In the past, I probably would have figured it out immediately. But this time, I was so focused on the question that I typed the command line exactly as shown in the question, afraid of typing the wrong command. As a result, I forgot to type the 'f' that I should have added, and I ended the exam with regret.

After the exam, I told Teacher Yue that things might be dangerous. After all, a score of 3.1 is quite a lot, plus the design question that was given away for free. At that moment, I was very confused. I thought to myself, did I come here to take the exam just for a free lunch? If I don't do well, I won't get anything in the end (after all, in the adult world, we often only look at the results, and sometimes we can't see the process). Wouldn't all this time have been wasted? Wouldn't my career change be even more difficult? If I take the exam again, will the questions change again? Will there be any more surprises in the next exam? These are all unknowns. Although my teacher comforted me by saying that if everything else was fine, I would still have a chance, even though I had basically everything I needed before the exam. But when these problems occurred during the exam, I became less confident that my other equipment might also have issues, and I started to doubt myself. So I boarded the train back home, feeling anxious and constantly checking for emails every night before finally falling asleep. I woke up around 5 a.m. and was surprised to find an email from Cisco. My heart skipped a beat as I opened it with a trembling heart, holding my breath as I checked the contents to see if the word "fail" appeared. I then discovered that I needed to log in to check. After entering my username and password and clicking confirm, I hesitated to look, afraid of seeing the glaring word "fail." Fortunately, I finally saw "pass," and breathed a sigh of relief. I zoomed in and out repeatedly to confirm that I had indeed passed and then informed my teacher.

Because the theoretical knowledge points for NP were so far removed from my studies, they were too easy to forget. I need to start reviewing them, prepare for a career change, and then I'll probably need to focus on learning English. The road ahead is long and arduous; I must take it one step at a time. I've fallen behind in the first half of my youth, so I must cherish the second half and not waste my youth! Thank you WOLF-LAB for their professional training process, and thank you to the instructors for their professionalism, enthusiasm, patience, and high standards during my exam preparation. These qualities supported me and allowed me to pass even when I didn't perform well on the exam. For Cisco certification, WOLF-LAB is the place to go!

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