This was taken right after my exam at Mercury Gold Coast this morning. Yeah, I just cleared my CCNP route exam. All I can say is so far it has been the most humbling experience I’ve had since I started with my certification journey. I must admit I started to get cocky last week thinking that I can probably take on this exam and maybe get a perfect score for it.
It was originally schedule on June 5th then decided to move it earlier on 29th of May then last night I decided why not I will do it the next day and all the way to the Gold Coast which is like an hour drive. I took the 9:30am exam but I was so excited to take the exam I was there as early as 8:45am. I started around 9:00am and after I got my first lab which was questions 9, I got stuck for like 20 minutes trying to work out the requirements.
When I did my CCNA exam last Sept of 2013 I clearly remember I can use “write”/”wr” to save my running configs. I can even use the “do” commands. However, with this set it did not let me use them. What’s worst was “copy run start” is not even working. I was in complete panic mode. I was asking myself if it will only allow me to save if I got everything right, I was probably missing something that’s why its not allowing me to save or something along those lines. After spending 20 minutes on the first lab not saving, I just pushed on until I got to the next lab which was still not saving my configs. I was running out of time so I started to assume that the saving the running configs wasn’t a requirement.
The weird part was when I got into my 3rd lab it allowed me to save my config. It was really freaking me out. It was a mixture of blaming myself for taking on the exam earlier that I was supposed to and being really cocky about it. It was an internal battle of accepting that I will be failing this exam because of some command that does not work.
The 4th lab which has something to do with redistribution, I accidentally misconfigured a redistribute command. When I tried removing it using the “no” command, its not doing it. Yes, it will allow me to type the command e.g. “no redistribute ospf 23 metric 1500 2000 255 1 1” but it will not do anything. I ended up having 2 redistribution commands. It must have been a bug because I got a perfect score in that lab. Its really weird.
Overall, I still ended up passing ccnp route making me so far highest certified staff in terms of cisco at TAFE. I never had problems with the multiple choice, drag-n-drops and choose the best answer types of questions. It was really the clunky labs that really freaked me out.
On to switch for me….here we go.
Running-Config 