Progress Update
In the last month and a half I really haven’t had much time to post anything. Between gearing up for my lab attempt on the 17th of December, the holidays and the vacation I just got back from, the last 5 weeks have really flown by.
For those of you wondering if I passed my exam on the 17th, I did not. I was close, but close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades. I was able to make it through the entire exam, but I spent too much time on certain sections and ultimately ran out of time to go back and tweak things that were not working.
Countdown: 24 days…
and I am starting to feel the pressure. Need to work faster, smarter and harder….
That is all
Home Lab – PSTN Phone Configuration
I have been contacted a few times by people that are running into problems getting their PSTN phone working in their home lab. This can be a little tricky, especially if you are just starting out in your CCIE Voice studies.
Your PSTN phone is going to rely on CUCME as well as very heavily on voice translation rules and profiles. If you are not familiar with either of these I would highly recommend reviewing the CUCME Admin Guide before starting to set up the PSTN portion of your home lab.
In my home lab I have a Cisco 2811 acting as my PSTN-WAN router. I have this 2811 as well as a 7961 IP phone connected to my Cisco 3560 switch. Below I will outline my 3560 and 2811 configurations that are relevant to getting the PSTN phone registered and assigned its configured numbers. I am assuming that you have already configured the PRI portion of your PSTN-WAN router.
CCIE Voice Written Refresh v3.0
It appears that the CCIE Voice Written exam has finally been brought up to date. [See Cisco Announcement] So, if you are looking to take your written exam after October 12, 2010 make sure you have been using the v3.0 blueprint for a guide.
Looking through the new blueprint, the two major additions are Presence and all of the sections now include troubleshooting. Even though it wasn’t explicitly defined in the v2.0 blueprint, troubleshooting was pretty much assumed.
News from CCIE Voice Techtorial
Some very interesting information regarding the upcoming future of the CCIE Voice lab exam from Cisco Live!. I have reposted some of the more interesting ones below.
- Troubleshooting tasks could potentially include in depth knowledge of the protocols used for establishing call setup. Detailed knowledge of the call flow involved in protocols such as SIP/MGCP/H323/SCCP/Q931/etc will be required in order to explain why certain calls to the “provider” are failing. It was mentioned that the candidate may not even have to fix the problem and instead create a text file with the relevant traces/debugs and a suitable explanation. A process not too dissimilar when you create a TAC case
- The Voice CCIE pass rate is currently between 20% and 25% but expect that figure to drop as the impending lab updates will no doubt increase the difficulty of the test.
- Cisco will continuously modify the content of the lab and this includes changing the number of UCM and UCME sites. You can expect 3 UCM sites, 3 UCME sites or anything in between!
Read the full update from IPExpert here