Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Current Status of My Certification Path

Well its been a month since I've posted here, but after I finished up my CCIP, I went ahead a took the CVOICE exam (for the CCNA Voice certification) and passed. Certainly some good news there, although nothing that great :P.

As for the past couple weeks now, I've been hittin the books hard for the CCIE R&S Written exam. I ended up purchasing the INE Written Video-On-Demand series to help speed up the studies, which has been pretty good so far. I was expecting a bit more detail in the material, but hopefully the level of detail I was expecting isn't actually on the written exam (fingers crosses, but who knows with some of those wacky Cisco exam questions they throw in there).

I hope to finish up with the INE VOD series by the end of this week, and we'll see how I feel about the exam from there. I feel like I'll need to brush up a bit more on topics I don't work with daily (IPv6, advanced STP, PfR, etc), but after that I may be ready to take the written. We shall see, maybe I'll be attempting it in a little over a week. Why not, it's only a $350 exam :P.

The Not-So-Surprising Federal IPv6 Mandate

It was just announced to day by Kundra, the new 'Federal CIO', that ALL Federal agencies have native IPv6 connectivity to public services, including Web, Email, DNS, and their Internet gateways. Equally interesting is the fact that the Federal agencies have 2 years to comply with the 'due date' of September 30, 2012.

Quite the game changer when it comes to IPv6 adoption, which has been painfully slow in the U.S. (non-North American areas are practically being forced to IPv6 because of the lack of IPv4 addresses for their country/region).

A very much needed push from the Federal government to get the commercial/private sector focused on the real business opportunities ahead for IPv6, and the real (and obvious to us network engineers) infrastructure upgrades that will be needed.

If you haven't been reading up on IPv6, now is certainly a good time.

Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/092810-ipv6-obama-plan.html