Ep 18 – Carl!

This week we talk to Carl! Carl shares his journey from the Marines, to FedEx, and then into IT. Carl also shares his experience preparing for, and taking, certification exams.

Check out Carl’s article on the AONE Blog – The Art of Preparing for a Cisco Exam.

You can follow Carl on Twitter, he is @cfzellars4 (https://twitter.com/cfzellers4)

Cisco Press Enterprise Design Book – https://amzn.to/2IHvA63
300-730 – Implementing Secure Solutions with Virtual Private Networks (https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/svpn-exam-topics)

This episode has been sponsored by Meter. 

Go to meter.com/aone to book a demo now! 

Transcript

this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keys technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering podcast my name is aaron also known as at aaron engineered with me i have the one and only permit ip andy andy laptop yo dude it's been so long since i've heard that except earlier i'm not kidding you i got a new a brand new neighbor they just moved in and so their parking spots right next to ours and their license plate says and i was like gosh who would say that nowadays and i just got my answer um and uh aj no blinky blinky murray good evening good evening tv land um and daniel the videographer richards why are you shaking your head aka howdy patty packet howdy how to pack yeah you guys win for doing that so this is the point of the show where i would usually shout out who got w's this week w being win as in not an l which is a loss in our discord channel and just so happens that the only person that admitted they got a w this week is actually our guest as well so that's pretty convenient uh that person is the one and only bearded one himself carl the thor zellers but guys yeah but you know actually if you're if you're linkedin how do you say it on linkedin are you friends or like connected what is that i don't even know connected okay so if you're connected with carl on linkedin you wouldn't even recognize him because he's missing 90 of his profile years ago years ago back when you were a younger man so carl start us off dude would you uh pass this week man so a few months back got got kind of the the um the hankering to get into this uh enterprise design it was flinging around on twitter just after aj passed and uh i don't know i figured i'd grab the book thumb through it see what it was all about um took a practice test did pretty well at least better than i thought i might have done so yeah just kind of stuck with it did some reading and and jammed it up that was it two nights ago actually two nights ago yeah and so that was the uh we're calling um e-n-s-l-d the sally yeah the salad the big salad salad the enterprise salad i know i love we're giving them like food names like the sandwich and the salad those are great i think penaloza was the one that came up with that so shout out to him um cool man so it sounds like it was pretty easy right uh yeah well for reference um no ccda in the old format so okay um that's good to know i didn't really didn't really have that on never really had the design stuff on my radar um kind of like a lot of people was doing the ccnp realized after um shortly after getting into it there's only one more exam you need you know for the dp but um turns out i would have had to go on back and get the d.a and all that stuff so kind of left it alone and just let the let the the big sir apocalypse happen and kind of see what happened on the other side so then you saw aj pass and you're like i know that guy there's no way i'm not going to be able to pass it because aj passed it let's i gotta be honest man design is a it's kind of a an underrated um discipline within all this stuff it's in it it underscores every single track it's sneaky it's kind of like the wireless one nobody likes wireless but so this is a little bit different than that in that regard but i still feel like those are kind of like still a little bit of outliers i guess i could consider sd-wan maybe but that's not even really a thing that cisco sd-wan book is literally just a viptela handbook so um yeah so you have that book too because i saw you posted that on twitter i just got to the books myself so you have the you have the salad and the sandwich you got the whole buffet over there when are you taking the sandwich i don't know i got through got through the first two chapters the other day um haven't taken a practice test yet or anything through pearson so um we'll see how we'll see how the end of the year goes um it's pretty wide open but things get kind of condensed you know around the holidays a lot less reading that kind of stuff so family etc etc now do you have your encore i was i guess grandfathered in is maybe the word um from the previous ccnp so um i got with the changes i got pushed the uh encore and the in narcy i guess is how people are terming that yep that's what happened to me too that's the advanced routing right you know yeah yeah that's basically a ccmp route switch it's weird like aj and i were talking about this i don't know how long ago that was i think it was like right after this whole sir apocalypse thing happened and it was weird because i was super confused like you i'm grandfathered and actually i just learned today that we can't say grandfathered anymore you know did you guys hear that no i'll get to that in a minute it's hilarious okay all right so um yeah so anyway um i was grandfathered as well but then i was like oh maybe i should just go take the ccie lab because you know i'm just stupid like that and aj was like no you got to take encore because that's the ccie written even though i'm technically have it since i'm grandfathered i don't have it isn't that weird okay that is weird are you are you 100 sure about that aj is yes because i have talked to other people that are in the same situation where they were grandfathered in they were given credit for encore and sorry because they had route switch and t-shoot and they want to go take the ie lab but they still have to take the encore because that's the new ie i mean to be fair if okay if you were getting turned away by the ccie lab because you were ready to book it and they're like you need to go take this i'm pretty confident you'd be okay at taking encore but still like that would really kind of chat me if i went to go schedule and then like let's say that they didn't even catch that right because i'm like the first one to go to the ccie lab after it opens back up and i go and because quite honestly that's been since sir apocalypse too right like we coveted smashed right into sir apocalypse so that's crazy so i could be the first one walking in there they wouldn't they wouldn't have a process for it yet you know so they're like oh yeah i get the conditional pass and an email and then all of a sudden they're like oh yeah we screwed up you got to go back and pass encore dude what no you know there's there's a couple of uh i don't know missteps or things that maybe opportunities that they miss opportunities for improvement like you know if they're going to give credit for route and switch to encore um you know there was there was that specialist exam np desi that was all about automation i mean that seems very relevant but that didn't equate to anything that didn't equate to ian auto that didn't equate to devnet associates so that just is just now like an extinct certification however it seems like the skills that one would acquire going for that certification would be very relevant today yeah so same with um the data center right and the service provider tracks both very important like that's just yeah i don't know maybe we're supposed to be learning elsewhere and we just don't know yet carl how many certifications do you have dude you have like a hundred thousand of these things right uh let's yeah i've got some some juniper certifications uh cisco um e-learn security which is they're primarily a red team cyber ops kind of kind of certification granting authority but they do have some blue team so a blue team cert through them um palo alto pc nsa not the not the engineer the associate i guess it is um done a lot of firework firewall work um yeah your certified meraki network administrator the cmna you're a you're a firewall dude because you're you're always actually i would sit back i would actually consider you a vpn dude yeah yeah i have the the cisco the network security vpn implementation specialization which is cool that was a big one for me i really i really enjoy vpns i've never even heard of that yeah yeah it's a specialty track where did you find it on the website like what did you type cc under the security cord yeah yeah once you take the s core you have to take a um a concentration or specialization just like enterprise oh they've got they've i think they've got esa wsa the s the security corps auto whatever the automation is security auto yeah i'm an idiot i i didn't even know firepower i think they have a firepower one i bet they do yeah i bet they do you know i'm surprised they have wsa and not like umbrella or amp it's weird they split wsa and esa the email scanning and the web scanning appliance yeah uh centric exams i think they they were separate in the old np as as part of the four exam format but uh i was surprised to see those still split in this new format they're i don't know i'm not really sure that they're really widespread technologies but you know anything anything that has a cloud cloud-based platform you can usually bet it's going to persist but so like you take a lot of search and i noticed this ah quite frequently um what we have like i'll just call them repeat offenders and you're one of them where it's like you seem like every other week or week and a half he's like ah here's a cert lately it's been aj too but he's like huh it's uh it's monday morning let's see what cert carl got what is the secret to your breakneck speed dude like teach us the secret sauce we know you have a family you're married yeah you know so you got obligations full-time job like so so what teach teach us what we don't know here dude i don't i don't know that it's a secret as much as probably uh a lot of it a lot of it really does come from experience um not not that i know everything but the the the kind of the directions i had generally are are backed by a lot of real world experience so i don't think you know i don't think there's a lot of real hard-nosed um net new kind of you know grueling handwritten notes uh for the most part there's a lot of overlap within a lot of these so um not sure there's really a secret but um i don't know i mean if i guess if there's a secret maybe it's just a mindset you know so you do something every day to learn hardwired to hardwired to to really lean on that learning and see if it's see if it's stuck do you do you study every day uh probably i would say on average maybe like four days a week okay so like any time on weekends anymore so you're like a free moment you're just like i'm going to scope read this real quick yeah it's kind of like a um i don't know if it's a meditation thing but it's a good way to get you know 30 minutes in before the day starts um you know lunchtime that sort of thing so there's people that have a conflicting view of that and when i say conflicting i mean almost polar opposite and um one such guy is andy laptop in fact uh you say it's like meditation he would probably say that it's like being tortured in a turkish prison well how much experience do you have carl how long you been in the industry uh this will be six years okay i took a took a huge leap made a career change back in 2014 so wait so all right let's back up so you're you were in the military at one point yep okay um you get out of the military what'd you say dan which branch marines he's in the marines he was in the tough guy one all right so dang that sounds intimidating can i play that guy on call of duty or no yeah yeah does he have a sweet beard like that so anyway you get out of the military day one they're like sorrow here we go you're free and you're you know you got you're a stick with a handkerchief and all your worldly possessions hanging off the back of it uh where where are you going from there is that what that is it well it didn't it wasn't quite like that i was actually um it was reserved so when i got i was actually working part-time and going to school at the same time i was working at fedex i started at fedex shortly after high school had been there a long time um up to prior to enlistment um i just kind of floated around this community college and took classes and passed most of them not all of them but uh didn't really know i didn't really have a plan um leading up to that so you know it's it's always funny to me with the whole college and certification thing it you know i i think i think i have probably 150 college credits of of just varying use usefulness and uselessness general ed stuff i mean i i just didn't have a plan um didn't really know what i wanted to do so yeah and i mean how how could you at that age though isn't that a little ridiculous yeah i mean i you know i've heard my story is a lot like yours man in my younger days it was just kind of having fun hanging out like that's um you know except for maybe you know farthest i looked ahead was maybe a couple hours okay maybe you are like me i still do that is that weird yeah actually got i got interested in i.t um a roommate of mine at the time uh we were both taking college class both going to school working hanging out and stuff and he was going to school for computer science i know andy's brought this up a couple times and diera and some other people about you know the whole computer science he's you know he's been more of a software kind of programming um discipline and uh but you know i kind of thought you know what about computers what about that you know my mind is kind of it's kind of geared on on how things work you know seeing a process understanding it building it taking it down fixing it all that kind of stuff so i kind of applied what you know how my mind works to several different disciplines over the years through college classes and trial and error and that sort of thing so so i thought well what about computers let's check it out um took some classes at a community college didn't know i didn't know anything about it i t to me was literally i t two letters the acronym the the common you know household name for anyone that does computers i i'm gonna try i t you know i don't know what i don't know what i don't know what that is but it's i.t so i ended up in some networking classes and uh and just fell in love with it so how old were you at that point was probably 23 23 i think okay yeah yeah so got into some networking classes in community college it lined up with the cisco network academy i know a lot of people probably have heard of that or been a part of it so um that's kind of where you know the whole certification game comes in it lines up with the cisco certification you get a voucher after after the program and stuff so so yeah so you got you got your ccna there uh it was actually probably two years probably two years after i finished the network cisco network academy when i finally got to ccna and how long ago went straight down i went straight into pursuing a bachelor's so okay full time full-time and working full-time so gotcha yeah well where were you working all the time yeah all right so the first job i took um this is crazy yeah so i was at fedex right yeah um i'd been there almost nine years wow it's kind of the a lot of the you know seniority and all this stuff um a lot of people know kind of the golden rule with ups fedex like you know you work you work all the way until you get that full-time route takes 8 9 10 12 years you know so actually my number came up in one week i had i had a full-time i had a full-time route job offer in my hand uh this uh two days i think two days before the very first uh it job i took that same offer in my hand on the same week um so i had to get you know i had to leave fedex i had to give up my seniority i had to give up you know i didn't have to i that was the plan all along sure but still that that the timing of them well the scary yes but the timing of them finally being like hey dude yeah exactly like that that's i don't think that you could replicate that feeling anywhere because the amount of fifty percent pay cut to do this oh see i was going to ask you what's the other part the time that you've invested in to get to the to get to work exactly that's exactly it and then take a picture then take a picture so so can we ask because i'm dying to know like what is a full-time route for a ups driver make so it was uh it was what they like at fedex we call them swing drivers so we'll be full-time you know a lot of split shifts uh covering vacations sick calls uh you know ad hoc for really really heavy routes the new guy um yep but but the thing with fedex is though once you once you level up in inside the company they try to take your your accumulated you know raises over years and they try to translate that into a new paid grade a new like a new um pay scale so it's low well well they try to they say okay you know you've been in this job for four or five years you've gotten four or five pay raises yearly we don't want to start you even though your pay right now is below the minimum for the next job up we're not going to give you the minimum of the next job but we're going to give you kind of equivalent what you would be in that next job oh okay so if i'm if i'm 8 above my current pay grade and i move into a new pay grade i'm not going to start at the bottom because my 8 above my current is lower than the low they try to make you whole as you move up there's also some overlap too i would bet right and some of that so then you could actually be making as much as somebody in a rank above you so so how much so so give us some numbers dude less than a hundred have been yeah with with n like without overtime i mean it would have been it would have been right around like 58 59 okay 60 a year that's about what i assumed yep and my first it job it was it was uh it wasn't hourly i mean it was salary but i think i think that the offer letter was like thirty four thousand dollars a year or something like that mm-hmm yeah wow what kind of job was that carl what were you what was it i was working i was working for a managed service provider we were we were basically um business class internet network security on behalf of several large national isps time warner cable back in the day comcast so when they would sell business class internet they would also sell business class internet security services managed which was us so that was kind of our deal that's a sweet contract to have yep i started as a provisioning technician so what we would do effectively is get these you know these new accounts we would contact their their technical uh resource whoever that may be maybe a store manager maybe someone of mild technical ability or no technical ability but we would do a site survey you know what's your network like now because we have to we have to pre pre-provision these devices to ship on site to be installed by the install technician so yeah a lot of low level configuration but a lot of um you know our standard kind of our standard boilerplate you know reporting on the back end for for the value add there and some of the security stuff but um yeah i did that for uh for about six or seven months and then was moved into the knock so from there it was just in flight support so why did you take that huge pay cut to leave fedex to go to an i.t role so i i had at right around that time i had finished my associates in uh information systems or information technology so i had my associates i thought i'm definitely going to keep pursuing my bachelor's but that associates was enough to get me you know an interview for some entry-level roles so i knew long-term i was going to make the transition um you know a year i always say like a year you know as a driver like a fedex driver ups driver that's that's kind of the equivalent of about four years of a desk job oh dude yeah it's a it's a pretty hard it's a pretty hard job it's a fun job um stressful physical probably yeah yeah yeah you're out in the weather all the time it's hot it's cold it's raining so you had like a long game a long plan you weren't yeah it wasn't all about money day to day yeah it was though it was the work smarter not harder that's all it was work smarter not harder and i and i loved you know i loved networking once i got into it i loved it so it was kind of a work smarter not harder and do what you love so i can you can't ignore that pay cut right like right left a lot of money on the table yeah but i mean you know you got to think you know what what makes you happy you know what kind of what your long-term plans are like you said so right but half though gosh yeah half half yeah i'm like uh i'll be happy and broke that's me the happiest how old were you were you in your 20s yeah i was probably 20 something about 28 29 was this was this after the marines yeah yeah yeah so i'm 30 i'll be 36 this year okay so that was right yeah i was right about 29. so you got your first it job at 29 seven years ago you were at this entry-level place as a provisioning tech then you moved to the noc have you because you used to live in other places have you ever moved for any of these jobs like physically nope never moved for a job no but but you've been relocated okay you've relocated and then got a job or got a job while you were relocating yeah relocated for my wife's position the company at the time didn't want they didn't want to let me go so they let me go remote um so when we did relocate we lived in michigan for a little while so i was i was remote for the company in greensboro north carolina that i had previous that i worked for my first job stayed remote with them for uh i don't know maybe four or five more months you know and as part of our relocation with my wife's job we had a lot of perks you know resume take you know take let's take your resume we'll we'll we'll uh circulate it around for you kind of thing i thought that's fine you know i don't really plan on moving but you know the phone starts ringing and and stuff so it's hard to yeah you guys know how that goes oh yeah i don't know if you've noticed but my phone has just been ringing off the hook this whole time with people trying to talk to me and they're just dying to get a hold of me i'm like just it was new blood in the water i'd only been there for a few months so it's you know new talent people i guess if you're new to a certain area they'll start they can smell it yeah they can smell it on you for sure so one of the places your resume got shopped to is that where you're at right now or no no no so i took a i took a um a position in michigan uh for a small regional isp that exclusively served the the communities that it was a property management company so big town homes apartments that kind of thing um ultimately really really didn't wasn't too into it uh wasn't getting a lot of hands-on as far as like the network side it was a lot of cable docsis kind of stuff yeah that's right that's right up our alley man keep talking dirty to us watch what happens let's see yeah get getting into a cmts oh stop it stop it it's a cable modem termination service it's very sexy very good yeah it's like it's like a like a 20 u the the 10k the cisco ubr 10ks they're like a half rack they're huge huh yeah throw all your modems aggregate into yeah good stuff just a big tedious box it was kind of cool i wasn't i wasn't like in love with it so um i ended up i ended up in a data center managed services cloud hosting sort of company um probably eight or nine months later and i was there i was there for about almost four years loved it loved it same thing happened again though we wanted to relocate back to north carolina they didn't want to let me go so i went remote again when i moved back down here so i really love that job did a lot of managed services a lot of data center work um a lot of the network the back end network infrastructure work for cloud hosting a lot of fun really loved it great people so and so it was so great you left yep so here's what happened yeah it was a privately sure owned privately owned privately held company it was called secant technologies um ownership was uh kind of getting towards their twilight um and they uh they were entertaining um offers for a buyout and everything and uh they i guess they had you know maybe four or five interested parties i was kind of keeping close tabs with my manager um and uh not really we didn't really have anyone i was the only remote employee at that point in time um so you know i i was keeping tabs thinking you know are are they gonna if we go through a transition you know are they gonna want to maintain a remote workforce or or even support one if it's just one person um so at that point kind of started uh unknowing you know it probably wasn't going to be an issue but had to had to go ahead and plan anyway so put some feelers out there and ended up at cisco here in raleigh uh north carolina the rtp campus uh probably about four months later oh wow so dude so so how wait how did you end up at cisco yeah uh so yeah so like i said that that company i work for was going under under a transition uh of ownership hold on stop stop stop stop stop stop okay every time you talk about your job you're like yeah so uh i just ended up over here like you're just you're just like casually happened like when i casually end up somewhere it's like a 7-11 or something for you for you you're how do you casually get to cisco because i've been trying to get to cisco and i don't know maybe well it's i don't know i like it's a it's a massive i don't know if you've ever like looked it up on google earth but there's like 15 buildings here in raleigh um so there's you know in all fairness it wasn't me competing with 60 000 other qualified individuals there's there's kind of constant openings um that sort of thing so anyway there a role came up that was that was really really really close to what i've been doing as far as data center networking and managed services so it it was it it just felt right it was really um you know just the almost the exact same job just with aci instead of traditional data center networking yeah so wait because you work at ine right now yep okay so for everybody out there if you don't know what ine is welcome to technology welcome to the world of networking so ine is an online learning resource they have some of the smartest dudes in the world uh folks i should say um doing a lot of training and what's good about them is that they have rack rentals uh so you can buy tokens and actually lab up so they have like lab follow along books they have lots of cool stuff i know people usually go to like and i'm just explaining this for those who have never heard of it but like folks usually go to like udemy or cbt nuggets or um pluralsight you know one of those um in is just another one of those resources so you're a network engineer at a place that does network engineering classes i mean you're basically like a janitor at a landfill right like thanks yeah do you know what i mean though it's like it's like uh yeah we all do that like do you ever get like because okay we talk about well first of all we only have like three or four subjects that we really talk about a lot around these parts but boy oh boy one of them is imposter syndrome and you are in a company it can't be that many people over there right i mean less than a hundred right i think it's we're right about a hundred yeah right about 100 and i would i'd be willing to bet that 50 of those people are ccies right uh no no it's probably um enough yeah there's yeah there's enough yeah okay when but that's most companies that have a hundred people that are all networking focused don't have that many typically so that's kind of what i'm getting at but uh yeah dude so you're you're you're basically dipping your pen in the company ink there is that not intimidating at all because like i would be super intimidated if i was the network guy at ine because imagine okay you know how the memes go so today twitter went bananas so obviously uh the five of us had no idea what to do with our lives at that point once twitter went down for an hour or two so we really that really went well but if the network goes down at ine and someone notices it like there's got to be hell to pay for that right like that's inexcusable you know do you remember um during that comedian mitch hedberg he was like oh yeah he's like you know if you were walking down the street with your friend who was a tightrope walker and he tripped that would be completely unacceptable like that that's exactly what this is like if if the network goes down at ine and you're nothing but network engineers what happens is it like the spider-man meme where you guys are all pointing at each other like yeah no first off you just you just blanket statement blame the isp that buys you at least trust me 30 minutes trust me yeah i know just dns dns yes it's the geo go ip services that's what it is you guys got me routing out of l.a what are you doing anyway it's freaking comcast man yeah always so so i mean it all in all seriousness though yeah it's it's it's um it's just it's not i guess it's not to that level i don't know it it's never it's never come off that way so you ever get the guys like looking over your shoulder like why are you doing it that way they're like you know you can you know you can do a pipe include right like you could do that filter yeah i know it's you're tight you're diving it's like i'll give you here's some asmr for you you're over there hey and somebody's somebody's behind you like like dan is constantly just going stop hasn't hasn't been the experience yet oh my god but you get stop there stop there it's up there just hit just go just go just go do you don't type do you get free training and stuff that'd be a pretty sweet perk yeah yeah okay i guess like a company iep or a company um email address so log in to ine watch some videos nice so like i bet too that that that kind of company this is interesting because i've never met anybody other than you know we just interviewed knox that works at a place similar to that so like but you're it's different for you because you're not like someone you're not one of the trainers right so i'm really getting the behind the scenes you know they always say uh i love sausage but i don't want to see how it's made but in this particular case i do want to see how you make the sausage because it is delicious but you funny you mentioned that because that's that's actually what i do the actual irony network the production network that's not i i usually don't really don't touch that very much it's all um like our rack rental stuff some new stuff we're doing oh okay teach us how that works how that works okay hold on so so you go online and you buy these i'm just going to quickly to the best of my ability explain this so stop me or correct me if i'm wrong with any of this but so you buy tokens uh ine does a really cool thing where when you buy the training you can also buy a lab uh booklet basically you just follow along with the labs it's really cool because basic stuff typically like interface addresses for your like point-to-point links like you know we all know that's the worst part of gnsa or eve or even viral or whatever it's like initially setting the lab up so that you can go in and do what it is you actually want to do um because yeah so so the so the rack rentals are cool because like they'll have a pre-built lab but the topology is there as well so basically you log in when your time your rack rental time is and uses so many tokens per hour um based on whatever it is you're doing and you could just sit there the whole time and follow along with the book and go through the different labs and stuff right exactly yeah okay so we shortcut the entire process of of pre-building your lab or even having to know how to build some of the are you the guy building the lab no occasionally um with uh for for access restrictions i might take escalations from the rack support team um but that's mostly just like vmware permissions and some other stuff that would necessitate that it's not very often um but so we went through we so we went through the cert apocalypse right yeah you know the blueprints all if you ever if you ever look especially at the ccie level they'll be um they'll they'll actually have an included software and hardware list that you would need to prepare for the exam oh so um basically yeah that's you know we're we're kind of adapting um with with with cisco obviously and so there's upgrades that need to happen there's uh you know things that the instructors need for content creation which is what i've been doing a lot of recently um building building new new stuff not necessarily that stuff but supporting that but building new stuff so that uh new stuff like labs or something yeah like all this the new cc we've done some ccna boot camps keith has i built the racks the virtual racks for the ccna boot camps the cci service provider uh it's about 40 vms in those racks yeah so yeah i'll work with the instructors one-on-one uh we'll we'll kind of build a topology um a logical topology uh for whatever they're trying to do whether it's a certain video or a series of videos or an entire uh learning path but yeah we'll get those we'll get those created um occasionally i'll shortcut some some work for them and actually do some of the base configs and things like that just to save them time that makes makes for better content so yeah that's kind of in the mix of things you know sometimes i'm working on data center stuff sometimes i'm working on service provider stuff sometimes it's you know something specific like sd-wan or dude that's so cool it's weird because like i don't know if anybody else here knew that he did that because i had no idea i just thought he built i thought i actually thought he was like part of the wan team for whatever reason just because like the vpn thing i had no idea but here he is building right like so i'm just gonna volunteer you right now so if you're listening to this and you wanna know what kind of setup that you need for x cert your guys right here uh you can find them all over the place it's no underscore ddp dtp does not exist it's a joke for those trying to type no dd well that's that's not his twitter handle though he's not not anymore no that's that's just like his name the display yeah let's explain him or whatever his actual handle is at czeller's uh uh okay yeah see at cf sellers four i think so oh the cf seller is four well there's free three others roman numeral for them yeah our son is the fifth number five your kid right yeah carl zeller's the fifth yeah cool that's my walking dead impression for those who get his that's so cool dude so you're you're the guy that's building the token thing too right or you at least know what it looks like like how it works so yeah yeah that's been around for a while but that's vms it's a mix vms and physical hardware yep so are you guys running it like on are you guys running vms on like esxi or in an emulation program that you have that we don't know about right on esxi okay that makes more sense to me then so then basically they're already connected and then you're letting people type in whatever they want on the interfaces et cetera blah blah blah oh that makes more sense i see you know it's like i just didn't know i kept wondering every time i'm like clicking around for some strange reason i should be focusing on you know spanning tree or whatever crap i was learning for the day and i'm like gee i wonder how this works this is so weird i'm like i have no idea is there some guy i just pictured like a like the hunchback of notre dame or whatever and he's like plugging in my rack he's getting zapped every time i change an interface he's like yeah i'm going faster sir yeah obviously all the ccna ccnp stuff that's i think that's all physical actual physical gear but anything and some of the np and up is kind of a mix between software uh vms and actual hardware so i did um i studied for my ccmp switch with ine and i used it was my first time and i used the booklet that i was talking about for the labs and then i did some rack rentals and stuff eventually i just ended up just like building the topology and really in hindsight i should have just been using the t-shirt topology the whole time i mean why not right right it's got everything in it anyway um but yeah i did and it was awesome i mean obviously i passed switch so that was cool but it was very helpful because there was like sequential like the lab was like sequential so like you basically set yourself up almost like the ccie lab you set yourself up for the next part and if you screwed something up you were also screwed pretty much how boot camps work too yeah yeah yeah but i like that i like that yeah it's so that's so real world it's like okay where the heck did i screw up and then you have to go dig for it and then you're like oh my god exactly yeah like i love that so that's cool so what uh you guys had um uh since the cert apocalypse like obviously everything changed so you're saying you had to change like the labs and stuff like that so like how have you guys been doing that did cisco tell you early on like what the blueprint was going to be so that you could prepare for this or did they just say yeah i mean we really don't care about you you could figure it out on your own you guys are making money off us anyway yeah we have no we had no pre pre-war as much pre-warning as anyone else had so i don't know if it was at cisco live when that happened or yeah it was unless you were a cisco champion right aj that's right but you gotta you gotta imagine i mean a lot of the the official certification guys aren't even published yet some of them don't even have published dates i'm not even sure cisco i think cisco had a plan with the certifications but i don't think they had a a a whole whole holistic you know it's a lot plan for all the all the other stuff that they would need so there probably should have been a longer uh well let's just call this they probably should have like a sun setting process right where it wasn't just like today you can't tomorrow you can you know or vice versa it's like let's melt the two together so that you can study for both right if you currently are for you know even a year or so seems like it would be adequate so those of us who were trying to get ccmp toward the end they're like i got it a week before a certain pocket like a week i had a week like sure that was so that was a lot of fun on twitter oh yeah dude i was going banana i i failed it a few times too um but dude i took three tests in like a month because of that you know yeah like i had to i was like well i took everything but switched so i took route and t-shoot but multiple times because i kept failing it obviously um until i got finally i got it on like a monday night god what a relief dude i wasn't even excited like i wasn't even stoked when i got it i seriously wasn't i wasn't i was just like gosh dang why did they do that to me you know what i mean i i i was pretty close to flipping the table over when i passed t-shoot really did you take t-shirt last yeah i took it out then switch then t-shirt aj did the same way i did actually so did andy where we all took switch first yeah and i i took two try i think i got switch on my second try i did um they threw me for a loop on that one and then route was cause they didn't have spanning train enabled no dd yeah it gets me again but yeah it was it was like going back to the test center like a year later to continue the studies for route was interesting because i i remember like the thing with the ccmp and having three tests is like that thing is just always looming over you for some reason it's like here you are trying to read through like switch right and then like i get half a second break and i'm like i have two more of these to freaking yeah and i'm not even like 10 pages into this thing like i think everybody in here was on that that that sprint of 2019 no we were in some way shape or form andy's the same way i was too where he took switch so much earlier his actually expired mine didn't um but i caught it before it did i don't even know why i just didn't continue going after i did switch really cause it's like hey you just passed but it's basically the same way that i felt about the other two tests which is like the second i got done wipe the sweat from my brow uh take a long nap call it a day right and then it's like i'm never doing that again you know what i mean like i'll tell everybody i guess but to me i'm glad i took ralph first it was kind of all downhill from there that was a that was a beast see i thought i thought route was pretty hard but i you know we were talking to knox and i he brought up something that was very interesting and i i i'm glad we got new tests from cisco like it's definitely a good thing if not for just the content you know because there's way more stuff now right this relevant like obviously the automation stuff is a big glaring difference um and then the omissions of some things like that's good too um but to hear knox's perspective about like hey imagine this from the test makers perspective he's like you basically run out of questions to ask cause people brain dump the heck out of everything so so like let's say there's like a thousand route questions that exist in this pool like of course some of them are trivia you couldn't read that book and come up with a thousand questions unless you were starting to ask questions like what is the third word on the 43rd page of the fifth paragraph you know what i mean like that's where it was gonna go next that you know what it is like it had to have because they were running out of stuff to ask like how weird did those tests feel because everybody i think except for dan has taken that three ccnp uh track at one point took at least one of those tests within the past the couple of years or so so it's all been the same test so we all know what the questions were and i'm not doing anything nda wise here i'm just saying like it was there were some just straight up trivia questions on there no no doubts about it to where you know we're taking practice tests and like i'm like yeah i know how this technology works and then they just hit you like i get it now and that's probably why they they had the hard day of like just cutting it completely off don't you think not imposter syndrome you just you just left the test center feeling terrible about yourself yeah dude for sure oh my god like and then it's okay so then it's like guys like you who have it already so as for people that like i interact with on a daily basis the most i would say you were probably the only person that had the full-blown process over with right and i'm thinking to myself like no wonder he has a beard in a freaking ponytail like he's he's been holed up in his office for three years like i'm ready to go bananas and jump out a window dude from from jane no from well really from december of 2018 through um you know july august time frame of 2019 was it was it was three three hours a day minimum and that's i mean that's what a lot of people say about the ccie but that's you know in my experience that's exactly how hard route was i was i would agree with that actually it i have weird emotions i feel like about the ccie lab so i feel like on one hand that it would almost be easier right because and i know it's not like i haven't taken it so obviously it's perspective but like i don't i would find that more at least enjoying from a pressure perspective than sitting there for an hour and a half sweating like literally sweating because i have never even heard of what they're asking me but that's why you like to shoot better than route or switch of course because as engineers that's what you want is you want a practical application way of proving your knowledge or skills or whatever i know i so i had you know shout out to to the boson uh x sim because the or the net sim sorry because for t shoot they because you could copy the topology that's awesome and they gave you tickets and it was great so i would go in with the tickets on the the uh netsim product and just time myself and i'm not kidding you dude because there's 19 tickets on there i was getting them less than a minute and a half each one and i don't was the same way yeah but they but they weren't they weren't um it wasn't like i was memorizing the questions because they're the tickets are just numbered and there's 20 of them just like on the actual test but i would just go in and randomly click on one i had no idea which one was which it would ask me to find the problem i'd find it in like 35 seconds and i'd go through the questions and answer them like boom boom boom and i wasn't missing anything right and i get to the actual t-shoot and they hit me with almost the identical stuff and you know what i found out this is hilarious because i had to google this because i thought i was going bananas there's a there was a question on one of these tickets on one of these t-shoot tickets where and this is the only t-shoot ticket it did this on you actually had to scroll down in the answer box the only time a scroll wheel appeared on any of the answers was on this one question and i don't remember what it was it was a layer two problem and i found it right away and i'm like no no no this is the problem like i know for a fact and i'd open up the question and none of the answers i wanted were there so i'm so freaking mad i go home and i'm like no i'm like there's no way i know the technology like i know like first of all i know where i can't ping anymore right i mean that's pretty obvious so either either the exam's busted the questions busted and it's wrong or i'm just like i have the monitor you're busting or i'm busted probably that one well that's that has nothing to do with the test so it was kind of it was kind of a make your own story for anyone who had never took it you know you you find the fault domain and then depending on what you selected it gave you a different answer yeah that might follow that was crazy that would be different based on your initial answer or yeah or the third would be you know different based on your second answer so if you guessed it wasn't like it it wasn't like it was easy to solve like i guess and then it took me to like basically follow the bouncing ball like then logically this must be next and this was me you know it was hard it was always the same problem yep it the whole pc departing this ip same topology unless it was the v6 or the v4 difference but yeah it was it was always the host campaign why that's always right and and so i'm finding the the oh you know what it was it was it was something about it it was a it was a vacuum so i found i found the problem with the vacal um and that turns out that that particular answer was in a scroll section like i'm not kidding you i went home and i googled this i was like i was like t-shoot question about vac and i found on reddit somebody was like there's a there's one of the questions that has a scroll and i'm like about to like throw this microphone out the window like no you know that's a lot of money dude well it was kind of weird because it was a little bit subjective there were several where i knew what the fix was the third third part of the question what would you do to fix it and the answer wouldn't be there right but that's only because like when you look at the fault domain it could really fall into maybe one or two categories but the subsequent answers you know it's like well i know what this is right like you said a vacle vlan acl right so you might say a layer two problem and then it's on it's on switch two that's where it is um but but you know then the fix wouldn't be there and you thought i thought well that's weird man because that's the way i would fix it that's kind of the way i would assume would be best practices to fix it so you go back a few steps okay well maybe maybe they're interpreting this fault domain as this or the this tech or knows the fault domain the technology at fault and then what would you do to fix it so yeah there was a couple i had you can actually go back through the answers in the ticket you just can't go back tickets so yeah you kind of had to you kind of had to like if you you know like you said i know what it is i see it i know where it is then you kind of have to uh you know trudge through some of the the objectivity that they actually had in the wording of the of the answers and and the one thing about t-shirt though is that that part wasn't as bad as a traditional five to six year old cisco exam that turns into nothing but trivia because like we just learned you know that's kind of what they do they just result to trivia because everybody gets the answers from the internet but in t-shoot it's like you still even if even if it did exist somehow there's no there's no way i just don't understand that you would just be able to just find the interface that you can't ping i mean come on people if you're listening at home and you want to be a network technician ping until you cannot okay like traceroute if you must ping until you cannot it's it's pretty simple right like especially on that topology it's like you're user a you're trying to figure out why you can't reach b i mean and you can't reboot it so that's not the answer you know what's funny about that i think the real world had me jaded so much that i never actually believed that the pc couldn't ping so i'd always ping every ticket i'd try to ping it again oh yeah yeah yeah yeah like watch it watch it it'll ping this verify yeah i would have thought that it would have been cool because i did have one sim on there that wasn't a ticket that i thought was really cool i'm not going to say what you're talking about okay okay i thought that it was really cool because i did not see it coming it was basically like configure this it's broken and i was like uh that's the one yeah it's a certain uh layer four routing protocol if you want to call it that yeah we all had it we all had it dude i opened it up and i'm like first of all let me just say straight up that i out thought myself like you wouldn't believe i was i i go into that sim and i'm like all right let's see i know all people and oranges or whatever it was and i'm like and i'm like i'm gonna find out what's going on here and you know it was something stupid it was actually something really easy it was like one of the neighbor statements had like a wrong number flipped or something ridiculous and here i am going uh let me you know what freaking they're using uh loopback interfaces to peer with each other i'm like they don't have freaking bgb multi-hop on here let me add that i'm like this no like what you just said is the core of the the engineering part of it is he you didn't you weren't lost in the woods you had places to go you had things to check even though you were caught off guard too many engineering is too many yeah well my mind was spinning out of control i'm like no what that's not it okay what could be wrong here yeah that totally caught me off guard and there was also a couple of just basic questions as well you know it's interesting i heard um i was watching uh youtube and it was a guy going over the ccie test the lab test and he was going over the diag section i think it's the diag section or maybe it's the troubleshooting question but what they do and this is so cool like the format of it they literally take you to like uh an email client and you have to follow this trail of emails like a trouble ticket just like how many times have you had to do that in your life that's so funny right and it like and then it goes to like the customer and he's complaining about this and it's like it's all this back and forth between two people and you catch up at the very end they're like carl we need you to come in and save the day bro and so you you do what you always do like because i get forwarded these all the time like you know oh okay and then you play ketchup go to the very bottom how did this start and you like go through and you're like okay and then you have to go find it but what's cool is you have to go find it then you have to go fix it but it's like still one big topology like almost like your ine labs are where if you screw that one up or don't fully fix it you're gonna be hosed on a subsequent ticket because you didn't fix it fully and that was required for like let's say like some overlay reachability or something so i thought that was pretty cool but closest thing to t-shirt we're going to get boys that's it carl i i can't let you out of here without asking you because you have so many certs and you touched on it a little bit but i need to know how you study you started to get into you know a little bit yeah like you said you do 30 minutes here 30 minutes there but then you said with route you're doing three hours a day so but how but how yes it's it's i think if there's no one answer it's always different like route what i would do was i would i would take practice tests through the certification guide identify my weak areas uh a lot of times those were some of those niche kind of topics where you really have to start getting into white papers and stuff or or you know some of it you could lab but um back back for ccnp ccna it was it was really heavy on packet tracer not a lot of reading for route a lot of videos um recently i don't know that i've i don't know that i've watched more than maybe 30 or 40 hours of video training in the last six eight months so what's it look like now reading and laughing yeah reading historically reading's never really been effective for me but i don't i don't know what it is but it's not effective for anybody the salad book just it read really well i don't know yeah i agree it was a unique experience like it stuck i understood it it was laid out logically it made sense um and same with uh same with sd-wan that that two chapters in and it literally makes it just makes sense you know it's not overly uh so what do you do i've always found some of the readings to be kind of not organized the right way no they're definitely not not all of them so what do you so what are you since you're saying basically that you correct me if i'm wrong you're saying basically that depends it depends on the on the cert or or that you're opening the book and you're reading the first couple pages and you're like yeah this ain't for me it's video time like is that how it's going down yeah yeah some i mean depending on like multicast the topic right yeah yeah i i got maybe halfway through that chapter and that i i closed the book and went straight to the videos because it's you know sometimes that's a shortcut as far as you know condensing materials sometimes it's a clarity thing i'm not you know i'm reading the words but it's not you know it's not going in straight or or sticking straight you know so like at that point i kind of want to hear someone else's voice someone else's perspective yeah of multicast for example so but now are you dead sparse mode i read dense mode versus sparse mode i think uh you know in a video you get these ad hoc like uh examples so yeah that that it just depends on the topic it depends on you know time of year how i'm feeling i guess i don't know do you structure your time do you have dedicated time no no i i've read you know i've heard all the the trackers and and and heard all the you know the ways people have these boards and stuff i'm not sure what they're called but um no my style is very organic i try to you know if it's been a hard day at work or family or something i just i kind of i push it to the side i don't i don't deal with it um you know if it's been a little bit calmer of a day you know i have some mental capacity left yeah okay so pretend for a second that you're andy lab tough and and every and every day is stressful i mean we're painting a picture here that the back's about to start hurting too so poor guy you like to beat up on me no no yeah but you can't you can't beat up on yourself man well it's been a hard day like don't just i mean don't punish yourself and see how you feel if you just get more angry just here's the here's the problem we keep having guests on that for lack of a better term are cert princesses and i mean that with all the respect that i can that i can muster and i i ask every one of them what am i doing wrong and i still really haven't learned the secret sauce to be fair you weren't asking what am i doing wrong you were saying what are you doing because you assumed what you were doing was wrong correct yes okay so that you know this is my little selfish andy's corner part of the contest where i try to figure out how to help to get my mp well let's be honest too i don't know what my you know my quote batting batting averages with exams but it's not it's not over 500 i'm not i'm not that i'm not adding 300 i don't think see that's the thing too right it's like we um we started very early on about talking about failures right because no one does because we just have no idea you always just see because like that's why we made up the failure plaque right because no one has any idea how many times you took the test because you don't get assert for taking the test good or bad it's just like you just get one when you pass so that's all you see you know you never see it's like the tip of the iceberg but most of the iceberg is below that like that's that's everybody and i think like we have been selfishly i'm i'm with annie too on this one i want to know what people are doing because we do see that like i was saying like i i knew very early on that you had a ccnp and i was like well i wonder how he did that like i was just curious like we always ask yet for some reason we still don't have anything we have nothing right we haven't had nothing and that's why i asked earlier how much experience you had because i was hoping you had like 20 years experience in the industry and i'm like all right that's why but you know you you you have you have the same experience i do basically you have a wife and a kid in responsibilities you have 10 active certs i have one that's about to expire and i may be an imposter carl an actual imposter that doesn't belong you're you're no more of an imposter than i am dude i've only got my c sent first of all dan why are you talking sexy like that like that made no sense that was his calm therapist he was trying to talk me off the ledge he was like doing everything right everything's going to take a deep i'll be honest with you you're okay you can use some sort of system to keep myself on track and all this i it would stress me to the point where i probably would just walk away so if you had a process you're saying if you had a process you'd feel like you were stuck in a cage i i don't know man i think i think i would just worry about it oh i didn't update it oh i you know i deviated oh is it right that's just another thing yeah yeah i was meeting along the lines like you had a you had a time a scheduled time every day or a scheduled amount of time or or whatever not saying like you have a whole full-blown white board behind you where you're like drawing pie charts of like what you learned today i just mean like you had two hours in the morning no matter what that you did or if i didn't have those two hours i would read it lunch and then go home for a half hour like we're always trying to find something like there has to be something i i mean i can tell you what i do but i want to know from someone who's done more than what i've done you know like and that's why we're always asking we're like what teach us teach us teach us but i guess maybe what we're learning is that uh no one has a process and everybody does it completely differently and they're all smarter than me yeah right right well and by default that makes you smarter than all of us we're all just struggling like it's weird because we do ask that almost like that's actually no we do we ask that very specific question so what is it what do you what do you do on a daily basis like the first thing out of everybody's mouth is not much whatever i want i don't know some days i i i don't even i just end up with dessert i don't know i just ended up i didn't study i didn't study at all today i don't have i don't have a date for any next exam or anything i was going to ask you that you don't schedule your exams like a motivator here here's here's what i do this is this is i don't know if you want to call this all right here we go here we go here we go dan dan it's good yeah when you pay for it when you set a date you just stress yourself out man oh i'm on the 13th guess what happens on the 9th 10th 11th and 12th procrastination all you think about the 13th that's all you're thinking about so the cool thing with the tests from home stuff now this is what i do i just study and i'll notice as i'm feeling more comfortable what what may equate to you know i don't know a two weeks from test date kind of thing where you might historically in the past have had to say well i've got to line up a lunch break a commute to a test center all that kind of stuff right throw that out the window you but you know you're in kind of that two-week span where you're getting close so you study you ramp it up you know you kind of read video read whatever you whatever you do whatever you know hits your weak points but here's what i've done this entire year i'll i'll just i'll have enough right i'll be studying and i'll just this is it's over i'll go to pearson view look if there's something within an hour or two i'd go do it because i just under dennis just like the dentist if you have you know your appointments next thursday guess what you got four days of misery ahead of you how do you gauge your readiness are you doing practice exams yeah mostly yeah mostly practice exams like juniper has practice exams practice exams palo alto i don't know that i've taken a certification that really didn't have any kind of hands-on or you know pre-pre-test assessment you know i love the juniper stuff for that like the junos genius is is so great like i wish cisco had that yep like it's so much cool stuff but it's good for them because like it gets people to go to the website right like it's it's uh consumable it's free uh you get a voucher for you know percentage off like they they really encourage it which i guess that's what you do if you have a lesser market share especially in the certification space than you know the mothership cisco so that's good um and the important thing is to at least take it don't don't put it on a pedestal don't let it overtake you yeah like i so okay i've taken eight or nine or 11 exams or four exams whatever the case may be i still moments before they release it i still have the same as i did at the very beginning the feeling oh my gosh because you you know no matter what test you take no matter how much experience you have you're gonna hit either you know early on the first question or somewhere down the line you're going to hit something and you're going to go oh my gosh what is that i don't even though those three i'm not i don't couldn't i couldn't tell you what that acronym meant it's so bad when you when you get an act like they're asking you something and you read four answers and you don't know what any of those things are the answers you're like uh uh yeah how does that happen i mean if it's a pick 3 it's one of those what doesn't belong kind of scenarios if it's uh just straight up i mean eliminate you know the the ones that right aren't it like you're right but let's say you don't know that let's say that there isn't any that definitely are not it you know what i mean euler plate sat strategy at that point yeah um you mean uh using the scrantron test to draw out a stick figure because that's what i did so so so i played tic-tac-toe carl do you know just real quickly i guess i probably already know the answer to this but i'm gonna ask anyway what do you know what's next on your radar uh as far as tests go tests yeah it'll be it'll be the sd-wan sum cool yeah i had i was i was on i was on security corps for uh for a few months but um you know like you know kids at home and stuff it the the core the core honestly i've i haven't taken a core exam but they they scare me to death 100 some odd questions the the depth the breadth the width the they're scary that's scary so yeah the shit out of me and mostly because automation it just terrifies me yeah it's scary so i put the book in my closet and haven't looked at it in probably two months this but somebody somebody recently may or may not be very close to the conversation said he himself might be studying the same thing so oh that's me well okay look to be fair uh me and studying like it's not a thing like i'm not scheduling this i'm basically gonna do what you do i like day of i'm like i'm feeling this it's go time baby um otherwise like i guess maybe what it comes down to for me lately is that like i've always been kind of doing stuff for just myself i've never gotten anything from a cert never gotten a raise it's never gotten me a job um like i can't name one good thing other than like personal reasons that it's done for me in my actual career it probably will in the future right so a little insurance but i've always been doing it on my own so then you know people always ask about motivation like that's finite it 100 is we can all attest to that like some days you just don't have it it's cool don't push yourself but like i don't have any long-term motivation other than i'm just gonna do it to prove it to myself you know what i mean like i claim to be this sd-wan guy put your money where your mouth is bro cause like i don't i don't know i'm like chasing clout or anything but i feel like i have to live up to that at least somewhat so yeah i'm not i would call that loosely studying um i do have the book i got both those books uh they came very fast uh got a sweet discount got the electronic ones and the pearson tests which i'm excited about too so um what's that did you open the box yeah one of them one of them is holding michaels well i've never really had a like a laid out plan or anything but yeah it's stuff i'm interested in um oh my god carl let's do it together you and me you and me we are the sandwich we are the sandwich we just need dan in the middle fully automated traffic engineering experts yes all right on that note uh we're gonna call it a day because we've been pushing our hour very very hard um carl any last final words for the lovely audience that you are actually a part of as well yeah yeah it's been totally fun in the discord channel uh interacting with people seeing people win seeing people you know get psyched up to to get to really better themselves not really have a you know something in a plaque on a wall but a genuine interest in in bettering themselves and that's that's really what it's what it's all about for me as well so i had a lot of fun uh getting to know people and learning from people and helping so for sure yeah no we we all echo that i mean obviously we're we're also in there but all all of the above and lately we've been seeing a large surge in people applying for new jobs and also people building blogs based off of a conversation we were all having about you know branding yourself and stuff so that's been really cool to see because a very unexpected i would say but has it been three new blogs yeah three uh there might be four there might be like this week alone yeah like in the last day or two yeah yeah yeah actually since tuesday it's like i know the exact date it's been since tuesday there's been like four since tuesday uh there's there's been like three blogs one haircut i mean a haircut yeah i haven't had a haircut in three years two mustaches and a beard and a beard all right we're cutting this off we're obviously we're getting on we're like a couple of four-year-olds you know we're ready for bed um so thanks for checking us out uh we'll leave all of carl uh no underscore dtp's uh information you can find him uh you actually can't miss him he's got a giant red beard in his picture so if you're also living under a rock and you can't seem to find him we'll put all his stuff in the show notes uh the art of network engineering dot com is where you can find all of us make sure you subscribe and as aj will say and we'll repeat in the outro make sure you smash that bell icon so you get notified actually he doesn't say it like that but you get the idea um thanks for tuning in see ya hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you