2 weeks ago, I was at Narbik Kocharian’s 5-day Bootcamp in RTP, NC. Before deciding to go to Narbiks Bootcamp, believe me, I did my homework. I spoke to co-workers, other CCIE’s, and people currently pursuing their CCIE. I will be honest; only 1 of them suggested Narbik’s Bootcamp.
Now I had run across his website (micronicstraining.com) before and thought nothing of it, no offense to Narbik. So I started reading reviews online of his Bootcamp and was blown away by them; not a single bad thing to say about it. I figured it was an online review; let me go back to my co-worker and ask him. He let me know that those reviews were, in fact, 100% true; he called him a “walking networking dictionary.” Now, I think no one can know everything. There have to be some gaps, and boy, was I wrong.
This review is going to break down day by day how the Bootcamp went
Day 1 (8hr mock lab and Layer 2 Security):
I show up at Cisco RTP Building 8 to the “magic 8 ball conference room”. Everyone was getting settled and in walks Narbik. He gets set up, and we start the day with an 8-hour mock lab. When that was completed, probably around 6 or 7, we jumped into layer 2 security. I have to say I like his style of teaching. He does not bore you to death with slides; everything he does is on the board: diagrams, configurations, and verification. Now I see what people were saying about him; he is a walking IOS help menu. He knows every command, inside and out. I think he runs 12.4T(15).
The reason I say this is he will be talking, let’s say, about port-security. He would say, “ok, you input switchport port-security and hit question mark, and you will see four other options”, then he would put the option in, and he would say when you hit question mark now, you would see x number of options that went with that last command. The class was blown away, but that was not the best part; on day 4, one student said, “Really, did you have to go there and show us all up?” Back today 1. Very light layer 2 security, port security, pvlans, protected switchports, etc., nothing too crazy. He said he wouldn’t kill us the first day, and we were out around 9 PM
Day 2 (OSPFv2 and EIGRP):
All I can say is wow. If you think you know OSPF, sit in this class and be amazed at what you don’t know. He went from a ground-up approach to OSPF, starting with breaking down each LSA, then went into different ways to form a neighbor adjacency, some of which blew my mind, and a student asked, how can you do it like that? Narbik’s response, lab it. If I am wrong, prove it to me. Everything he teaches, he confirmed working in a lab. He said to go to a page in one of our workbooks, and he had the same lab there, with a detailed explanation on verifying you are correct.
He does not produce workbooks like others; his philosophy is Configure, Verify, Test. For every example from as simple as an OSPF adjacency over a P2MP link to an OSPF conditional OSPF neighbor adjacency, meaning only neighbor up with one neighbor (but have the other two sitting in ATTEMPT when the first neighbor goes down the 2nd adjacency comes up, with preemption). Then, we moved into key OSPF topics like authentication, network types, filtering, and summarization. EIGRP was similar to that in how it was laid out, and then we got released for the day, probably around 10 PM
Day 3 (BGP and MPLS):
I found this day interesting as I know both very well. His approach was the same as the other days’ diagram, configuration, verification, and testing, all on the whiteboard. He never turned down answering any question. No matter what the question was. Now, I have an issue with MED, Always-Compare-MED, and Deterministic-MED. When he went over MED, he only covered Always-Compare. I asked about Deterministic MED. He was like, sure, let’s do it, drew a table on the board, and explained it so I could probably teach it to my wife and son. They might now know what BGP is or what it can do, but believe me, they will know all about deterministic med. Oh, he has also been warning us about Day 4, saying day 4 will be the fun day, so fun you won’t be able to sleep……
Day 4 (QoS, 2HR Mock T/S lab, and 8HR Full Configuration Lab)
Yes, you read that right. 9 AM-7 PM was QoS, 7 PM-9 PM was T/S Lab, and 10 PM-??? was the configuration lab… Yeah. If Cisco organized the CCIE like this day, we would be at number 8000. This is where the fun started. He quoted several RFC’s lines for line and port for port. He had us Google RTP Protocol-Parameters, and he went straight down the list quoting each protocol number and what it was assigned to; I think at that point, the class thought, what does this guy not know? After QoS, we took a 2-hour T/S lab, and finally, we ended the night with an 8-hour configuration lab. I met up with my pillow at about 4:30 in the morning.
Day 5 (IPv6):
We finished up with IPv6 transitional designs maybe about 2 hours.
Overall, it was an excellent boot camp; I learned to look at a problem or situation and think outside the norm to implement and configure it.
I highly recommend this Bootcamp to anyone looking for CCIE R&S Lab training.