Well, I got to SF early, to a friends house, spent a couple of days just trying to relax and doing not much but trying one lab a day, and while I felt I was 100% ready the day before the lab and even though I drove from SF to SJ to get to know where the lab was and everything, to try to wear down some of the fear, shake off the deamons, oh boy was I wrong. In my previous 2 failed RS attempts I didn’t go feeling as prepared as I did this time, in fact, I felt the exam wasn’t only fair but I did knew everything that was asked backwards, but you know, Murphy is always there, whatever you have done in your lab and worked could fail on that evil SJ room, for different reasons, even the stupidest you can think of, you name it, IOS failures, faulty IE browser, etc.I know people will say that it’s not possible, or true, blah blah, I couldn’t care less, my honest opinion is that Cisco makes us spend a lot of time and money on this, and allowing for stupid bugs to slow you down while you go to the proctor and let them know what’s going on and not even giving you back a reasonable answer is child’s play, we can fail this exam easy, cause it’s already too damn hard, why make it harder by letting crap like this go as if it was part of testing our skills? No clue, but it seems that most senior IEs and even instructors believe it’s reasonable, or as some call it “fair game”, yeah right…

Anyways, I managed to finish the exam in about 6 hrs, but did too many mistakes, wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why the VPN concentrator didn’t let me browse past the login page for a while, even after restarting both the workstation and the VPNC boxes the problem continued, I missed one task in the VPN section btw. In general, I don’t believe I failed cause lack of knowledge/practice, I was hyper since I started the lab, and kept going for the whole 8 hrs at the same high speed, even though I finished with 2 hrs to spare I did not check my solutions thoroughly enough, ended up missing the mark by 2 tasks, it’s frustrating to realize 4-5 mistakes on your own while I drove back to SF, but it was rewarding to know almost for certain what I did wrong, which is a completely different from my RS failed attempts, where I felt clueless of what happened. I rapidly scheduled my next attempt for November, but it didn’t go well either, I’ll post about it later.