I just got an email from Cisco congratulating me. 15 years wow how did that happen?
I think back to where this all started. The HP 85. After college, I spent years working in electrical engineering for many companies on various DoD products. The HP 85 was very popular in the early 80s as you could write programs using “Basic” and pull instrumentation off the serial bus of any HP instrument. I did a lot of R&D and also QA so it was important that we documented the results of all the testing.
The successors had more modern color screens and capabilities and this was a large part of my work environment.
I was fortunate to work on avionics for the F15 and A10, precision cesium standard clocks for the Space Shuttle, Project Gallelo, and other satellites. Eventually, I made my way to Sperry Gyroscope (Unisys) working on the MK-92 fire control radar. We still used the HP85, but then DOS on the IBM 8086 came around and we had serial cards that could integrate with the testing equipment.
Eventually, my future electronic jobs started to use windows 3.11 and then I can remember converting dozens of computers to windows 95 with 15 floppies. Took forever. Back in the mid-’90s the “certification craze” took effect. The big one was the MSCE, and my employer Brookhaven National lab was offering it at night for free. So I took the courses and learned all about Windows domains, IIS, and Exchange and got my MCSE in NT 4.0. I even built my first little network using a 486 as a router.
We also had some Cisco routers to connect building out at the lab and I was interested in that as well so I studied Cisco and networking and got my CCNA back in 1999. From there it was hook line and sinker. I went down the Cisco and Microsoft path learning as much as I could using my home lab. Eventually, I was able to get my first real IT job(even though I have been doing computers and such since the 80s).
At my job at Northfork Bank, I was responsible for all the networking as well as computers. In those days it was token ring for the workstations and DLSW over fractional T1 or ISDN to the branches. By then I had my CCNA/CCDA and CCNP/CCDP. The next step was the CCIE! This was 2001 I attended Bruce Caswell CCIE BootCamp, read all the books, and took the exam in early 2002 and failed. Also in late 2002, I got a job with LendingTree down in Charlotte NC so I moved down and my family came down in 2003. At that point, I had a good job and the CCIE took a back seat while my kids were young and growing up.
In 2006-2007 I started collecting gear so I could work on the CCIE R/S test again. I passed the written and used CCBootCamp and IPExpert materials. I had my lab on the dining room table for the longest time and one of my neighbors came home with a sweet rack with glass doors someone was throwing out. At that point, the CCIE lab reservations were actually running on the weekends. So off I went to RTP on Saturday, Feb 9th, 2008, and spent the day in a hotel room cramming for any last things.
Sunday a group of CCIE candidates was waiting to get in. Most were from all over the country and there was a guy from the UAE. I breezed through the first part and everything went well up to lunch. One guy walked out at lunch never to return. I can’t reveal details but there was an easy 5-minute configuration I could not get working. I spent a great deal of time as I couldn’t move on to further items. I went to the proctor and asked if was it possible somehow I was hooked to the wrong link. Nope, all things looked good but he did say you are missing something really basic. I went back and instantly saw the deception and my neighbors came up. I had about an hour left to do 3 hours of test so flew through it and finished.
The proctor asked if the 10 of us left wanted to wait and if he would grade it right there. Of course, we all said yes. And we did it alphabetically so of course, Witte is last. One by one people were graded, failed, and left. Then it was my turn. Before he started grading he mentioned how well I finished off the last portion after getting stuck he never expected me to pass. And we went through my test and I passed easily. He handed me a yellow tear-off pad with my CCIE #19992! I even wrote my name up on the board there in RTP. Out of 10 or 11 of us, I was the only one to pass. Literally one of the proudest moments in my career. Still have that piece of paper.
The proctor then said since you did so well on some of the sections, I would go home and start studying Service Provider you should be able to get past that easily. So that’s what I did buy more gear, an ATM 1010 Lightstream, some 7200s with ATM, and some IPExpert SP material. I tried 2x for the SP CCIE and that was when there was rampant cheating. There was a 4-question written portion worth 20 pts if you got 2 wrong you started the test with an 80. And you need an 80 to pass so both times I got a 74 so I should have passed. I did that 2x and didn’t get through the 4 questions pretty unfair for an at the time $1400 test to ride on. Then they changed the test from IOS to IOS-XR, new gear the whole thing was changed. At that point, I had enough with SP. Below is my lab with the CCIE DC added. NetApp filer, MDS switch, and servers for virtualization. You can also see the LightStream 1010 on the bottom from the CCIE SP.
Here is the entire lab, I had frame relay, ATM, and call manager, then used VMWare a vASA, virtual 7k running OTV, FC with the MDS, and a UCS simulator. I tried the CCIE DC using this gear but failed as well. At that point, I had joined WWT and was traveling a lot so with the travel and family obligations I put it away
Here is the physical portion;
And the virtual portions with the CCIE DC gear and virtual 7K and UCS
I’ve tried seeing about revisiting these but 15 years have gone by. I’d rather learn AWS and public cloud, Kubernetes, smart NICs, and AI/ML. The CCIE was a great gateway to getting me fantastic jobs at ePlus and WWT. People ask why I don’t go Emeritus and that I’ve worked too hard and you never know where you’ll end up. I keep doing my re-certifications using CE learning credits instead of the CCIE written. I’m up to 50 credits, I need 70 more CE credits from Cisco to re-certify everything.
Been a long 40 years journey with computers then moving to networking and I’ve been fortunate to see it go from AppleTalk, IPX/SPX, RIP, DLSW, Token Ring to SD-WAN/LAN/DC, AI/ML training of the network and virtualized everything with VNFs. Now we are getting into containers and microservices via Kubernetes and other container platforms so there is never a lack of something new. Next is 20 years!
The Journey of binary bits 