Analysis of the Dynamips for CCNA (or not) Decision

I'm suprised that few people felt that Dynamips would be more suited to ICND2. For my own CCNA prep, it was invaluable to get some interseting topolgies built for learning EIGRP and OSPF, much more so than you could accomplish with a home lab. With ICND1 focusing more on learning the basic IOS commands and file management/backup/restore features, real gear certainly has the edge here in my opinion.

Well, the way I see it is after completing a 32 week Cisco Networking Academy and having real life hands on networking with Cisco equipment outside of the academy.

I will use any thing that can be found to help with the CCNA exam. I just passed the first part ICND1 and seen how Cisco likes to add the time clock to add a lot stress to the whole test. I mean come on if they are going to have these simulator questions to test your hands on skills then the clock should stop at that point. Let the newbie show they have the skills to complete the task at hand without adding the clock factor. I think this is what kills most people on the exams. I know for my-self that speed reading/configuration was not part of the Cisco academy and we are talking about people new to this process.

I only have five years in IT and about a year in networking, but my boss has never came to me and said Hey You Only have X-amount if time to resolve this issue. If it is that important he has the whole team on it and we work as a group to solve the issue. Along, with the fact that we can use are command guides or any other source to figure out an issue. What really matters is if you know how to find the answer to your issue and then how to take action to resolve the issue.

So, my point is Cisco needs to give the newbie a litte break with the time issue and let them configure the simulator and answer the four questions without the clock ticking down. Once they retest in 3 years that is when you let the clock keep on ticking down.

First make sure they can solve the issue and configure the routers and switchs then you add speed and more pressure, along with a ticking clock. After 3 years when it is time to re-test the person should have the background and skills to solve issues on the fly and do it very fast.

OK, getting to the issue on Dynamips my feeling is use whatever you need to help you pass this exam. For me I use the Packet Tracer 5.1 , my Cisco Academy books, CCNA flash cards (by Cisco press), 31 Days Before Your CCNA Exam (by Cisco press), and many types of testing software programs that are on the market. I also go back to my community college and use the Cisco lab to get my hands on the real equipment, along with what I think is the most important way to study is for any exam is to find a study partner.

I really do think Cisco should just sell one package that allows a person to studying and test their hands on skills. I do wonder if Cisco is in the business of selling routers/switches or testing. There must be a lot of money in the testing end of this business.

Lastly, I do not put a lot of weight into certifications! my employer (HR ladys from H###)department has forced me (the whole IT department) into getting five different certifications and know the Cisco CCNA. None of these certifications hold weight to the education from my poor old community college and the last five years of on the job learning and hands on skills.

From what I have been exposed to it seems like certifications are some kind of mad craze and everyone wants to put some colorful company logo on their resume and wear a shirt advertizing their lastest certification. Big deal! show me what you can do.

I am part of the hiring selection team for my companies IT department meaning that I get ask questions and help interview individuals with my manager,along with administrating the deparments IT tests.

Meaning HR provides a prepared question format and I get to put a number in a box rating the person on how they answer the questions. It does not have a single thing to do with the position or even if they tie their shoes in the morning without help.

What I have seen just shocks me, it is always an individual with a B.S. in IT and a load of certifications that makes their resume look like a NASCAR uniform, along with experience that would put my five shorts years to shame making me feel like I should give up my System Administrator position (and my $64,537.00/year) and go back to desktop support (for $39,500.00/year) to take care of e-mail issues and to put memory in PCs and when I started it was more like 29,500.00/year for desktop support. I skipped the whole help desk position. Don't have the temper to deal with the person who likes to use the cat5e as a foot rest and wonder why they cannot get e-mail or they forget their password every other day.

At any rate, I am getting off the issue once again.

However, then comes the company test which Consists of both written and hand on skills. They are allowed to use any resource (book, google, within are department)excecpt calling someone or help from anyone in our department or having someone from the outside come help. No time limit, they do have to finish by the close of business that day. The written part is not the issue if they can read and use google all the answers can be found. It always the hand on skills that seems to put these guys in their place and make them sweat! All the tools are right there for them and the instructions on what is the issue or how we would like a small system/network setup. They almost always fail or do it half way.

Now, the kid that just finished community college with no certifications and has called over and over again just to get an interview passes every time. You might ask how is that? Well it is due to the fact that kid has spent the last two plus years living for IT and has been messing with systems since before high school. This is who I want!

Then there is HR once again and the new requirements for hiring; years ago we could hire this kid, just like I was hired. Then train him/her to our way and guide them, along with increasing their skill set by teaching and having them do the tasks, but now they want to see your Cubicle wall Papered like a NASCAR drivers uniform with colorful company logos advertizing that this person does not have a clue, but he/she is certified and they came closer to passing the IT skills exam then anyone else, except for the kid just finished community college and has spent more years mastering their skills then Mr. or Mrs. B.S. in IT and certification overload.

However, the department IT exam and the HR questions are combined for the overall score and the IT manager has to pick one of them top four individuals. These are the rules from our wonderful HR department and I work for a fortune 500 company with over 29 locations and approximately 85,000 employees worldwide. Give or take with our global layoffs and plants closings.

So, as I have stated above combined all the materials that you can find get a studying partner go over this stuff every day for 31 one days for three or four hours a night and go pass this skilly certification while reading and configuring as fast as you can while the clock is ticking down.

Then do what my HR department makes us do so Proudly! tape or pin the colorful certification to the inside of the cubicle for all to see and Acknowledge.

I would rather have them spend the money on sending me back to the community college for an English grammar refresher course, so I could stop writing with so many run on sentences, fragments, comma splices, misplaced modifiers, missed spelled words, missing subject/predicate, and most important punctuation. Now, only if the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Psychological Association (APA) would come out with a colorful certification for me to tape to the inside of cubicle and a clothing line. Until then I guess it is coming out of my 65K.

You are correct the certification and testing is way out of control. It is just a money maker for the company offering the certification and they do not mean or hold any weight in today's world if you have experience. I do feel it will get an inexperienced person an interview and shows the person can learn a subject matter.

As the test goes the clock is there to ensure added pressure and stress is not fair in my book if were considering newbie’s and this is the subject matter new people to the Cisco realm with no experience or very little.

The real problem is the whole certification process why would Cisco even think a newbie could race through with the clocking running down while the tester is attempting to run through “show commands” and configure routers and switches in their simulator software or troubleshooting for Frame Relay issues, ACLs, NAT, PPP, OSPF, EIGRP, and RIP. They don’t and that is why it has about a 60% fail rate and 40% pass it.

Cisco does not publish this information you have to know someone at a testing center who is keeping track of the pass and fail stats or has access to VUE stats, but trust me it is ~60% fail rate.

The concept is to put added stress on by the clock and having a 40 or 50 question test turn into 60 or 70. It stresses the tester and they will begin to rush all the while watching the clock count down and falling behind with all the added in questions. The CCNA is all about time management not your skills just read a book practice all of the subject matter and learn to take a 65 question test as fast as possible.

If they cared about the entire certification practice they would require that a tester have X years of verifiable experience working with their equipment or have successfully attended and passed a Cisco Networking Academy. Then give the tester a little more time for their first attempt (s) at passing and after their three years are up and they must retest give them a seasoned test with all the stress factors.

Next, they should make the “New” CCENT a prerequisite in order to seat for the CCNA. None of this take one test and be a CCNA or take the CCENT part 1 and then part 2. It would be more respectable if it were a two part test and once the tester passed the CCENT and met the X years of verifiable experience or attended and passed a certified Cisco Networking Academy.

Until then it is just a quick money maker for the testing sites and Cisco and with about a 60% fail rate for the first time tester at $125.00 per test that’s not bad for having some guys write tests back in California. What would those test writers do in this economy? Without a 60% fail rate.

With that said the hopeful tester better find a good simulator program and practice for at least a month until they can troubleshoot and configure without even thinking. I would also suggest using one of many test prep software suites that are on the market and don’t worry about all the hype concerning the so called brain dumps.

Show me one profession that does not have simulated testing software or books with practice test questions or boot camps that help the tester prepare and test for their exam. If Cisco were playing fair they would produce this type of material in some kind of test prep software with simulated test questions and drag-and- drop, fill in the blank, and of course their wonderful simulator questions that always seem to have four questions and with some of commands being disable. That always makes me mad when is the last time you went to troubleshoot a router or switch and your commands did not work? Give me a break if they want to make it like the real world then stop with these kinds of childish games and have the tester come into a certified Cisco Networking Academy and setup a small network.

Cisco has the capital and the workforce to produce the best test prep software on the market, but they choose not to and instead they sell games on subnetting and have so called practice questions on their website. No wonder there is so many test prep software programs and brain dumps all over the place. Not mention it would appear that every CCIE has a book, software program and now simulator software that they are more than willing to sell the tester to help them with their endeavors in achieving the grand Cisco certification.

It’s all fair unless you are looking at the real test word for word and problem for problem. Then the tester needs to be ethical and turn that company in and get ready to retest and lose their new certification.

I really do hope Cisco decides one day to produce a realistic software test prep program that puts every other one on the market to rest and just maybe the certification process will become respectable again, allowing the certification to mean some more than a office decoration hanging on the wall.

... then transition to Dynamips while still working towards CCNA

Hello,
I like this sentence, as it fits to my own experience.

To be honest, I already worked with real Cisco gear before I tried Dynamips the first time. I usually don't see the routers, switches and accesspoints I configure, they are in a storehouse or already at the customer site. So, on my first evening with Dynamips, I could concentrate on the setup of a Dynagen *.net file (usually I do all my labs without the GUI, aka GNS3).

The greatest benifit of using Dynamips and not a simulator is that you can mix it with real Cisco gear. One of my labs while preparing for the BCMSN exam had two real 2950 switches and two Dynamips routers with NM-16ESW modules used as switch. Even etherchannel worked with a four port ethernet card connected to four ports of the emulated NM-16ESW and a real switch.

So I use both, real Cisco gear and Dynamips.
Bye, Tore

I took (and passed) the CCNA this January. I had taken (and passed) the CCNA in 2001, and I must say the newer version is much, much harder.

I would disagree with the article regarding the switching functions. You can simulate a 16 port switch module (NM-16ESW). Granted, you can’t do hardware intensive functions like filter a VLAN, or do a remote span, but you can do spanning tree with multiple switches. Watch out for earlier versions of the IOS, as they still use the VLAN database.
Even the best simulator can only get you so far. I recall a colleague who used dynamips to test a very complicated failover scenario that required two default routes. He solved the problem using VRFs, and tested the solution using dynamips. When it was rolled out in production, the router worked, but couldn’t be managed, because the management interface was in the wrong VRF. The problem was quickly fixed using out of band management, but this example shows you have to be careful because a simulator can’t simulate everything.

Part of passing is time management. When you get to the simulation part, I would recommend taking note of your start time. The simulation part was quite involved, and I had to abandon it after 20 minutes, but I still passed.

So you want to create a certification. Who do you hire to write the questions?

Do you get the best and brightest designers and developers of your product to write your questions, or do you get the laziest, most confused and most ignorant users of your product to write the test questions?

The answer is obvious, you certainly don’t ask your best talent to write the test questions,when your end users will write your test questions for you. Do you have to pay them for the questions? Certainly not, your end users will pay you! How does that work? It’s called a helpdesk. All you have to do is have the helpdesk collect the most commonly asked questions, add in a few really memorable scenarios where end users really got stuck, and you have a test.

Plusses of this approach are:
1)You turn product flaws into money. If a feature of your product is really poorly designed, you don’t have to change it, you write test questions, and charge money for classes and tests to work around the problem.

2)The helpdesk gets a chance to vent their frustrations. Your poor helpdesk spends all day getting beat up because of product flaws. They can’t push back to the designers to get the product made better, but they can at least push back on the end users by putting their frustrations into test question.

3)The tests beat up end users and put them in their place, making them less annoying when the call in. The higher level Cisco tests have 1st time failure rates of 90%

The minus of this approach is:
1)When you have the helpdesk write exams, the exams center on correcting problems once they have happened rather than avoiding problems before they happen.

So what do I suggest? First off, get the helpdesk involved with correcting design problems with products. Secondly, get the higher level people involved in the test process. Have the design people take the tests once a year. Give them a bonus depending on how they score.

Well i think there's nothing wrong with timing the exam
but the ones who r designing them are experts and they
make estimates about how much time each question would take which is fine , however the thing is that they at that
point forget to realize that the ones taking the exam are not experts .

Genuinely .. cisco exams would have been more inviting
and fruitful if they were not so strict in terms of time and yet be a bit more tough on concepts .