The New ROUTE exam: More Difficult than the Old BSCI?
If you've watched this blog in the last few days, you will have already seen that the CCNP cert appears to have fewer topics than the old CCNP. In fact, the ROUTE exam itself even looks a little narrower at first glance - quite a trick if you consider that it's moved from a 5 day BSCI course to a 5 day ROUTE course plus 7.5 hours of e-learning. Today I'll look specifically at the new ROUTE exam, to consider how the topic breadth and depth have changed, and whether that translates into a more difficult exam. Read more
Brief announcement: 10 winners in the free CCIE R/S Written Cert Guide book giveaway
We did a book giveaway in January for 10 copies of the CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Certification Guide (4th Edition). This post lists the winners. I hope to get to the post office today to mail them out. I'll get the next CCNP series post out in a day or so. Read more
The scoop on the New TSHOOT Course and Exam
(Today's post is about the new CCNP Troubleshooting exam. It's written by Cisco Press author Kevin Wallace, who wrote the new TSHOOT Official Cert Guide among his many other products. Kevin should be around to reply to your posts as well, and I'll keep an eye out as well. The rest of this post is from Kevin - I think you'll find it interesting!) Read more
Cisco Announces Changes to CCNP
It's almost like those too-familiar infomercials that get so popular around New Year's - time to get rid of the fat and add some muscle. Cisco's done the same to CCNP with today's announcement of CCNP changes. Cisco starts by removing roughly half the topic breadth from the old CCNP: most every topic from ONT and ISCW is gone. Cisco then adds back a Troubleshooting exam that focuses on routing and switching with a few other topics. Read more
Brief Wrap-up on the Lab from the Last Few Weeks
This brief post is a wrap up of the lab I posted a few days back. The question is this: is a 2-router, 2-serial link design enough to experiment with EIGRP metrics and with the concept of when EIGRP needs to send a Query, and when does it not need to send a Query?
If you didn't read the last few posts, this is really #3 in a series of 3 related posts, so you may want to start here with the RIP lab, and then here with the EIGRP lab. Read more
Almost Perfect for CCNA: a Two-Router, Two-Serial Topology
Are two routers enough for practicing CCNA skills in your home lab? Maybe, maybe not. But you can practice a surprising number of CCNA-level router tasks with a two-router lab using the topology suggested in my last post. Today I'll discuss pros and cons with this topology, discuss some of the nuances with the lab exercise I listed last post, and close with a new lab exercise challenge - this time with EIGRP. Read more
Topology Design for Routers Through the Lens of a Lab Exercise
Do you need two routers to practice routing commands for CCNA? Or do you really need 3 - or even 4? Likewise for CCNP, or one of the CCNA concentrations? And what topology do you need to use - which determines what interfaces to buy - so that you can test every function of every config option for that exam, and see the nuances that you might miss in a different topology? And what are those nuances in the first place? And what lab exercises should I use to learn all this? Read more
Dynamips, Building a lab, New Certs, and What Ya’ll Want in 2010
Taking 16 days off for Christmas was wonderful. I occasionally did one of the items on the infinite length honey-do list (I marked off 20 items - but the list is longer still - how?). I played, ate, cleaned the house before the next visitors, ate more, visited, ate - the usual - but there was a lot of time to kick back. One of my first tasks this year was to plan out some of the known topics for this blog for the coming months and year. Today I'm going to tell you a few directions I'll head this year, including an update on my Dynamips progress, and ask you for input. Read more
Tis the Season… for Buying my Dynamips PC
Tis the Christmas season, and among other things, it's time to shop. I'm ready to get out the checkbook and buy a PC to run Dynamips, with enough umpfh to never ever worry about whether it'll run 12 routers or so concurrently. Well, maybe that's a bit naive, but in today's post, I'll tell you about my research, suggest two sets of specs for buying a DM PC, and ask the rest of you shoppers to help me find a good place to buy it. Read more
Way too Easy - Nowhere to Dynamips Under Linux was a Breeze
I'm beginning to wonder why I didn't do this earlier. Of course, I'm speaking figuratively here - I do know that I had little time for non-essential work, and a rack full of gear in the next room already - but so far it looks like the path to a humming fast Dynamips (DM) server isn't all that painful. I'm still working on what to buy hardware-wise. Today I'll give you a quick update on my progress, and focus on how I ended up picking Ubuntu over other Linux variants, at least for my initial foray into a dedicated DM server. Read more
Can Santa Deliver a Hummin' Dynamips Platform for Christmas?
Bam! A quick idea about how something works on a router pops into your head. 5-10 clicks later, you're typing in the config you want to test, while waiting 5-10 minutes for one of your saved Dynamips pods to boot up. Soon, you're consoled in to the 12 routers in one of you standard topologies, tweaking a baseline config before testing out the config you just created for this latest brainstorm. Read more
Thanksgiving Blog Spread: CCNA Difficulties, CCNA Security, CCIE Troubleshooting, and More
Happy Thanksgiving to ya'll. I know with the flat Earth today that some of you folks out there don't celebrate the US Thanksgiving holiday, but we do, and I'm out most of the week. So while we don't say or type everyday a thanks to those people we appreciate, it seems an appropriate week for me to say thanks to all of you who read, post, and answer my polls regularly. The blog thing has turned from a small overhead chore into something I look forward to - and the biggest reason for that is the interaction I have with all ya'll that join in and participate. Read more
Index Page - 2009 Series on Why CCNA Seems Difficult
CCNA Diffcultives Index Page
This blog post lists links to a 6-part series on the CCNA Certification, examining the reasons why many people find the exam surprisingly difficult. This series was posted to this blog in July-Sept 2009. This index is here as a convenience for those searching for information on these topics.
Index Page - 2009 CCNA Security Exam Posts
This blog post lists links to a 3-part series on the CCNA Security Certification, posted to this blog in Sept/Oct 2009. It also includes a few links to other relevant posts. This index is here as a convenience for those searching for information on these topics.
Index Page - 2009 CCIE R/S Lab Posts
This blog post lists links to a 3-part series on the CCIE Route/Switch lab exam, posted to this blog in late 2009. It also includes a few links to other relevant posts. This index is here as a convenience for those searching for information on these topics.
CCIE Lab series
Part 1 - A Sneak Peek at the CCIE R/S Lab
Part 2 - CCIE R/S Troubleshooting: Initially Shocked, but Wasn't Too Bad Read more
The Best Study Styles: Prolonged Concentration or Lots of Short Sessions?
It seems like every place I turn here of late, I'm reminded at the number of distractions in life. These distractions might be useful - a newscast at the lunch place, twitter from your phone, and the entire universe of information just a few Google searches away. It doesn't have to be technology either - could be daydreaming, or an unexpected need to do something for a family member. This whole line of thinking can be applied to many parts of life, but in this case, it got me thinking about the role of these distractions during the time you have set aside to prep for a Cisco exam. Read more
CCIE R/S Versus CCNA/CCNP Troubleshooting
It's a long story, but I started out planning to blog about a book I used to prep for the CCIE R/S lab troubleshooting section. However, I think there's a broader topic that grows out of what I experienced in the lab. Today I'd like to offer a few thoughts that crystallized around this theme: the CCIE R/S Troubleshooting tasks require such a broad view of everything in the lab blueprint that it may require a different approach than the CCNA and CCNP t'shooting questions. As a result, your preparation, and the tools you use, may need to be a little different. Read more
CCIE R/S Lab Troubleshooting: Initially Shocked, but Wasn't Too Bad
So I'm sitting at the CCIE R/S lab Beta, and beginning the part I was sooooo looking forward to - the new 2-hour troubleshooting section. 2 minutes into that section, I was completely bummed. It seemed too much to even attempt. 40-ish routers and switches... 10-12 trouble tickets... 2 hours... plus a new user interface. But by the end of the process, I had completely reversed my opinion - I thought it was completely reasonable. Today, I'll describe the process and draw a few conclusions about the t'shooting section. Read more
A Sneak Peek at the CCIE R/S Lab
The recently announced changes to the CCIE R/S written and lab exams took effect this week. I recently had the chance to take the R/S lab again, as part of the Beta testing - so I decided to save up some observations and post them around the time the new exam has come out. Today I'll look at a variety of things about the lab exam, and make another post next week concentrating on the biggest change: The 2-hour troubleshooting section. Read more
CCNA Security Part 3: Lab Requirements
If you're buying gear on a budget, then CCNA Security may be for you. As difficult as I think the IINS exam's theory might be - at least relative to my original expectations - the lab requirements may make up for it. You can practice all the router features effectively with only 2 routers; most can be practiced with a single router. Only a few of the features require a switch, and a single switch at that. Add your existing PC to the mix run SDM and to run a TACACs+/RADIUS server, and you have enough gear with which to practice. Read more
- About Cisco Cert Zone
Odom, CCIE No, 1624, splits time between writing books for Cisco Press and teaching classes for Skyline ATS. In his 25-ish years in the networking industry, he has worked as as a pre-sale and post-sale SE for a few networking vendors, as well as a network engineer implementing network technology. Wendell has spent the majority of the last 15 years teaching, consulting, and writing about networking technologies, most of which in some way relate to Cisco products. His books include titles on QoS, CCIE R/S, as well as several titles related to CCNA certification, including the September 2007 book CCNA Official Exam Certification Library (CCNA Exam 640-802) (Read a sneak peek of chapter 7). Click for the list of current titles by Wendell.
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