When writing books, I have to stick to the topic. Blogging (supposedly) can be whatever's on your mind - quite a different beast. Today, I'm hitting a lot of small topics on a brief ramble.
First, I'll be doing a chat session for Network World on Tuesday the 8th at 2PM Eastern US time. Join in the fun, ask whatever's on your mind. Or, go to http://www.networkworld.com/chat/ and queue up your question now. The official topic is " Cisco certs and Building a Home Lab", but I'll listen to anything that makes it through the content filters.
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I mentioned Wednesday in this blog that Cisco announced three new CCNA exams this week at Networkers: CCNA Voice, CCNA Security, and CCNA Wireless. On the flight down to Orlando, I was pondering the question "why". Turns out that my #1 guess as to why was the main reason I heard from Cisco when I asked at the booth this week. But, just as importantly, I thought is was important to consider what the new certs are not supposed to be.
First on what it's not: It's not a new requirement on Channel Partners. Normally, cert changes have some requirements on Channel Partners, which then results in more time/expense, but no such requirement exists in this case. (Well, at least for today. Never know down the road. That's just me thinking out loud, by the way.)
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It was a Networkers 1998 - Philadelphia, I believe - where Cisco first announced CCNA to the general public. Now, 10 years later at Networkers 2008 (aka Cisco Live), Cisco is announcing some major additions to CCNA.
I'm going to repeat this a few times so there's no question: the existing CCNA is NOT changing per Cisco's announcement this week. What is changing is that Cisco is expanding the CCNA program, adding three new certifications that have the CCNA name:
Good old 10 year old CCNA keeps the same name.
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Friday I posed an open-ended IPv6 addressing question. Today I'll start working towards the solution - but more importantly, I want to find out whether you personally, if you were preparing for the CCNA exam, would want to read/study IPv6 address (only), or whether you would also feel the need to practice IPv6 commands on gear/sim/Dynamips.
Before you answer, let me tell you an assumption I'd like to make when working through this: let's take Cisco's exam topics at face value. If you look at the CCNA and ICND2 exam topics, you'll see the following (quoting http://www.cisco.com/):
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I promise I'll get to the next post on IPv6 Wednesday sometime. It's been unusually hectic of late, as opposed to normally hectic. But before I whine any more, on to the non-technical purpose of today's blog entry: if you're at Networkers next week, you'll see lots of giveaways from Cisco Press at the bookstore - and this blog is the only place we're announcing one of the giveaways.
Here's the deal. You get a bunch of books if you win (somewhere more than 1, but less than 10, TBD). To enter, you have to stop by the bookstore between 3-4PM local on Tuesday, June 24th, to enter the drawing.
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Way back a few weeks ago, when I had wrapped up the CCNP lab series, I asked via survey what CCNA topics you'd most want me to talk about in the blog. The top vote getter was IPv6. I had planned on getting back to basics a bit, picking a topic, offering some sample questions, and doing some CCNA exam prep topics here in the blog.
At the same time, there were more than a few requests for me to write more about labs and gear, and particularly about the whole "now that I bought the gear, what do I do with it" thing. So, I'm going to try and weave the two together, and we'll see how things go.
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Wow, I wrote my last post on a bit of a whim, and we got a great discussion going. Less than 10% of us think it'd make the Cisco Associate and Professional exams worse by moving to completely CLI tests. More surprising to me was that close to 70% thought that an all CLI test improved their chance of passing, with only 16% thinking it would decrease their chance of passing. Also, around 30% of you through that a 75 minute exam could hold 15 or more Sim/Simlet questions!
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Don't panic. Don't rejoice. Don't send John Chambers a letter. But at the end of the post, I wanna know - did the title make you think "hoorah" or "oh @%$&"?
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We've got several hurdles to overcome in getting better at passing exams. Our survey from a few weeks ago confirmed that the #1 hurdle is the time crunch. At the same time, another survey told us that about half of us think that you've been most successful on your exams when you've done more detailed planning of what you will do during your study time.
I'm convinced that the two are linked: a detailed plan makes you more productive when you do get to study, and that's especially true when you might need to set aside your studies for several days at a time.
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The last few posts, I've been focusing on our collective progress with passing Cisco exams this year, and what's holding us back. It appears that the planning more deeply - beyond just picking the exam and buying the right study resources - can certainly speed up the study process as well as make us all more successful in passing the exam. So, it seems appropriate that I spend a little time talking about the specifics of a plan.
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Last Tuesday's post and survey has had enough time to cook, so today I'm going to continue that thread, summarize some of the feedback, and talk about why some of us (me included) aren't quite making the progress we'd hoped to make this year.
First, to the data. As a quick reminder, last Tuesday I asked how you had done this year in your actual progress towards your planned Cisco certs, versus the progress you had hoped to make so far. So, let's start with a general characterization of the data to date:
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Exam day is approaching, and you're getting your last few study periods in before taking the test. The pressure builds - ok, it's not like passing the bar, or your last shot at passing your PhD orals, or taking the CPA exam for the 5th time - but it's still pressure. So, what's keeping you up at night? What one topic is giving you the most trouble? What's just not making sense in spite of what you read or study? Or what topic did you finally have to give up on for now, hoping you don't see too much on that topic on your exam?
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Bad, bad Wendell. Zero progress on my cert goals this year. How about you?
Back in January, I posted about our collective new year's resolutions regarding certification. We had a pretty healthy response on the survey as to what certifications you each planned for 2008. I promised then to help in an ever so slight way by asking you each quarter about your progress. Hopefully, stopping for a few minutes to consider your current progress will be worth the time. So... how's your progress?
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It took me almost 3 months, but together we made it through a good discussion of how to build a CCNP lab. After I finished the CCNA lab series before that, I posted a summary page with links to all the blog posts in the series. Likewise, here's a set of links to all the CCNP lab series posts. Enjoy!
Wendell
CCNP Lab Part 1 - Overview and Budget Survey
CCNP Lab Part 2 How Badly Do You Need an L3 Switch?
CCNP Lab Part 3 - Which L2 Switch?
A few weeks ago, I announced a small contest for anyone willing to give a suggested alternative to some of my CCNP lab suggestions. After countless analysis, considering, and a few coin flips, I've chosen a winner. More interesting to most of you though will be why I chose the winner, so let me ramble about that for today's blog.
In my posting for a $1200 CCNP lab, I had posted the following build list:
$1200 Lab 1: Switch-centric
3 X 2950 w/ standard Image $450
2 X 1710 $160
3 X 2610 $375
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Finally... last budget of the 3 options. If you haven't been reading the blog, there's a lot of background to catch up - should be relatively easy to find in the past weeks. Last week, I posted about a suggested CCNP lab with an $800 budget. Earlier this week, I posted about the $1200 budget. Today, I'll hit the $1600 budget.
Same rules as last post, with almost the same assumptions. I'll repeat them here for completeness:
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If you're new here, well, you picked a bad time to start, unless you want to read the last 10 weeks of posts. We're almost to the end of the CCNP lab madness. Last week, I posted about a suggested CCNP lab with an $800 budget. Today, let's expand that to a $1200 budget.
Same rules as last post, with almost the same assumptions. I'll repeat them here for completeness:
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Well, I'm finally ready to spell it out - what would I buy with $800 for a CCNP lab? Your job is to tell us all how you'd tweak my suggestion, or what you'd do that was totally different. Also, if you want to join in the free book contest I announced yesterday, then make sure you post your alternative design using those same requirements.
Again, my assumptions:
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As promised, and just for fun, I want to do a contest. There's no one right way to build this CCNP lab we've been discussing for a while, even making lots of assumptions. So, I'm going to offer a few suggestions for each budget range. As usual, you can comment about my choices, tell me what you'd do different, tell me what models/IOS versions/cards might make it better, what models you can get for cheaper, and so on - just like we've been doing. However, for the contest, if you'll take just a little extra effort, you'll have a shot at a free Cisco Press book.
So, here are the rules.
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What a mess! There's just too many variables for my little processor. There's no right answer, and there's no best solution.
Yep, it's time to pick which routers I'd suggest for a CCNP lab. We've discussed many in the last few months in this blog. But "best" depends on a lot of factors, including cost that varies from week to week on Ebay, features supported by each platform/IOS/feature set, the availability of that IOS version/feature set based on your relationship with Cisco, whether Feature Navigator lists all features or not, and whether you really need to practice several features that have only a little coverage for the CCNP exams.
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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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