CCNP

Cisco certs and home labs, a great discussion

Cisco Subnet — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:21:09 -0400

Yesterday, Cisco Subnet blogger Wendell Odom answered a truckload of questions about building a home lab from attendees of a live Network World chat. (You can also find Wendell, and ask him questions, at his blog.) If you are studying for a Cisco cert, thinking about studying for a Cisco cert or just want to build your own home network, this information in this chat will guide you on your way. Guest also asked Wendell his thoughts on the new Cisco certs, his upcoming Simulator project and his feelings about brain dumps. Here's an excerpt.

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CCNA Home Lab: Survival Guide

Cloudy — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:48:00 -0400

I never thought building a well-balanced home lab would be so challenging. Sure, anybody can buy a 2500 router and have at it, but to put together multiple routers and switches for CCNA and have a starter lab for CCNP is more work than I thought. So this blog will be about my practical, ongoing experiences in trying to build this lab and is geared towards arming you, the aspiring CCNA, with practical information about facing the challenges of doing so. Just FYI, I began my self-study for the 640-802 exam about 3 weeks ago (June 1 2008) so I'm just getting started as well, but have already learned that a lot of the issues I'll mention here are not addressed anywhere in a single place that I could find.

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Time for Cisco to take Certifications tests in house Mr.Chambers

Larry Chaffin — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:51:01 -0400

Time for Cisco to take Certifications tests in house Mr. Chambers,

Dear John,

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IPv6 Addressing – Do You Choose to Practice?

wendell — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:45:47 -0400

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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Networkers Giveaway only for nww.com blog readers

wendell — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:46:35 -0400

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 24^th, to enter the drawing.

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All Hands-on Cisco Exam: Negates Brain Dumps?

wendell — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:54:46 -0400

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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The New Cisco Exams – All Questions Require the CLI

wendell — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:23:27 -0400

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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Components of a CCNA Study Plan

wendell — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:48:51 -0400

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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A Failure to Plan Means… What?

wendell — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:27:19 -0400

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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What Makes You Lose Sleep Before the Exam?

wendell — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:32:14 -0400

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 5^th 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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CCNP Lab Series – Master Links

wendell — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:05:01 -0400

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?

CCNP Lab Part 4 - Where's the Beef in ONT?

CCNP Lab Part 5 - CCNP Wireless Config (Poll)

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CCNP Lab Suggestions Winner – Free Book!

wendell — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:50:12 -0400

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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CCNP Wrap-up V: Build List for $1600 Budget

wendell — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:05:34 -0400

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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CCNP Wrap-up IV: Build List for $1200 Budget

wendell — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:08:49 -0400

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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CCNP Wrap-up III: Build List for $800 Budget

wendell — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:27:45 -0400

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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CCNP Lab Contest: Win a Free Cisco Press Book

wendell — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:27:39 -0400

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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CCNP Wrap-up II: Picking Routers

wendell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:45:12 -0400

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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CCNP Wrap-up I: Picking Switches

wendell — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:07:45 -0400

Yes, for those of you who've been sticking with me on this seemingly un-ending ramble about CCNP labbing: it' finally reaching it's conclusion. I've covered all I'm going to about content on th eexams. Next, I'll spend a few posts making suggestions on gear, topologies, and build lists for building your own CCNP lab. I'll start by listing some thoughts about which switches to buy today, routers next post, and the pull together some build lists.

For budget, I'm going to fall back on the budget survey I asked about a few months back. Feel free to weigh in if you haven't already - I'll look at the results again before I put the final build list together. Or just post on today's page and I'll see it there.

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CCNP Lab 9 – ISCW and MPLS

wendell — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:46:53 -0400

I just forgot. Of all the CCNP exams, ISCW covers the broadest range of topics. When I covered ISCW a few weeks ago, I covered all the main ISCW topics, focusing on the security topics. But I just forgot MPLS. Any interestingly enough, as our survey has shown over the last few weeks, MPLS is one of the topics that more people want to hear about when this series is finished. So, before turning my attention to the bigger picture of what to put in a CCNP lab, I need to post a few comments about MPLS and the ISCW exam.

First, for those of you unfamiliar with MPLS, today "MPLS" is almost as big as saying "IP routing".

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CCNP Lab 8 – Some Cheap Options for BSCI

wendell — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:18:30 -0400

Of all the CCNP exams, BSCI is probably the most familiar to most people. It has the most overlap with the topics in CCNA, it's got a lot of topics that people use in their real jobs, and the topics covered haven't changed a lot over the years. So, I left it as the last of the 4 exams to look at in this CCNP lab series. Today, I'll look at the topics, and talk about some really inexpensive options for BSCI labbing.

First, for perspective, the main hands-on topics for BSCI are:

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