The CCENT certification has some appeal for many reasons – it gets you a Cisco certification, but with roughly half as much knowledge (and study time?) required as compared with CCNA, you get CCENT by accident if you wanted to use the 2-exam path to get your CCNA anyway, and it never hurts to have another acronym on your resume’. Assuming that there will be some segment of the community that wants to get CCENT – maybe stopping there, maybe not – let’s take a look at what’s required to get your CCENT cert. And by the way, feel free to weigh in with yesterday’s survey about whether you might be more inclined today to take the ICND1 exam, and get your CCENT cert, as compared with the old exams that didn’t have the CCENT cert.
Cisco positions this new certification as requiring the knowledge and skills needed by an entry-level network engineer – and personally I think they did a pretty good job of reaching that goal. For example, the exam covers many things required of a new engineer at a company with 5-6 sites, with 1 router and 1 switch at each site, and with point-to-point WAN links from the main site to each remote site. Also, they wanted CCENT to be useful for IT services engineers that might be dispatched to help small businesses connect their single site to the Internet, using Cisco switches and routers. So, let’s take a deeper look at what Cisco included on the exams relative to this intended audience. Here’s some of the more interesting and more important topics for the 640-822 ICND1 exam that gets you your CCENT cert:
- LAN switching and cabling – but for a single switch, no spanning tree issues, no trunks, no VLANs.
- IP addressing and subnetting – you need to be both good and fast at this – but with a single subnet mask per classful network (no VLSM).
- RIP version 2 as the only routing protocol
- WAN – includes point-to-point leased lines between routers, plus using DSL/cable for Internet connectivity
- Internet connection features for the home/small office, including NAT/PAT and DHCP client/server
- Wireless LAN concepts – enough to describe (but not implement) WLANs with multiple Access Points at a single site
- Security – a smattering of concepts, with some depth on securing access to routers and switches – but with a bigger goal to convince you that even in a small network, you need to go further than this exam in order to secure the network.
- Build/troubleshoot – while the ICND1 exam covers a higher percentage of theory than does the CCNA exam, you must be able to use the command line to configure, verify, and troubleshoot small networks.
While that’s not an exhaustive list (check https://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/current_exams/640-822.html for that), it hits the biggest points, in my opinion. Also, besides the actual topics, the questions also tend to test you on theory in part by making you apply that theory to real network scenarios. For instance, rather than asking you directly what messages flow when a user issues a traceroute command from a router, a question might show the output of the command, and ask the details of the messages that made the third line of output appear. Not a huge difference, but these questions do make you show a little more mastery of the theory.
So, whatta ya think? If you’re responsible for a small Enterprise internetwork, or installing small office Internet connections with Cisco gear, what’d they leave out? What should be emphasized if this cert is to really represent what you do in your job? Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at a typical type of problem from the exam, and talk about how to solve it – and solve it quickly enough to matter.
