CCNA

gangaskan said:

not to stray away from topic, but its been forever since i've done any entry ccna classes when i was in ccna4 which was basic routing i believe? we did alot of ISDN and frame relay stuff from what i remember.


but yeah, nat isnt that big of a issue as is ACL's and being able to subnet on the fly

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Well when I took my ICND2 last year, I had quite a few questions on NAT and ACL's...

ISDN is pretty much non-existant but Frame Relay is still kind of big; just need to know the basics of Frame relay though.

I wish You the best of luck on your tests. That being said, I self studied without access to cisco devices for roughly 4 weeks of active studying as follows:

Week 1: read, reread, and reread ICND1
Week 2: take the included practice test for a week strait, look at the questions I missed and re-read those chapters, test for ICND1/CCENT at the end of the week
Week 3: no studying brain dump
Week 4: read, reread, and reread ICND2
Week 5: take the included practice tests for ICND2 for the week, reread chapters that I missed questions from.

Granted, I wasn't really working then, as I was on my transition leave from the army (best 60-something days of nothing EVER). It worked for me and I passed both tests the first time. I dont think I could do that again, as I'm working now. The closest to formal training on cisco devices was from one of my previous commanders while I was in the Army. He was CCNP certified, and gave our detachment 2 40hr classroom training sessions.

I've been looking at this: http://www.howtonetwork.net/public/department95.cfm
"CCNA in 60 days." The guy provides a lot of useful learning tools. I just need to find time to start it.
I've went through a ccna class last year but couldn't get my cert at the time. But I've used Packet Tracer, GNS3, dynamips, and then some. I've worked on a live systems. Doing the stuff virually is cool, but doing it on real hardware using real connections really helps. Even though you may be typing in exactly what you would virtually, it still helps. Everyonce in a while you may find some cheap old cisco equipment on craigslist or ebay. I've seen packs that people put together that include, all neccessary cables, hardware, and some books for a decent price comparatively; everything that the examples in the ccna course material uses.

Mehovoric said:

I've seen packs that people put together that include, all neccessary cables, hardware, and some books for a decent price comparatively; everything that the examples in the ccna course material uses.

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When you go to e-bay or amazon just search for "CCNA lab kit" or "CCNP lab kit" and there will be multiple offers for 3 routers and 3 switches for around 350-500 dollars. My recommendation is to just use packet tracer and GNS3 for the CCNA. If you are going to strive for the CCNP (which you SHOULD especially after CCNA is fresh in your head) I would get the lab kits then. You can get away with not using real gear for the CCNA, but the CCNP is a different story from what I understand. I am also about to take my CCNA here in a couple weeks. Hopefully we all pass on the first try!

Good luck!
Brian

DreamerBrian said:

I am also about to take my CCNA here in a couple weeks. Hopefully we all pass on the first try!

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Good luck to yourself Brian!

I've studied through the whole thing, but its been almost 9 months since I've looked at anything cisco except for our routers at work which all have a GUI and make things a lot easier. Unfortunately, once they're setup we don't dare touch them again unless something is wrong. I've got books and access to the pretty decent lab I built back when I was in college. I just need to get the time and kick myself to sit down and do it.

Mehovoric said:

I've got books and access to the pretty decent lab I built back when I was in college. I just need to get the time and kick myself to sit down and do it.

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Therein lies the hardest part about the exam: getting off your *** to study! I'm pretty sure I need not emphasize the importance of that overly-imperative first step, but when you finally get back into the swing of it then you'll never look back.

Thanks for the support! I'll make sure that I tell the ladies at the test center that I'm taking the test in your honor

Brian

I had a talk with our installations manager the other day, we have a ton, and I mean a ton of 26xx routers just sitting around because they are end of life so we don't ship them out to customers but they can't sell them either (don't get that) but to make a long story short they are going to allow me to cobble together a CCNA lab that I can remote into. Can't wait to get started, and it should help the other Network Analysts as well when they are ready to start studying for their CCNA's as well.

J

Congrats on the promotion, and GL on the tests. I spent some time studying CCNA levels one and two as part of the exploration curriculum, and I'll only reiterate that packet tracer was an enormous help.

What also helped me was having the ccna exploration guides. These were either online books or hard copy books and were used as the main text for that particular curriculum. I believe that the CCNA exploration curriculum deals chiefly with CCNA, while CCNA discovery has some overlap between CCNA and CCENT. In any event, there were 4 books as part of the exploration curriculum, and it looks like each can be found for about 30 bucks on amazon.

Gl once again.

Thanks everyone for the info! Lots of good stuff here.

Fortunately I have access to pretty much any gear I need. I already have a router and a couple switches at the house, but have been using GNS3 mostly thus far. I'm just focusing on ICND1 right now, which I think is much better than having to tackle the whole thing at once. I'm feeling fairly confident so far. Much of this stuff in ICND1 I am already at least somewhat familiar with.

I spent 4 months creating 280 flash cards of ICND2 material. In the last couple of days I have started going through them and I am getting like 1/5 right lol. This happened for me when I made roughly around the same amount of flashcards for ICND1, but I ended up almost acing the exam after studying my cards for a good while. Stick with it and don't force it to happen!

I passed ICND1 today. w00t w00t!

Start studying ICND2 material this weekend, and hope to take that within 30 - 60 days. I can put it off as long as 90 though if I need to. I will say, ICND1 was much harder than the practice exam material had led me to believe. Even the review guides on cisco's website don't seem to compare. Knowing subnetting well realy helped, and being able to use IOS commands frequently at work didn't hurt either.

For anyone studying, this guys website is awesome!

http://subnettingmadeeasy.blogspot.com/2007/11/subnetting-made-easy-lesson.html

His method of subnetting was quite a bit different than that of my training materials, and I found it much easier to understand. After a day of practicing using his methods, I was 100% better at subnetting. Just keep his page up, and visit www.subnettingquestions.com. Great resources there! There is also a lot of other info on his site to help with cisco certification tracks.

i'd recommend getting your ccna then ccnp. this is an awesome time to be in networking - so much is happening. today's routing and switch is significantly better and more complex than it was 10 years ago. so the skills learned in ccna and ccnp are essential. even if you don't take the tests, just learn that stuff.

best of luck!

So this is reviving a really old post, but I never got around to taking ICND2 until today. Work actually got in the way, and I spent all my time actually working and no time studying. Recently, our network engineer (the only other network guy in the system) resigned and moved out of town. I have now become the de facto sole network engineer for 3 hospitals, 12 external physicians practices, and several administrative buildings, totaling 2,000+ employees. I work with a lot of cool stuff! I've also been informed by management, that they will not be back-filling that position any time soon, if ever. Anyway, I crammed for about a month, and went in pretty confident. I do this stuff every day after all, right? About an hour and forty-five minutes later I walked out with a hair over 700 on my score card. Disappointing, to say the least. It seems I don't work nearly enough with old school wan links, lol. That's what killed me. I totally bombed that category. All our stuff is either leased fiber with managed switches, or drilled fiber. I guess the studying there just didn't stick, since I don't work with it. At least I know exactly what to study! I thankfully aced all the subnetting and did really well on lan switching/routing. I've scheduled another exam a week from tuesday, and I'll be ready! Guess it's time to break out some routers and set up a proper lab. GNS is just not very satisfying. I can appropriate some gear from the hospital.

With the changes coming up to the CCNA program, it sounds like the focus will be on the newer stuff soon like IPv6 and what not. Since I last wrote I have moved on to network engineering and don't regret although it is highly stressful and massively long hours. I work with tens of thousands of routers and cannot beat the experience. I have my JNCIA as well as my JNCIS security and am now studying for the CCNAX hoping to achieve it before the exam change.

I wish you the best of luck in taking the test again certs can be extremely satisfying.

JP

Yeah.
I found the CCNA topics bizarrely old. Only time I have seen some things like frame relay or even WIC 1 serial cards is in my home lab. Real world is on 100Mb fibre!

aftermath said:

Yeah.
I found the CCNA topics bizarrely old. Only time I have seen some things like frame relay or even WIC 1 serial cards is in my home lab. Real world is on 100Mb fibre!

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It really depends on the job honestly, I work on everything from 56k up to 10gig drops. Elan, frame relay, atm, mpls etc. We even have a token ring customer... so yeah really depends on the field and the needs and requirements.

JP

aftermath said:

Yeah.
I found the CCNA topics bizarrely old. Only time I have seen some things like frame relay or even WIC 1 serial cards is in my home lab. Real world is on 100Mb fibre!

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it varies, but a majority of your networks are not truly complicated.

wait till you start getting into MPLS, bgp, ospf, isis etc ... Or other things like SpeeDJ said.

Update, passed ICND2 today. Hello CCNA! Now to begin working toward CCNP route/switch. w00t w00t!

Best of luck to you guys who are working on this stuff. It's a beast, for sure!