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CCNA Topics: What has been useful for you?
Magic Johnson
Member Posts: 414
in CCNA & CCENT
For anyone not in networking or looking to get a role, here's how I personally feel about the CCNA topics and how useful they are to me in my role:
I've just grabbed topics from the CISCO Press books so here they are:
Ethernet LANs and Switches: Oh hell yes.
IPv4 Addressing and subnetting: Again, beyond critical.
Operating Routers: Yes you need to be at least familiar with the CLI.
Config OSPF: Nope. This is obviously company dependant but in my firm we don't use it. It was still useful to get a grasp on routing protocols though definitely.
ACLs and NAT: My God yes. Absolutely crucial.
IPv6 Fund: Not at the moment, but will be obviously in the future. Handy to understand.
VLAN/STP: Yep. VLANs are paramount to most if not all LANs out there. STP is another one, don't deploy it at your own risk.
Static/Connected routes: Aye, obviously. Used a lot more than I thought.
VLSM/Summarisation: Yep yep yep.
Advanced ACLs: Yep, again critical.
OSPF/EIGRP: Again not really, we use IS-IS. But the foundations are there, and it's cool to know. As you jump from firm to firm it may come in handy.
Point-to-Point WANs: EDIT: This is useful, but not really the serial T1/E1 side of it. There's a tiny section on DSL config at the end of the last chapter on this subject which was more useful to me than the rest.
Frame Relay: Nope. Complete waste of time.
VPNs: Yes, sort of though most firms run far more complex setups than the one discussed in the book.
NAT: More NAT! Yes.
IPv6 Routing: Again, useful to know but it's much the same as v4.
Troubleshooting: Obviously.
What's everyone else's thoughts? I thought I'd put this together as when I wasn't in networking doing my CCENT I often wondered just how useful the stuff I was learning would be to me.
I've just grabbed topics from the CISCO Press books so here they are:
- Networking fundamentals
- Ethernet LANs and switches
- IPv4 addressing and subnetting
- Operating Cisco routers
- Configuring OSPF
- ACLs and NAT
- IPv6 fundamentals
- Virtual LANs and Spanning Tree Protocol
- Static and connected routes
- VLSM and route summarization
- IP access control lists
- OSPF and EIGRP configuration
- Point-to-point WANs
- Frame Relay
- VPNs
- Network address translation
- IPv6
- Troubleshooting
Ethernet LANs and Switches: Oh hell yes.
IPv4 Addressing and subnetting: Again, beyond critical.
Operating Routers: Yes you need to be at least familiar with the CLI.
Config OSPF: Nope. This is obviously company dependant but in my firm we don't use it. It was still useful to get a grasp on routing protocols though definitely.
ACLs and NAT: My God yes. Absolutely crucial.
IPv6 Fund: Not at the moment, but will be obviously in the future. Handy to understand.
VLAN/STP: Yep. VLANs are paramount to most if not all LANs out there. STP is another one, don't deploy it at your own risk.
Static/Connected routes: Aye, obviously. Used a lot more than I thought.
VLSM/Summarisation: Yep yep yep.
Advanced ACLs: Yep, again critical.
OSPF/EIGRP: Again not really, we use IS-IS. But the foundations are there, and it's cool to know. As you jump from firm to firm it may come in handy.
Point-to-Point WANs: EDIT: This is useful, but not really the serial T1/E1 side of it. There's a tiny section on DSL config at the end of the last chapter on this subject which was more useful to me than the rest.
Frame Relay: Nope. Complete waste of time.
VPNs: Yes, sort of though most firms run far more complex setups than the one discussed in the book.
NAT: More NAT! Yes.
IPv6 Routing: Again, useful to know but it's much the same as v4.
Troubleshooting: Obviously.
What's everyone else's thoughts? I thought I'd put this together as when I wasn't in networking doing my CCENT I often wondered just how useful the stuff I was learning would be to me.
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theodoxa
Member Posts: 1,340 ■■■■□□□□□□
I deal with the ones below in my position --- ACLs
- Firewalls
- Ethernet Switching
- IPv4 Addressing and Subnetting
- NAT
- Networking Fundamentals
- Static Routing
- Troubleshooting
- VLANs
- VPNs
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