how important is ipv6 for ccna

pinkiaiii

Anyway its been about 4 months now in my studies towards ccna.Most chapters are long and very dry using netacad mostly,thus getting to do around 2 chapters per week which i barely manage.But so far have avoided any ipv6 subjects,its just bunch of numbers crammed in and mask on top,now i know couple basic commands ipv6 unicast-routing,show commands,and that mostly every protocol supports ipv6,and difference in seeing output or configuring is adding ipv6 into commands.

That said haven't got class where it would be explained in detail,since gave up on it on first chapter when enabling interfaces to support ipv6 and configure them EUI64 or in other ways.

reason i ask i noticed that almost every lab since semester 2 and practice exams have around 30% questions on same topics with ipv6 in them.

So realistically i still have around 4 months before exam date is put in,but should i expect many ipv6 questions in general or labs with it,since was told that exam is around 40-50qestions and 3 labs-so not sure what % could be there related to ipv6 in general,any input those who have done ccna and seeing many ipv6 related questions ?

Since the part where i get lost is with ipv6 address the way it can be shortened then split into parts assigned for isp,host,network,host and getting confused with addresses and their masks.

Dollarhyde

Netacad does indeed really focus a lot IPv6 a lot.

Overall IPv6 is not that hard IMO. It is kind of easier, the only hard part is the very long address, which you shorten by use of :: and removing leading zeroes.

IPv6 will allow you much easier configurations such as OSPF, in IPv4 you need to worry about different wildcards and networks. If you mess up there it might advertise more networks or similar. In IPv6 you just give IP to an interface and enable ospf there, it does kind of a job for you. They have implemented that same feature for IPv4 later, but you will not encounter that on the CCNA exam, they still expect you to subnet and do wildcards.

pinkiaiii

yeah i get your saying wildcard masks are a bit pain in general,but its also possible just to use 0.0.0.0 on ospf.
As for leading 00s and :: that was easy part,id suffer more with seeing say fe80::/48 or smth like that and then im like looking at some morze code,or any other shortened ipv6 address and say subnet mask / then im lost as in how many subnets there are or how do they increment etc.
Since i know it was a year or so before they put more focus on it,but in general public and besides some large corps ipv4 is still everywhere.

Even got told by lecturer,he was purchasing some ipv4 addresses for testing in college that cost like 3-4$ guess its class c or whatever,but he was told by engineers that ipv6 could been gotten for free yet nobody wants it real life example here.

Dollarhyde

Well I usually do not use 0.0.0.0. The exam wants you to know how to do the real wildcard, not just the host wildcard.

/48 just gives you how many bits there are and you count them, each one of the hex chars is 4 bits, and you just go by that, one hextet is 16 so it is easy to see that 3 hextets are 48.

IPv4 is everywhere, but the pool of addresses has deprecated, you cannot buy them more from ARIN, and definitely not that cheaply.

The problem that IPv6 solved is that there were no more IPv4 addresses for everyone to use, therefore in the future we will have to use IPv6 with the IoE, or IoT. They just want us to learn it before it happens, so we will be able to configure it.

pinkiaiii

Ok thank you for your answer,yes i do realize that ipv4 is exhausted and many ISPs starting to use dual stack thus switching slowly people to ipv6,to maintain balance as well.the price i told was 3euros per ip,but not sure since college could have some discounts with provider,but in general was told its not that much if one wants public address,also companies like windows seems carved out majority of work for regular folks not to be bothered by any changes,given that windows can assign ipv6 itself using mac-so general public is sort of sorted not to be concerned.

Silverymoon

IPv6 is very important for the CCNP Route exam, DHCPv6 and OSPF and EIGRP for IPv6.

pinkiaiii

Honestly ccnp is least of my worries i do on average 2-3h per day max learning,and theres 2chapters dhcp,nat left for semester 2 -that would be equivalent to be ready for ccent.On first semester exam on netacad scored 63.x did it again two weeks later just to score little above 70 %.

now for semester two on every chapter exam my score would be around low 60s% close to 70%.

but i also know i have a lot of weaknesses in ipv6-basically blank,subneting still rusty on class A,issues with class b but at least know some basics as in block sizes,increments,then layer 3 switches and routing on them was blur,same issues with switchport modes for switches dynamic,static,restrictions,wildcard masks still mystery on figuring out range,as in range that id would like to specify myself, not given on paper to solve,and also a lot of guessing with show commands and interpreting issues or outputs when theres dozen lines and needing to figure whats causing troubles with say ospf or other protocols.

so id say im 50% in general score at best,which given 4months left will be a long shot,at even passing ccna from first couple times if at all.Since college is part time only and any classes is like bootcamp but more read it yourself and do some labs from the book.Thus some topics are easy to understand but once you get onto ones with more terminology,as how PDUs are formed and what they contain or change depending on protocols,what osi layer is used what in that layer for certain protocols,links feels like stone wall to go trough and come next week your doing another chapter ahead.Thus reason ending up here,asking for help every other week