Intro - New Student

redwarrior

Hello Everyone,

I've been lurking around this forum and the CCSP forum for a while trying to make up my mind which direction to choose and also waiting to see which my employer might pay for and I've finally made my choice and luckily my employer agreed, so here I am, ready to study for the CCNP! I couldn't be much more excited!

Here's my plan. I get a lot of hands-on experience at work right now with a pretty good range of hardware and issues and I don't have much (any) disposable income right now and my employer is only paying for books and exams, so I am thinking the dynamips route is the way to go. I am thinking I'll use the Cisco Press books for the main source of my study material, supplement with their fine website along with resources on the web, and build my virtual lab around Cisco Press lab books so I can practice labs. I was planning on starting with BSCI to begin with and working my way from there.

A little bit of background. I got my CCNA last summer and ended up landing a job in december with a company that was having a hard time finding a network engineer. They ended up using me for the basics and bringing in consultants for more advanced troubleshooting and projects. It's been great because I've gotten to do things I might otherwise never been given the chance to do, like configure an ASA failover pair. The problem is, too often I feel like I'm feeling my way around in the dark, especially when dealing with things like BGP.

I'd appreciate any advice and hope that I can eventually contribute some to the discussions here.

Mishra

Good luck! Nice to hear when people are actually excited about studying for the exam instead of just passing it.

APA

Join the club!! Great to see another CCNP chaser.......... and one very enthusiastic about it as well...

You'll be through those four exams in no time!!!

I'm keen on getting the CCSP after I finish my CCNP, DA and DP studies...... I'm aiming for the end of this year.... Some say I'm crazy..... I just love to study though.........

Look forward to conversing more in the CCNP forums

redwarrior

I think my coworkers think I have some sort of disease, but I really enjoy figuring out how things work and being able to tweak them to make them work better. I've always been the type to fiddle with hardware or software constantly and since I got into networking, it's like I've been given a much bigger, cooler box of legos to play with.

I've decided to start with ONT on the advice of a recent CCNP. So far, I'm enjoying learning about QoS and devising theoretical strategies to prioritize my coworkers' traffic at the bottom of the list. (Theoretical, of course! ) I'm thinking BCMSN will be my last exam and hopefully I'll have some money to build a switching lab by then since it looks like Dynamips won't be enough to study from for that one.

beezee

Hi all. I got my CCNA on the 2nd of May and I'm looking forward to expanding my knowledge with the CCNP track.

I also got a job with a growing local company that needed a cisco network technician. It's kind of a "Jack of all trade" position because we use Cisco, juniper, sonicwall, trapeze, build and configure servers e.t.c. Yesterday we were reinstalling AD on a client's 2000 server and the day before that I was at the data center doing other cool stuff.

I'm hoping to start reading the BCMSN and doing the labs.

I'm grateful to be here!

bZ

mikej412

Good Luck on the CCNP Journey.

Sneak a peak at the CCNP FAQ. Make sure you read all the way down to the Other Cisco Resources. The Link to the Cisco CCNP Prep Center is there, along with Cisco Learning Connection Links that could be useful as you study.