Passed CCENT

flurrball

I just passed the CCENT after two weeks of studying and one very sleepless night. 948/1000 just wanted to thank everyone on these forums, while I was studying, I frequently came back to these forums to see other peoples experiences and suggestions and they helped and encouraged me a lot. Thank you everyone!
Just thought I would give a little back and help some of you who are preparing for it with some of my thoughts on the test. I'm trying to honor my non disclosure agreement too, so if I say to much, someone let me know.

My study path was as follows:
Watched all of CBTNuggets first for general overview
Read the older ICND1 by Odom
Realized my book was old and got the new ICND1 by Odom, and reviewed
Took all the ICND1 tests from the Cisco.com prep center
Used Packet Tracer 4.11 and Boson Netsim throughout, usually right along with Jeremy

I found the test to be easier than I expected, i finished with about 30 mins to go, and few simulations, so time wasn't an issue, but there were some topics I saw that you should have down before taking.
Subnetting (as if it hasn't been emphasized enough)
How switches make switching decisions + how routers make routing decisions
Be versatile and know what show commands will show you what (this will save you time)

One thing I do feel stupid for, I was in a sim that wanted me to find a connected LANs subnet from the router it was connected to, I spent like 2 mins in user mode before I realized I had to get into priv mode to use the right show commands (major brain fart)

I also found it helpful on a lot of questions to just eliminate the wrong answers. The test was good about not being ambiguous like some of the practice tests I've taken. Cisco isn't trying to trick you. So study hard, and don't stress, there's always the free come back offer if you fail.

jscimeca715

Congrats on the pass and for some really awesome feedback. I'm currently taking the two exam route like yourself and this will go a long way to help us fine tune our study plans. How did you study for SDM if I may ask? I have Packet Tracer and Boson for CLI but I can't find anything short of buying the routers, which I'm willing to do, that will give me practice with this. Thanks for the details and good luck with ICND2.

nel

Congrats man, great score. Did you have much experiance in networking?

Onto icnd2 now i take it?

Slowhand

Congratulations on the pass, take some to time to celebrate. And good luck on the next exam on your hit-list.

elegua

Hi,

Congratulations, nice score.

flurrball

The only experience I had previous to studying for this was setting up my home network and some basic knowledge of networking from programming.

And I didn't really study for SDM beyond watching CBTNuggets a couple times to remember the setup, and what the SDM could do with NAT and DHCP. From what I could tell, if you can do something from the command line, you should be able to figure it out from SDM. I think there was an SDM you could download even without the hardware on cisco's site, I found it somewhere in these forums, if I find it again I will post it.

marco71

congratulations !!

mikej412

Congratulations!

jscimeca715 wrote:

How did you study for SDM if I may ask?

If you don't have a router that supports SDM (link to supported routers is in the CCNA Forum FAQ), Cisco does have an SDM Demo (the link is in the CCNA Forum FAQ) -- not as good as the real thing, but it's better than nothing (when used with the Cisco Documentation).

Link to CCNA Forum FAQ

leefdaddy

Congrats!

kevin31

Congratulations!

Sounds like you havent done much apart from eat sleep drink cisco? lol

How much time a day were you putting in?

Great feedback I will try follow that myself!

peanutnoggin

Congrats on your pass!

~Peanut Head