BCMSN Scheduled - June 1st

redwarrior

My study plan got thrown off a week by a pretty nasty illness, but I'm back on track and have my BCMSN scheduled for June 1st. I'm feeling pretty good about the material, scoring well on practice exams, and hoping that by the end of next week I'll be working on my last exam for my CCNP, the big BSCI. It's taken me a year to get this far, but then it's been a pretty eventful year with a new job, moving a datacenter, and just life. I'm really excited to be nearing the home stretch, though.

My plan for the last week before my exam...review, review, review. I always have problems remembering tiny details like hold counters and such, so I'll be hitting those hard along with a lab every couple of days just to keep things fresh and some more practice exams to boost my confidence. Hopefully that poor exam won't know what hit it!

networker050184

Good luck!

tomset

Good luck man!

skrpune

Good luck red - go kill that thing!!

mikej412

Good Luck!

btowntech

Good luck! Passed this exam last month, not to bad of an exam.

kryolla

Good Luck

josunin75

Good Luck!

I'll be doing mine on June 8. ^^;;
Whole lot of review to do.
Hope I can pass.

SysAdmin4066

Good luck, looks like you're going to beat me

jamesp1983

that's a fun exam. def my favorite. good luck!

redwarrior

I passed with a bit of breathing room to spare! There was one sim which completely threw me off in the beginning, but I was able to regroup, regather my confidence, and I did pretty well. The funny part is, the areas I use every day, configuring vlans and inter-vlan routing were my weakest (77% on each of those), whereas some of the areas I have no real-world experience in I did great on. (VoIP - 100%) I guess I tend to overthink some of the questions on topics I deal with a lot. In any case, I'm going to do a little review of the areas I felt weak on and then move on to my final CCNP exam, BSCI. (Woo-hoo...routing at last!)

For study, I used the following resources:
Cisco Press Study Guide for BCMSN - I found this to be more than complete and a tough read, but good stuff.
Cisco Press Lab Portfolio - This was more than worth buying...the labs in here were great.
TrainSignal Videos and CBT Nuggets
Switches and Bridges by Caslow - I did read a bit of this, but by the time I cracked it open, I was mostly through the study guide and just could stomach much of it.

My Hardware Lab for this:
2 x 3560's
2 x 2950's

I found I could do pretty much everything I needed to do on these except GLBP and the wireless. Trainsignal was particularly helpful at filling in those gaps.

I'm planning on beginning my BSCI studies with Routing TCP/IP vol. 1 by Doyle and Caroll, then doing vol. 2 before diving into the actual study guide. I also plan on buying the lab portfolio for this one as well. Not sure on the hardware lab yet or if I will do dynamips. I do have a 6509 and some random routers I can use at work to build a lab, but I think most of them are 2500's. Already I'm thinking that multicast will be tough for me...it's always been tough for me to wrap my head around!

networker050184

Congrats!

nel

COngrats man!

mikej412

redwarrior wrote: »

I passed

Congratulations!!

miller811

Congrats on your backward progress.... Good luck on the BSCI

btowntech

Congrats!