642-902 - done!

Daniel333

Just wanted to share my experiences with Route.

Hardest IT cert I have ever taken.

I wonder if I had beta questions so many questions just felt “unfair”. But a pass is a pass, so after work I’ll pop a beer open for that!

So I passed with a low 800. I don’t have my sheet in front of me. But really. I honestly thought I had failed and started trying to commit what I saw to memory, planning for my retake. I found myself using process of elimination more than I would have liked.

Make sure you brush up on IGRP (no E!), RIP and RIPNG. So I can only really say anything you do in EIGRP ensure you can do in RIP/RIPNG. The Cisco TAC podcast has everything you need to know there though.

Route reflectors. I had only heard the term a few times. I think I got dinged here bad.

The sims were fair. If you have done the lab guide book you can do these sims. Just make sure you did the challenge labs and there will be no surprises. Some commands I rely on were unavailable. So make sure you know other ways of verifying things.

Esoteric level questions… this is frustrating. I ran into a number of situations where you were expected to know EXTREME trivia. I mean, seriously. Things mentioned ONCE in my Foundations learning guide and NOT AT ALL in the Certification guide! I felt like a few of these questions were in their just to lower your grade.

I wish I could cite some examples. But I have to tell you, it’s questions like these that have me on the verge of quitting IT certifications all together. I am sure the official excuse is “you should have learned that through your experience” my counter is “you should have put that in your text books!”

I suppose I would also remind people to memorize all the silly RFC numbers for things. Since it’s against the NDR to tell you which ones to remember and which ones not to… best of luck with that.

Materials Used-
Community College Class for CCNP
Foundations learning for 640-901
Certification Guide for 640-901
CBTNuggets for 640-901
Network Warrior
A few dozen articles linked from this forum
A handful of routing projects for work
Foundations learning for 902
Certificaiton guide for 902
Cbtnuggets for 902
Video Mentor for 902
Lab book for 901
Route Review book (forget it’s name, the one that comes with the Video mentors)
Generated over 3000+ flashcards
CBTNuggets CCIE Training videos (routing sections only)
GNS3

I would say it took me about a two years, but it was off and on. So probably could have done it much faster if I was more committed to the cert.

chmorin

You got IGRP? Last I heard that was supposed to be taken out of the new exam. It is not even in the exam topics. Strange.


Oh, Right...

CONGRATS ON THE PASS!!!! =D