My CCNP Journey

Danielh22185

Weekly Update:

I finished reading through chapter 6. This book goes quick! So at this time I am slowing my reading untill I catch up with some note taking. I always read my books first and highlight important topics along the way and then go back and manually take notes on those highlighted sections after. Right now I am caught up with taking notes through chapter 3 and have 2 chapters left to get notes caught up with.

This weeks goals:
* Complete taking notes on read chapters through chapter 6.
* Pick up reading again and read through chapter 10.
* Catch up on some CBT videos as well.

At this rate I think I can have the book completed within a week or 2. Then its on to the lab grind!

Danielh22185

Update:

Reading progress has tapered a bit. I have had a lot of stuff come up personally. Lots to do getting ready for my kiddo who should be here mid May. I am still holding my guns to studying though. Right now I am beginning chapter 8, and finally some STP stuff which I'm sure the level of difficulty will now start to increase. I am also trying to pair each chapter or 2 with CBT nuggets as well. I am 5-6 videos deep into those.

This week's goals:

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* For now I will set a goal by end-of-day Sunday to have read through chapter 10, notes taken, and videos caught up with. This will cover all the STP topics and the remainder of the book looks to be topics on design, aggregation methods, and redundancy.

I believe STP is probably my weakest area as I am heavily experienced with HSRP, etc from work.

The main goal for now is to have this book read within 2-3 weeks, have notes taken over the entire book, and all CBT videos completed. This way I can start my labs around the time of the birth of my child and don't have to be so heavily focused on reading as I am sure it will be hard to do with limited sleep.

ccnpninja

darkerz wrote: »

I've met guys who are CCNP 1,2,3 and can't tell me the IP Route & Forwarding process detail by detail.

Don't be that guy! .

well said

Danielh22185

WOW! I haven't made an update in quite some time. Life has been busier than ever!

I am a first time new Father as of May 15th. So studying has tapered a bit in between. Hats off to folks with kids that find time to study.

However, I have not completely stopped. I have been reading in the OCG book the entire time and have that reading completed. My overall review of the book is good. It covers the information well and is a good flowing read. I also recently attended a Global Knowledge Class for Switch paid for by my company. This was a great class! I don't feel so terribly unprepared having not been extremely rigorous with my studies.

Plans going forward:

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* Get my lab equipment setup. (Still lacking a few switches)
* Run through practicing scenarios in the student lab manual.
* Review purchased flash card content
* Continue to review my notes and reading.

Right now I am considering getting another book but not sure I want to do that yet. I will have a voucher for the Switch exam so I am itchy to sit for the test. I heard from my global knowledge class Switch is harder. I don't know completely how much I want to believe that. I can defiantly see where Spanning Tree will be a large area Cisco may want to grill me on.

Since it took me quite some time to go through the OCG book I may just speed read through it for extra review and take some additional notes too.

tomtom1

It seems we'll be going for the SWITCH together to buddy! If you want to do some practice questions sometimes, let me know. Couldn't hurt I guess!

Danielh22185

tomtom1 wrote: »

It seems we'll be going for the SWITCH together to buddy! If you want to do some practice questions sometimes, let me know. Couldn't hurt I guess!

Sure! I am all for that!

Danielh22185

Studying has been going along pretty well this week. I have been doing primarily a lot of video watching and note taking. The extra spending budget is tight so I am waiting to finish off my lab here soon. I want a good opportunity to lab some more to further engrain the topics before I set an exam date.

This week's goals:

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* Continue to watch videos and listen to pod casts
* Begin a speed read through the OCG book again as a rehash / find additional areas to take notes and map out labbing scenarios
* Plan lab (needing to purchase an additional 3550 and two L2 switches).

At this rate I believe I can set an exam date here soon. I am shooting for some time around August.

Danielh22185

This week has been pretty good as far as study goes. Mostly this past week consisted of nothing but re-reviewing the OCG book, taking notes on the areas I have highlighted, and marking places to do some labbing. I have also been doing Cram Cards at work in some downtime and have been taking notes on those as well. Car rides to and from work consist of nothing but pod casts and CBT nugget listening and I have been able to dedicate about an hr each night when I get home to note taking / reading, etc.

I feel pretty strong in all areas but still don't want to attempt the exam or even set a date until I get some hard lab hours under me, which I have not been able to do much at all yet. The only lab hours I got were about 20ish during my Global Knowledge class which was good, but not enough.

Focus for this week:
* Complete notes over the remaining content in the OCG book
* Complete marking scenarios in the book to lab from
* Review notes (never ending here, I will continue to keep doing this)
* Organize lab equipment to be ready for purchase.
* Continue with doing practice questions and cram cards between all other efforts / work downtime, etc.

Danielh22185

A pretty successful week of study.

I did not fully accomplish my goals from last week as the weekend was filled with a lot of stuff going on with family, however made good strides in a study effort overall. TomTom (here on the forum) and I have been studying via private message with challenge questions. This has been a good resource for me and I hope for him as well

I am beginning to feel more comfortable with the exam content and once I get my lab completed and have a solid chance to put in some lab time I feel I can set a date for the test. I have a soft date in mind for somewhere near late August / early September but we shall see. It's been a challenge finding time to study with an 8 week old baby. Just last night I tried to crack open my book to do some note taking however didn't have a chance till midnight and I was struggling to keep my eyes open.



Focus for this week:

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* Complete notes over the remaining content in the OCG book (about 80% there)
* Complete marking scenarios in the book to lab from (next on the list after notes are completed, haven't been able to make much progress on this yet)
* Review notes (never ending here, I will continue to keep doing this)
* Organize lab equipment to be ready for purchase. (Just sold a car part from my previous Mustang GT that I owned so I have some spare cash now)
* Continue with doing practice questions and cram cards between all other efforts / work downtime, etc.

Danielh22185

Another good week of study.

This week was pretty demanding at work. I found myself stuck on a high level / outage calls every single stickin day for long periods of the day, so I was feeling pretty drained each day after work! I have also been working on getting myself ready to transition to a new role as a Level 2 Network Operations Engineer within my company so I have been a tad bit distracted with work. One good thing with that will be my shift will change to a rotating 4 on 3 off / 3 on 4 off schedule again, which should free up a ton more study time!

My weekend was filled with stuff to do with family so I wasn't able to focus much on anything extra either.

However, I was also able to make more progress with my notes for each chapter from the OCG book as well. I still have a bit to go...


Focus for this week:

---

* Complete notes over the remaining content in the OCG book (about 90% there)
*Complete marking scenarios in the book to lab from (next on the list after notes are completed, haven't been able to make much progress on this yet)
* Review notes (never ending here, I will continue to keep doing this)
* Organize lab equipment to be ready for purchase. (sill haven't been able to touch on this at all yet. I haven't had the extra cash yet. I am also considering playing around with doing switching stuff in GNS3 Alpha)

Once I am able to make some good lab progress I will feel comfortable with setting an exam date. Untill then the date will be pending. I may also have access to an exam voucher soon as well, (provided by work) so I want to wait to see if that will be available for me to use.

Danielh22185

Getting closer!

I have completed making my notes over the entire OCG book. I may type them up simply for clarity and also as a refresher to myself.

I have also purchased all my lab equipment. As much as I want to fool around with GNS3 Alpha I need to get cracking on doing labs as soon as possible. I think after or maybe as soon as I have made progress on my labbing efforts I may take a second look into this.

For this week as I am waiting for lab equipment / setup of my lab I am going to focus on doing some additional review of the book / my notes.

Focus for this week:

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* Review the book for lab scenarios and accuracy of my notes
* Build my lab (hopefully I will have all parts in sometime before this weekend)
* Begin labbbing (arrival of parts / lab setup depending...)
* Begin typing hand written notes up for clarity purposes / extra review (lots to cover here I think I have close to 30 pages of hand written notes in a composition notebook)

Danielh22185

Added Pressure!

As some threads are floating around today the deadline for the current CCNP exams will shut off Jan 29th...

This can be good motivation for me to finish but I had plans to finish everything well before the year ends. However this idea of a closing deadline will offer some additional motivation. I am very thankful I got Route out of the way already.

Danielh22185

Not much of an update from the previous week. Just continuing to review my notes and practice on any test question I can. Basically my day consists of work 7a-7p Mon-Thursday, get in about 30 mins of study during my lunches, do some test question on and off during slow periods in my day, and do some studying when I have a chance at like 10pm – 12a midnight once the little one is down sleeping.
I have been focusing on going through the book and answering the questions in the chapter quizzes (I don't like to do this first thing) and marking what chapters / areas I can take additional notes on / focus on as a possible weak point.

I got all of my switches in so I also spent several hours making cross over cables etc. The lab still is not functional for labbing though as I don't have any means to manage the switches yet. Need my console cables to ship in (hopefully today).

This week’s goals:

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* Finish review the test questions from the book and mark additional areas for notes / etc / focus on my weak areas. I came across this: eBook Deal of the Week | Cisco Press -- I plan on possibly buying that for some additional review questions
* Finish my lab, 95% there. Once I have it up and running the main at home study focus will be labbing.
* I am going to set the soft date of Sep 30th. This gives me a solid amount of time to lab and re-review. I also have a few things going on in this month that will distract me from studies (starting a new position at work, family coming in town for a week, and Wedding Anniversary)
* I am considering taking the notes I have and re-writing them into a neater format. I also bought some neat fountain pens to make the whole note taking process an easier and more pleasurable process.

tomtom1

I know you know your stuff. Let me know if you want a go at the Boson material for switch!

Danielh22185

tomtom1 wrote: »

I know you know your stuff. Let me know if you want a go at the Boson material for switch!

Thanks Tom, I will let you kow. I am not going to lie the number of attempts Route took me might have damaged my spirits a bit and made me very careful before I jump into another exam. I also feel like I need to just take it too to establish a baseline. Once I can get some labbing in I will feel a lot more comfortable.

Danielh22185

Being sick truly sucks when trying to get studying done. I have been feeling a bit under the weather since Monday. Trying to do studying after work at night is near impossible when feeling this way and also trying to take care of an infant. Hopefully I can shake this soon and jump back in there. I have new things I am excited to try.

Danielh22185

The Lab should be up and running tonight! All I need to do is get some more cross over cables made and I should be set. Feeling a bit better today so I am ready to rock out some labbing.

Danielh22185

Got the lab up and running. It took me a bit of time to do password recoveries, cabling, etc. I wanted to make my own cables to re-train myself. I've done a lot of cabling in the past but it’s been years so it took a few attempts to get it down right again. In the mean time I have been hard at work re-reviewing my notes I've taken / doing chapter assessments. I am nearly complete with that; sitting on Chapter 15 right now. Should have it all completed this weekend.

Something I also came across as I have an enterprise license to CBT nuggets provided by work… the new “V5 CCIE” videos as well as the “R&S Troubleshooting Mastery” videos. I am supplementing watching these videos, specifically the switch stuff for now as well and taking notes since I have already completed the NP Switch nuggets.

This is going to sound super nerdy but a colleague of mine introduced me to a few places to purchase nice fountain pens. I normally am a vigorous hand written note taker when it comes to studying for certifications. I feel the hand written process really solidifies what I have read in the books and helps me retain information. So I made a couple purchases and WOW! What a difference! This actually makes the note taking process actually enjoyable! I can definitely write cleaner and faster than ever before. The only down side is I run through ink quickly however since I opted for a nice pen I can refill with no problem. I also like to use composition notebooks as I grab them by the handful when at the grocery store for note taking items. So, the ink bleeds a bit through the paper. I normally utilize front to back pages for my note taking when using a ball point pen but cannot as easily with a fountain pen. This is okay though as the notebooks are cheap. So I will simply just adapt to using one side of the paper. A benifit to this is this gives me buffer room to draw out extra stuff / add additional items relevant to the topics on the other side of the page if needed. I am really enjoying this part of my studies.

As I thought about my new note taking method I thought about something to even further solidify my hand written notes process would be to make as many visual representations as I can. So in my effort to re-write my notes I am going to make a big effort to also draw out things to give a pictorial representation of the topic. I think this will help a lot with retention too. It’s always good to visually see how something works.

I am also happy to report I started a new position internally at my work. I am now starting a second level Network Operations role. This is going to be ENORMUS for my network knowledge / career growth. This is a big leap regarding This will expose me to more networking technologies such as Riverbeds, Load Balancers, more Juniper, and additional DNS / DHCP implementation items. I am really excited with this position because I will have to call on what I have learned through self-study which should constantly be improving my skillset.

I still feel pretty on target for the soft date I have set of Sept 30th for the test. This puts 6 weeks+ infront of me to prepare.

Goals for this week:
=====================
* Finish re-reviewing notes / chapter assessments
* Begin writing a neat finalized copy of my notes to use as constant reference (my notes right now are a huge mess and really scrambled)
* Begin labbing (like crazy!)

*** Extra study possibilities: Begin INE video content. This will also be supplemental to my study since I have it. However I am still in a toss-up with the idea since going through this video content will be time consuming. ***

Danielh22185

So far so good! I've finished the reviewing of my notes and doing chapter assessments to gauge my weaknesses. I definitely have a baseline on where to re-focus a bit more study effort.

I'm deep into writing a clean version of my notes. I have really enjoyed this part of my study as I feel like it's really building the memorization skills needed to master these topics. I also have been trying to draw pictorials along with the major topics like I originally planned. I am enjoying this as well as it gives me something to look at visually as I read my notes. I've been able to get about 20% of this done and hope to get most of or all of it done by about this time next week.

Time allocation is my enemy right now. Having a 3 month old at home makes it hard to set aside additional time for study, however with my new work schedule officially in session now I should be able to get some of that back and get more lab time in. Most of my previous study efforts have been in off hours like during lunch at work, at night before I go to bed. However the lab portion I don't feel is as crucial as it was with mastering route concepts.

I haven't delved into the INE video stuff yet but still plan on doing some of these, I think if I can get my hand written notes finalized and out of the way quickly I can work on watching these videos.


Goals for the week:
===============
* Get 80% of my final notes written or fully completed.
* Get in at least 20hrs of labbing
* Find time to introduce INE videos for additional review

Danielh22185

Well so much for getting things done....

My wife and I made a small trip last weekend to San Antonio to celebrate our anniversy so not much was done at all over the weekend as planned for studying. Also, my 3 month old has been feeling a bit under the weather so its been a battle at home keeping her comfortable then trying to focus on doing some studying. I also am busy with reparing 2 friends' computers so needless to say not much of anything has been done.

However now my little baby is feeling better and things feel a bit more normalized as far as the time I can put back into my studies. Essentially I will be trying to complete last week's goals this week.

The test date approaches! I feel ready but need the final review / extra labbing. If all goes well and I can focus pretty steadfastly from this point forward up to the 30th I should be able to take the exam.


Goals for the week:
===============
* Get 80% of my final notes written or fully completed.
* Get in at least 20hrs of labbing

*** Extra study possibilities: Begin INE video content. This will also be supplemental to my study since I have it. However I am still in a toss-up with the idea since going through this video content will be time consuming. ***

Armsareus

First post, long time lurker. I've found that with videos instead of listening to the radio, I will play them in the car during my commute. Pick one video a day and listen to it both ways on the commute, then lab the concept at study time when I get home. Worked very well for me.

Danielh22185

Armsareus wrote: »

First post, long time lurker. I've found that with videos instead of listening to the radio, I will play them in the car during my commute. Pick one video a day and listen to it both ways on the commute, then lab the concept at study time when I get home. Worked very well for me.

That's essentially what I have done with a lot of my video related study. I think it is best to be fully engaged in the videos though (i.e. taking notes as you follow along, etc). I use my commute video listening as a reinforment of the content I already watched / studied.

Danielh22185

WOW! It's been a bit since I made an update. My apologies for that. I haven't made much progress with keeping up with my updates due to being super busy at work. I have been taking a lot of my free time to study work network documentation fork to get spun up as much as I can in my new position on stuff we support like F5/Netscaler loadbalancer, Riverbeds, Juniper, and Arista stuff. Lots to cover. However, I have not left my switch studies completely astray either. I have been keeping up with reviewing my notes and doing an occasional lab. Funds have been kind of tight too to set a date firmly but I have a bunch of overtime coming up to help pay for that. SO... hopefully in 2 weeks I think I will have a very solid idea of where I am at and when I can take test.

Danielh22185

Well studies have been REALLY hard to find time for recently but I am still keeping up with them as much as I can. We have a very limited staff at work right now so I've been averaging 55-70hr work weeks on top of having a 5 month old at home I've been exhausted day-to-day. The reason I have not set a date to take the test right yet is because I have not had a couple successive weeks to sit down and hit the studies hard. However I have also been keeping things fresh.

Where I am at:
* Notes re-write is complete, I am reviewing them every open chance I can get.
* Physical lab is up and running and I have hammered through the Cisco SLM once already / playing with other scenarios.
* Re-watching / listening to CBT nuggets

Plan of action for the test:
* After this week I believe things will settle down a bit at work and I will have time again to focus heavily on studies. So this should give me the interim soft date of Nov 14th.


Work fun from yesterday that relates to my switch studies!

At work yesterday I had the chance to play with HSRP in some pretty good detail which also doubled as a review for me on this topic. I had to manually failover some of our branch sites due to an outage via one of our carriers as these branch sites were still receiving default routes from the carrier. HSRP essentially had nothing it could track as affecting it so I had to do some manual configurations for vlans at these sites to prefer the redundant HSRP router not having a carrier issue to restore connectivity for these sites.

It was refreshing to be able to draw on my Switch studies to know how to restore this connectivity issue. Also it was fun to be able to perform something like this in a live sense which is directly related to the material I am studying via NP switch.

bharvey92

Keep going man and get that exam date booked in, I am booking my Switch exam in for December 2nd so then I have a target (and I cannot put it off). I'm sure you will pass first time, sounds like you have been doing some intense labbing - coupled with your last post (working with Switching tech day to day) will be a bonus and big help to.

busines4u

What podcasts do you listen to on your way to work?

Danielh22185

busines4u wrote: »

What podcasts do you listen to on your way to work?

I've listened to "Cisco hands on training" -- Caster's name is Darrell ... can't remember his last name. Do a search for Cisco in itunes and you can find it easily.

I've also put on CBT nuggets as well via blue tooth.

Danielh22185

Finally work has calmed down a bit so I have been able to get some study time back. This past week was a bit difficult though because I felt my wife and I were running around catching up on a lot but I was also able to get in a solid 4 strait hours on Wednesday. This allowed me to get about 2/3 of the Cisco Switch SLM manual done. I also purchased the Kindle editions of CCNP Switch Simplified and 101 labs for CCNP. I plan on using those other 2 books for supplemental lab practice.

I plan to be ready before Thanksgiving as study time will be hard to find with the approaching holidays.

My new soft exam date has been set for the 21st!

This weeks goals:
==============
* Continue reviewing notes from reading content
* Finish Cisco SLM manual
* Complete a good chunch of simplified lab manual

bharvey92

Good luck for your exam bro. Look forward to hearing your outcome!

Danielh22185

Well I want to take my exam and I am ready for it. The only thing holding me back at the moment is money. With the holidays approaching and already having been through one fronting the extra $250 will be really difficult for me right now, espically with the extra costs of just having had a baby 6 months ago. However, this will not completly stop me. I am trying to pressure my work into helping me pay for it. I would hate to have put the cost of the test on a credit card but if I have to I will. I just can't stand the fact of if I do have to resort to putting it on a credit card and not passing and that basically being a wasted $250 charge

I should hear back from work soon, and also may be able to pick up some OT at work to front the cost.

Hopefully soon I will have a hard date. I will get this before the test is retired!