Today I took the ICND2 exam and passed with an 888, while I guess that's not the best score in the world I'm so stoked that I've knocked this one over, there was a lot of content to study and this morning before the exam I was freaking out a bit due to the amount of things covered.
Materials I used was Odom's 3rd edition ICND2 book and Boson practice exams, I think these are worth it because they definitely show your weak areas and that lets you focus on studying what you don't know so well. I also have Lammle's CCNA book but I only read bits and pieces of that, the Odom book is pretty boring but very in depth which is good if you want to pass
For labbing I used GNS3 exclusively and messed around on a couple of 2950's I have here. I don't see any point in buying a bunch of equipment GNS3 is perfect for studying for CCNA IMO and it costs you nothing! Even more so if you work with Cisco stuff at work, there's no point getting physical gear because it's more than likely you've touched and racked it all up before.
All I can say is study pretty hard for this one! It's harder than I expected but having said that I read the book in about 2.5 weeks and did about another 2 weeks study, labbing and finally the practice exams!
This forum has been a great resource for me, the subnetting guide helped me SO much, I got 100% in the IP addressing portion of the exam, it's really not that hard once you know it and practice practice practice! You'll really need it for the exam.
Now on to my VCP5 and then next year some time I'll hopefully have the motivation to go for CCNP.
Best of luck to anyone going for this in the future, it's a great feeling to pass
