Getting ready soon

Greetings,

I am down to just three classes at WGU and will finish 1 very soon, leaving just tech writing + capstone. The CCNP is logically next since I work as a Network Engineer, but don't really get to dive into the crazy depths yet. I used to think the CCNP was impossible to get to before I took the CCNA, so it's cool to be at this point.

Now, I was really planning on just reading the official book and taking notes, but I recall there being no actual labs in there. For example, I recall reading about DMVPNs. It would probably be good to have an actual lab to follow, but is it necessary or could I just go ahead and do it on my own? Curious to see what other people did.

I took awhile to do the CCNA since I wanted to learn it, so there's no rush to get this done. Obviously, the sooner I get it done the better, but there's no timeline like I said. I want to be genuinely great and it's been mentioned before here, but you do not get paid the big bucks because of a cert, you only get the opportunity. You still need to ace the interview, and be good at it. So, I just would like to see what has worked for other people in recent times. I used CBT nuggets for the CCNA, but unsure if I will again.

Does anyone actually read this T-Shoot book either? Or do people just go take it after doing the route and switch exams? Equipment is also no issue as I have anything and everything available to me at work, which is fantastic.

As for the CCNP Security, is that really necessary? Now, at my job we handle the firewalls - there is no separate team. I do not do much with them yet though. My boss claims the R&S is important, but did not stress the security exam. At the point of completing the R&S, I would either do the Security or go back to WGU for an MBA. There's value in both really, I'd love to have both. But maybe someone with a Sr. Network Engineer job can go into detail on their opinion.

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The exam is scheduled for 3/31. I hope to finish review this week, then just cram whatever is necessary early next week via my notecards. I'll continue to lab-lab-lab as I review.

Passed with a 904/1000. Not sure why BGP was 2 large chapters in the book. Spent a ton of time on them, can't say it was worth it for the test though. OSPF + EIGRP + BGP make up over half the book but definitely not half the test. Typical Cisco.

Thoughts - Exam was not terribly hard. Questionable choice of question topics and wording, like most Cisco exams. I do not think this exam is a fair indication of someone's actual engineering ability. Once I pass the three tests, the paper is what is valuable, but the value was in the hard studying and labbing.

hurricane1091 wrote: »

Passed with a 904/1000. Not sure why BGP was 2 large chapters in the book. Spent a ton of time on them, can't say it was worth it for the test though. OSPF + EIGRP + BGP make up over half the book but definitely not half the test. Typical Cisco.

Thoughts - Exam was not terribly hard. Questionable choice of question topics and wording, like most Cisco exams. I do not think this exam is a fair indication of someone's actual engineering ability. Once I pass the three tests, the paper is what is valuable, but the value was in the hard studying and labbing.

Congrats! You may have mentioned it, but have you already done SWITCH?

I have heard lots of similar comments regarding the topics.

Thank you. I have not done switch yet. The book is much shorter, so I'm hoping it doesn't take me that long. This took 4 months. I did a lot of labbing. I have a vacation in May and I need to go to VA for work next month, so there's going to be interruptions in studying. I'm not really in a rush, but I'd like to have switch and T-shoot done before the end of summer. I want to get the CCDA and CCDP afterwords and then maybe finally take a breather, but I doubt it. I don't know what else to do but study for things. It's always paid off so it's always been worth it. I got into IT 3 years ago and got into network engineering a year ago, so I'm just trying to learn and do as much as possible to get to Sr. Engineer and a pay bump. I'm reasonably fortunate in the type of job I have I think. I'm only 24 and still new but do all kinds of stuff most probably do not get to do this soon. I re-designed the DMVPN environment as has been noted (adding Zone Based Firewalls, VRFs, cert authentication and making it a true dynamic environment because it is not right now). Actually working with the Windows guys tomorrow to get a Windows CA spun up, throwing this lab on the network, and making it work with the windows CA. Once that is done, I'll come up with an official strategy and probably get this implementation started soon. It's not a pressing thing though and only really gets worked on in spare time. I have a new office to open up and have to configure that gear next week and finish the diagrams. The voice team is trying to implement remote expert too and there's a lot of network stuff that has to go into it from my side. Will finally get to work with load balancers. I had to pass ROUTE today, I'm going to be really busy for the next week or two.

SWITCH can be tough, it really depends on how much Switching experience you have. I do a ton of Switch stuff day to day so I was able to pass it studying it only leisurely over the course of a couple months.

I don't do alot of switching. But, I need to set up RPVST for that new office I mentioned, so that will be something. Familiar with HSRP since we're doing that as well. I just don't really do the stuff on a daily basis but with me doing this new office it's kind of good timing.

Getting ready to start SWITCH. Any suggestions for a lab? I have 3650s and 3560s available to me. I'll probably use the 3560s due to smaller form factor. I have 3 stacked up and ready to go, should I add more (or use 3650s instead) and do I want a router added?

hurricane1091 wrote: »

Getting ready to start SWITCH. Any suggestions for a lab? I have 3650s and 3560s available to me. I'll probably use the 3560s due to smaller form factor. I have 3 stacked up and ready to go, should I add more (or use 3650s instead) and do I want a router added?

3 switches is enough but 4 is better. No need for a router.

shortstop20 wrote: »

3 switches is enough but 4 is better. No need for a router.

Thanks for your help! I am going to set it up today hopefully, erase whatever config is on them and load up the same 15.x IOS across the board. Hopefully start studying soon.

I spent last night watching videos on basic VoIP concepts since I'm tired of being completely clueless on how it works. Have a decent understanding now finally. Also watched a video on Riverbed Steelheads and talked to my boss about it. Logged in and saw some configuration on it. Trying to extend my range of knowledge a bit.

These things are plugged in and ready to go. Cleared the config and set up some basic config to begin. They are running 12.x, which should be fine. I don't think I need to take the time to put 15.x code on them.

So it begins, studying for the SWITCH exam. My goal is by the middle of July, but we'll see about that. I have a week of vacation + work trips mixed in, but hopefully that doesn't slow me down too much.

Finished Chapter 1 today, so I guess you can say it's fully begun. Fun times.

I want to say that we definitely have a modular hierarchical design, especially from HQ to our DC. But in one part it's not a collapsed core, but the access layer is also the distribution layer and connects to the core. What is that called???

Finished chapter 3. Haven't really learned/done a lot yet but that will change I am sure.

Okay, well I was away for work and then vacation. Back to the spanning tree chapters.

#draggingthisoutforever

Ugh, been ill this week. I HAVE to get back on this. I passed the Route, then got started on switch - went away for work, went on vacation, and got sick lol. It's been like 3 weeks since I studied. But, there's some good news. We got a 2 post rack for the IT lab and I've racked and cabled my CCNP lab and DMVPN lab. It looks official too. So next week - no excuse. I feel pretty good today so I should be able to kill it next week.

Started chapter 6 from the beginning and finished it. I have my lab racked now as well. Here is a picture of it. http://i.imgur.com/7HVPzX3.jpg It's a bit messy on the wiring, those blue cables are so stiff. Below is that DMVPN lab too which I should finally be getting back to. Unreal how long things take. Been waiting on the server guys to get a service account to get a CA set up.

Terminal server was the best thing I've ever set up. Makes it so much easier to lab.

Did some good stuff at work yesterday. Got some routers/switches into monitoring that were never added from the DR site. Involved doing some BGP work and then some re-distribution into an interior routing protocol. Some ACL/route map configuration. Some firewall work and a no-nat (most firewall stuff I've ever done) and some other work. Took awhile but I put a lot of CCNP route level stuff to work.

On to chapter 7.

Done chapter 7 but have some questions really. Going to need to revisit a bit tomorrow before moving on.

Banged out chapter 8. Need to bang out chapter 9 and hopefully 10 this week before the long weekend.

Not in love with this material. Very boring. Our core is all Layer 3 and even when layer 2 is present is numbers, it's all switch stacks. There's no real STP to be had...

Before starting Chapter 9 I decided to go back and review my notes and lab a little more and make some note cards. Really made sense of TCAM and SDM, even though we've never messed with the default template at my place of work. Did some stuff like mess with forcing err-disable conditions and doing the auto recovery commands which was cool. The note cards for some of the STP stuff will be helpful.

I feel alot better and am ready for chapter 9. I still have a ways to go, I can't wait to get thru the material and pass the exam and then T-shoot and take some sort of break lol.

Working thru Chapter 9. Might not finish it before the weekend. Took tomorrow off and going to the beach, so no studying this weekend and don't care either

On chapter 12 now. It's going OK, did some good labbing with SVIs and CEF was covered again in chapter 11, but was pretty familiar with it already. I know a good amount of the material already.

More exciting - learned how to calculate the bandwidth used by a phone call depending on codec and sample size used. Important because of some new voice complete stuff getting thrown into the mixer and we'll have much more phone calls coming into the data center. Not a voice guy but nice to get a little knowledge there.

Working on chapter 13 now. Starting to power through this thing. Back to the DMVPN lab at work and FINALLY have it working with a Windows CA, but the server engineer needs to do a little bit for me (CRL is not working for example) and I need to come up with a plan and all that to roll this out + the re-designed DMVPN environment to 110 sites. This project just always takes a back burner but I like working on it. Good resume builder.

The new ASAs came in, but I am waiting on the new F5 load balancers which I am supposedly doing. Never have done that stuff before, should be good experience.

Chapter 13 was easy. I actually set my lab up to use NTP yesterday because of the certificate stuff in my lab. Syslog stuff is nothing new either.

On to 14.

On Chapter 19. Have notecards made up to chapter 15. Might finish this week. Have been labbing all along but will really hammer re-labbing next week and maybe take test on June 30?

Way more comfortable now, but I know A LOT of the material from work. IP SLA, HSRP, etc are nothing new to me at all.

So I have finished the book and nearly done my index cards. I've landed everything on the way but I need to go back and re lab it all and hammer it home. Some of the AAA stuff was confusing and I still need some clarity on stp stuff, but I've booked the exam for next Wednesday. Fun fact, we had a port go errdisabled due to bpdu guard the other day. I think the guy looped an unmanaged switch. I tested it in the lab and it helped me clear up some spanning tree stuff. I didn't realize access ports were all designated ports. It makes sense why plugging 2 cables from a Cisco switch to an unmanaged switch would cause bpdu guard to go off.

Great progress, keep it up.

Thanks buddy. I'm nervous. I'm just going to hit the labbing hard the next 4 days to really beat in some topics. I do a lot more with routing than anything else.

As for the DMVPN thing I always mention, I typed up the official documentation this week. Meeting up with server guys next week to get off the CA in development and build one for production. This thing should actually start to be rolled out soon, maybe lol.

Passed the SWITCH today. Cisco has buggy labs - enough said. And some poor wording. Fortunately, all 3 labs I was somewhat familiar with because of recent real-work situations which alone was probably worth a ton.

On to T-shoot.

hurricane1091 wrote: »

Passed the SWITCH today. Cisco has buggy labs - enough said. And some poor wording. Fortunately, all 3 labs I was somewhat familiar with because of recent real-work situations which alone was probably worth a ton.

On to T-shoot.

Congrats!!!!! you ROCKED IT LIKE A HURRICANE!!!!

ITSpectre wrote: »

Congrats!!!!! you ROCKED IT LIKE A HURRICANE!!!!

Haha thanks mate. One more to go.

I have 4 switches + 2 routers in my lab currently, but I need to get 2 more in there it appears. I found something on Cisco's site regarding the TSHOOT topology, so I want to build that. I'm going to go thru my route notes and re-lab everything. I'm hoping this is not more than a few weeks.

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