Debug is your friend!

To everyone who is pursuing the CCNA and it's subsidiaries:

If you have a real lab to practice on, learn how to use the debug command.. i know it sounds silly to make a post about this, but hear me out.

I would say a huge chunk of people are visual learners, and such even more so that work with networking (after all, diagrams are amazing, and say more than words ever could). With the debug command, you actually see what is happening at a visual level as well (not with pretty pictures, but accurate descriptions of what is going on). When i was doing my CCNA, i never really utilized the debug command much, but now I have expanded my horizons, the debug command for me is an invaluable asset. It allows me to see WHAT is happening and 95% of the time, tell me (in almost plain English) WHY something is broken.

Think of the traceroute command (or tracert in windows) - it shows you what your tracing, where it's trying to go, and the route it has to take to get there.. exact same type of scenario.

Anyway.. that was a bit of a rant, but it took me a while to realize how great the debug command is, and I wanted to stress it for all the CCNA hopefuls.

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Comments

Paul Boz

Great thread. Debug commands carried me through the CCNP BSCI. You have to see whats going on to understand it.

dredlord

Is it my opinion or is the CCNA more focused on the show commands, yes I haven't touched ICND2 but most of ICND1 at least was show commands. Are there any nice debug command labs as most of what I have are show command labs. I admit that im a bit worried on the debugs as compared to my show command knowledge im week in them ( other then debug ip rip)

Paul Boz

The CCNA is indeed more concerned with show commands. The only difference between show commands and debug commands is that one is static and one is dynamic.

Plazma

there are many debug commands, check the IOS docs for the complete list. The beauty of the debug is it is dynamic and usually tells you what is wrong or mismatched (per say) then just taking a shot in the dark and doing various show commands and fixing it..

ITdude

Paul Boz wrote:

Great thread. Debug commands carried me through the CCNP BSCI. You have to see whats going on to understand it.

I second that motion!