FILFAN Posted March 16, 2012 Posted March 16, 2012 Gust going off topic but have just started to do my Cisco ccna and wondered if anyone out there has any knowledge that might help me along the way. Quote
Blatman Posted March 17, 2012 Posted March 17, 2012 What do you need to know? I have some experience in this area... If you want to do some class room based training, I can wholeheartedly reccommend www.commsupport.co.uk Quote
FILFAN Posted March 17, 2012 Author Posted March 17, 2012 I'm doing the Cisco academy through work. Starting to enjoy it now but it's alot of work Quote
ACW Posted March 17, 2012 Posted March 17, 2012 I may be able to provide some assistance. What do you need to know. Quote
Blatman Posted March 17, 2012 Posted March 17, 2012 Cisco Academy takes too long assuming it's the day release / night classes thing I've heard of. If you can dedicate a few hours a weekend to your studies you'll get a CCNA before the end of the summer. And I strongly reccommend once you have the CCNA you keep going for a CCNP. If you leave it too long you'll forget too much. And buy some lab kit. It's essential. Packet Tracer and GNS3 are OK but having some kit is pretty much a must have. I used 2 x 2950's and 3 x 2610's to get through my CCNA. Quote
FILFAN Posted March 19, 2012 Author Posted March 19, 2012 Cisco Academy takes too long assuming it's the day release / night classes thing I've heard of. If you can dedicate a few hours a weekend to your studies you'll get a CCNA before the end of the summer. And I strongly reccommend once you have the CCNA you keep going for a CCNP. If you leave it too long you'll forget too much. And buy some lab kit. It's essential. Packet Tracer and GNS3 are OK but having some kit is pretty much a must have. I used 2 x 2950's and 3 x 2610's to get through my CCNA. Oh I wont have time to forgrt anything as we are expected to do it in around 3 months of self study and 4 classes. Bit of a tall order really but gonna give it a go. would like to do the CCNP too if I dont struggle too much with this. what i could really do with is revision notes/guides and a miracle Quote
rocket_rabbit Posted March 21, 2012 Posted March 21, 2012 I have my CCNA and CCDA CBT Nuggets are excellent and along with the official study guide, you'll be fine. However, some pointers... Know your subnetting!! I am quite lucky in that I am mathematically minded and did loads of binary in my degree, so I can subnet in my head very quickly. You get 90 minutes to do the exam and my subnetting meant I passed within 30 minutes and my mate failed having ran out of time. Show commands (sh ip int brief FTMFW ). Know them because they are vitally important. Not just for the exam, but for the real world! The Cisco way. It's a Cisco exam so know the Cisco way. I'm not saying Cisco is bad, but they will want you to know about EIGRP and CDP and anything else Cisco proprietary. The truth is that in the real world, you'd turn CDP off and be running OSPF as your interior routing protocol. As Blatman says, your own kit will be useful, but you will be able to get by with packet tracer/GNS3 without issue. Kit isn't that expensive though and I can agree with the 2900 switch/2600 router combo that Blat suggested. However, whatever you get, make sure it is IOS and not CatOS. CatOS shouldn't be about much, but ebay is ebay and it is out there! As for CCNP, i'd suggest you get a few associate exams under your belt first - mainly because of Cisco's exam structuring, (a 642 Professional exam will renew a 640 associate cert, but not the other way around and you need associate certs in specialisations before getting professional certs) and also because you might find an area other than Routing&Switching (R&S) you prefer. I'd also recommend leaving 642 certs until you are in an appropriate position whereby they become useful (Network Engineer/Administrator), otherwise you'll forget it pretty quickly. When you are 3 days away from your exam, I will give you some more tips to make sure you pass However, any other questions, let all of us know! Quote
Blatman Posted March 21, 2012 Posted March 21, 2012 The truth is that in the real world, you'd turn CDP off and be running OSPF as your interior routing protocol. CDP is off if you don't need phones or anything else PoE CDP should be off at network edge though. I use it to check for layer 2 when I'm fault finding... I try to spec all Cisco kit so I use EIGRP whenever possible. OSPF for the CCNA is easy as it's only single area. I agree about knowing as many show commands as you can as well as knowing the lab scenarios. CBT nuggets are great too especially if it's Jeremy Cioara. Subnetting... a big YES. You absolutely must KNOW it inside and out. You may well also get a summarisation question on the exam so know that too. You may get some IPv6 and Frame-Relay too so don't skip over those subjects. And even for an IT subject, Frame-Relay has a boat load of acronyms. I disagree about doing associate exams before doing the CCNP. There are very few jobs out there currently looking for things like CCNA Voice or CCNA Security, but there are plenty looking for CCNP Routing and Switching I'm almost done with my CCNP studies and once that's out the way (gotta get my head down more than I have been of late though ), I'll be doing CCNA Voice ('cos I need the basic knowledge) but I doubt I'll go for CCNP voice 'cos right now 'cos Voice is not really a priority for me. That may change though... Quote
rocket_rabbit Posted March 21, 2012 Posted March 21, 2012 CDP is off if you don't need phones or anything else PoE CDP should be off at network edge though. I use it to check for layer 2 when I'm fault finding... I try to spec all Cisco kit so I use EIGRP whenever possible. Well, you won't find CDP on my network and it has plenty of PoE Perhaps if you were consulting and coming in to an unknown network, CDP would help you map it faster. And as for speccing Cisco kit, times are a changing. The chinese are moving and the Huawei stuff is very good. Not only that, it's less than half the price of Cisco. OSPF wins because no longer is it just a case of routers and switches and unless you want to use Cisco everything (Which in itself is a security issue), EIGRP is good, but not the best. Besides, the only thing it has on OSPF is a faster convergence time. I dunno about you, but I haven't noticed a lot of times when your internal routing needs to reconverge and the speed difference is perhaps a few seconds, even over a large network. Yes, there are jobs for CCNP R&S, but then the majority of jobs I see want you to be able to know of voice, know of pix/ASA/Checkpoint, know about architecture methodologies etc etc. The Associate exams give you a good taster of what is about and make you a more rounded network individual. By all means, if you love R&S, then who am I to argue, but i'd get to grips with a few technology sets to appeal to a wider scope. Quote
Blatman Posted March 22, 2012 Posted March 22, 2012 OSPF wins because no longer is it just a case of routers and switches and unless you want to use Cisco everything (Which in itself is a security issue How so? Is it just strength in depth with multi vendor devices or am I missing a vulnerability that's inherent to Cisco devices? I do love R&S and I'm not saying don't do the associate stuff, but CCNP R&S makes a candidate immediately more marketable when compared to associate exams, although the CCDA has always seemed to me to be more valuable than any of the other associate exams. I'll stick with EIGRP for my LAN's. As for CDP, I leave it on. If someone can get in and be in a position to sniff the CDP messages, I've got a lot more problems than worrying that I left CDP on! It's off on the external edge devices of course, in accordance with Cisco's stance on CDP: Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a network protocol that is used in order to discover other CDP enabled devices for neighbor adjacency and network topology. CDP can be used by Network Management Systems (NMS) or during troubleshooting. CDP must be disabled on all interfaces that are connected to untrusted networks. This is accomplished with the no cdp enable interface command. Alternatively, CDP can be disabled globally with the no cdp run global configuration command. Note that CDP can be used by a malicious user for reconnaissance and network mapping But every day is a school day so fire away... Quote
rocket_rabbit Posted March 22, 2012 Posted March 22, 2012 How so? Is it just strength in depth with multi vendor devices or am I missing a vulnerability that's inherent to Cisco devices?<br /> I do love R&S and I'm not saying don't do the associate stuff, but CCNP R&S makes a candidate immediately more marketable when compared to associate exams, although the CCDA has always seemed to me to be more valuable than any of the other associate exams. I'll stick with EIGRP for my LAN's. As for CDP, I leave it on. If someone can get in and be in a position to sniff the CDP messages, I've got a lot more problems than worrying that I left CDP on! It's off on the external edge devices of course. But every day is a school day so fire away...<br /> I just don't like tying myself down to a proprietary protocol. In this industry, things change too fast and Cisco don't necessarily make the best devices. I know you can redistribute, but it just seems pointless when OSPF is so good and everyone supports it. And we all don't know what the next vulnerability will be (whether it is already here or in a future release). However I like to see differing opinions and I take your (and Webmaster's)opinions with high regard (I hope that didn't sound sarcastic because it was very much genuine ) And as I work in Financial services, we need to be PCI compliant (although the company I currently work for are only Tier 2. I have worked for Tier 1's in the past). When certain banks come over they like to see it off!! The CCDA was a b4stard to be honest and, at the risk of hypocrisy, i'd have rather done the CCNP first before doing it! I'm trying to motivate myself to do voice next. Quote
Blatman Posted March 22, 2012 Posted March 22, 2012 Fair point about future vulnerabilities, but there is surely as much of a chance of a vulnerability being found and exploited in an open standard protocol as there is a proprietary protocol. And yes over a large LAN / private WAN where there are non Cisco devices, OSPF is the only choice (RIPv2 anyone? ) and it affords good control of traffic with the use of Stub/Totally Stub/NSSA areas and virtual links avoiding the use of Area 0. I agree that Cisco don't always make it easy. I've just done a CCNA voice course (crowbarred it in with my CCNP Route stuff ) and there is a perfect demonstration of Cisco making life hard when most sane folks think it should be easy. Look at CoS to DSCP mappings on a switch. It's a PITA if you don't know about it, and when you do, you wonder why Cisco haven't fixed it. No doubt the Webmaster will be here in a moment to tell us what the hell it's all about! It ends up being one global config command to fix but as far as I can tell, unless you "fix" it, yer VOIP traffic may not be correctly prioritised. Just make sure that CoS value 5 is mapped to DSCP 46 and all should be OK, at least for us at the associate level. Cue The Webmaster, CCIE Voice... Quote
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