The beginning

First of all, welcome to my new blog. I’m not going to be sharing this among friends or colleagues, as I’m just using it to splurge my thoughts, as I go through this process. However, if you happen to stumble upon it, welcome.

I passed my CCENT nearly two weeks ago. It was a great feeling to pass that exam, but as it’s really only part 1 of the real certification goal (to at least get me some interviews), the feeling didn’t last long.

I was really nervous leading up to the exam, as it’s been about 15 years since I last took a proper test. I won’t say it was easy, because I’d studied pretty hard for it, but I finished it in 25 minutes. There was a moment as I was getting towards the end, that I though,”crap, have I majorly messed up here? I can’t be finished already?”, but it was all good, I got a score of 933/1000, which I feel is a pretty solid score considering I don’t work in IT.

In preparation for the test I read the Todd Lammle CCNA book and watched a number of different video series’.

All I’ll say is, choose as many different sources of information as possible. Everyone has a different learning style. I found the less detailed videos better in the beginning, just to give me the overall concept, but once I was feeling comfortable, I needed a little more substance and found the more in depth material essential to filling in the gaps.

Once, I’d been over these, it was a matter of labbing for the last couple of weeks before my exam. The main lab I ran, was this:

I think its a lab from the ICND2 part of one of the video courses. It’s meant as a refresher, before you get into the ICND2 stuff, but it’s an excellent review lab to make sure you’ve got the concepts and configs down.

It’s got most of the ICND1 topics included. Trunks, Vlans, VLSM, OSPF, NAT, DHCP, ACL’s etc.

Anywho, so yeah, I passed and now I’m working on the ICND2 material. I found STP a bit of a bore/chore, but now I’m going through multi area OSPF and the routing protocol I hadn’t touched yet, EIGRP.

There doesn’t seem to be a massive amount of content within the ICND2, but it seems much deeper.

Wish me luck!

Wayne

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