CCNP Bootcamp – 1st Day of class (Part 3)

Posted on March 19, 2012 by ronald.nutter

When class got started today, we never stopped. It didnt take long to see how much was in store for us when you walked in and saw the stack of books for each student in the class. The instructor started off y introducing himself and giving us an idea of his background. He next laid out the timeline for when we would be covering each particular topic and when we would be taking each each of the three exams.

We started off with EIGRP and then got into the guts of OSPF. There were some of the concepts in OSPF such as LSA and Area types that I kept getting confused on. We didnt move onto the next topic until everyone understood things thoroughly. I had planned on doing this update via audio tonight but I am looking at about 6 hours of reading to get ready for what we will be covering tomorrow. Will take things on a day to day basis and will try to do audio updates when possible.

You will be taking a lot of notes, both in the Cisco Education books as well as a notepad. When the instructor said that something was an important concept or we discussed something in more than passing detail, I highlighted the page number at a minimum and usually the items that were of interest.

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CCNP Bootcamp – The day before class (Part 2)

Posted on March 18, 2012 by ronald.nutter

By the time you read this, I will probably in the first day of class. I flew to the city where the bootcamp is being held. Since my last post, I have made a few preparations that might be worth thinking about when you go to a bootcamp.

1) Bring some of your own office supplies. While I will be using my laptop and Evernote to keep things organized for each day of class, sometimes you will find that things jog your memory when you see it in your own writing. I stopped by a local office supply store and picked up a couple of highlighters and some gel pens to write my notes with. I picked up a several notebooks, one for each of the 3 classes that make up the CCNP Route/Switch certification.

2) I brought my Cradlepoint CTR-35 travel router with me. Since my hotel room only has a wired internet connection, using the CTR-35 allows me to get both my MacBook Pro and the other devices I have with me on the single connection as needed without having to jump through some hoops to get there. As a backup, I have both of my USB Broadband devices with me so that if I need off network internet access, I have my choice of CDMA and GSM carriers.

3) Since I will be working on my laptop for most of the class and sometimes need a break from looking the screen, I stopped by a local electronics store that I had looked up in advance and found a real bargain on an inkjet printer – $20 brand new in the box. Found the necessary USB cable, got a spare inkjet cartridge and a ream of paper so that I should be able to print out anything that I might need while in class. Will find a new home for the printer when I fly back home since I don’t want to fool with shipping the printer back.

4) Although not a technical item, it is important to eat healthy and wise while you are in class. It is too easy to eat out all the time while in class and take time away from much needed studying. Since the hotel I am staying at only had a mini-fridge, I stopped by a local Walmart and acquired a cheap cooler ($25) and got an assortment of the frozen vegetables that you can steam in the microwave along with some tea, milk and some diet soda. That way at the end of the day, I can come directly to hotel room and spent the maximum time studying to be able to pass the exam with the best score and learning the most from class.

Starting tomorrow, I will be shifting over to an audio podcast format to get the information as quickly as possible. For those of you who are reading this via Google+ or Tumblr, you will probably need to come directly to www.ronnnutter.com and listen to the podcast from there since I dont know how well the process I use to post the mp3 file will work when the information is uploaded to my main site and cross posted to either of the services mentioned.

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Ronnutter.com now available on Flipboard !

Posted on March 17, 2012 by ronald.nutter

FlipboardIf you are already a user of the iPad/iPhone app called Flipboard, you can now keep track of the posts I put on the site by tapping on the Red Ribbon in the upper right hand corner of the screen and entering www.ronnutter.com. You should see two options come up for this site – one from Tumbler and one for RSS. Either should work. Once you have selected which way you want to view the site, another screen will appear where you will see ronnutter.com followed by a + sign. Tap on the + sign to add the site to your Flipboard page.

Each time I put up new content on the site, you will be able to see it based on the RSS feeds that I have in place. You also have the option of entering your email address to get an email of the new post as well.

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CCNP – Study Aids for CCNP TSHOOT Exam (Part 2)

Posted on March 16, 2012 by ronald.nutter

Now that I am starting to review the material for the CCNP TSHOOT exam, I had to put together a similar set of study aids for this exam. Here is what I have put together for this exam in addition to the previous post about the Boson product offerings –

CCNP GuideCCNP Tshoot 642-832 Exam Guide from www.ccnpguide.com. With the good overview of information that the Router and Switch versions of this guide had, adding this one to the mix was the right thing to do. With using the same tools from the same companies, I am already used to the writing styles of the respective authors and have one less adjustment to make. I have had no problems in reading this in GoodReader on my iPad. Depending on the budget you are on for taking the exams, you can buy each study guide as you need it or hopefully, Aaron will have a bundle available for all three exams on his website soon.

Lab ManualAs with the other CCNP exams, having a good source of labs to work through so that I can absorb as much of the information as possible has been a challenge. This book, originally intended for the Cisco Networking Academy program, gradually builds one concept on another. By the point you should have a good handle on things, you are given a couple of “challenge” labs to walk through given very basic info to walk through, the basic router configs to start with and information as to what you should see on the routers when you are finished. With the TSHOOT exam probably being the most challenging of the three, every bit of preparedness will only help your chances in passing the exam.

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CCNP – Study Aids for ROUTE, SWITCH and TSHOOT exams

Posted on March 15, 2012 by ronald.nutter

Yesterday’s post covered the example/demo of what you can expect to see on the TSHOOT exam. With already haven taken one pass as the ROUTE exam and being caught off guard, I wanted to make sure I had the tools available to do everything reasonably expected to be able to pass the exam. I wasn’t concerned as much about the questions I would expect to get but the number of simulations that I had on my exam was far higher than I expected.

I had been looking for several weeks for study tools that would address what I will refer to as the new generation of simulations that appear to be the norm in the latest round of CCNP Exams. I found a mixed bag of the usual suspects but after checking into a few of them, I was surprised to find questions for technologies that Cisco has pulled from the latest question pool information that I found on their website. While I was doing the research where I found the topology diagrams on Cisco’s website, I saw a mention about Boson’s study aids.

My next step was to go to Boson’s website. With my writing for Network World for the past 16 years, I had been to several Interop’s and Cisco Networker’s (I know they call it Cisco Live! but us old timers still call it by the previous name, it seems to make a little more sense than the newer name). After doing researching the different options available and looking at the Demo video, the next step was to get a copy of the products I would need to study for the exam. Due to the level of sophistication of the product for the TSHOOT exam, you wont be able to download a demo version of the product. The video on Boson’s website pretty well speaks for itself and make me feel a lot more comfortable with going ahead with the purchase of the product. I was a little surprised to find the ExSim-Max products because the last time I was aware of their products they only had the Network Simulator product.

My concern was that since I am using a MacBook Pro was the ability to run the different Boson products. Since they are written for the Windows platform, I hoped they would run under VirtualBox or similar virtualization product. After doing a bit of checking, I was told that this shouldn’t be an issue. While not officially supported, you have a problem with running Boson’s products in a virtual situation. I ran into a few problems as I started bringing up VirtualBox to run the Boson products. Let me say to start that none of the problems I ran into were a problem with the Boson products. It apparently had been a while since I last used VirtualBox, so I was way behind on versions. After several attempts to update and getting failure messages, I uninstalled VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro, rebooted and then proceeded to install the latest VirtualBox. What I had to do to get past the problems I was running into was to run the uninstall script that came with the latest version of VirtualBox which gave me a message that said a reboot was necessary to complete the uninstall process. I was happy to see that all of the previously installed Guest OS’s were still present on the system.

I never could get XP to be stable. It kept dropping it’s network connection and wouldn’t ping anything. I started to go with Vista but thought better of that and went ahead and bit the bullet and brought things up on Windows 7. I added the ExSim-Max one by one without any problem. I will be using this as a part of my studying when class starts this coming Monday. Be sure to watch for my daily updates from BootCamp to see what you can expect when going to a BootCamp type class situation.

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CCNP – Study Aid for TSHOOT exam

Posted on March 14, 2012 by ronald.nutter

As a part of my preparation for going to a CCNP Bootcamp, I have been looking for anything that will help me apply what I will be learning at class so that I can increase my chances of passing the exams while I am in class. Having taken certification exams for over 20 years, it has been interesting to watch how the exams have changed over the years. Everything I have read about the TSHOOT is that it is probably the most challenging exam that Cisco has produced to date in the Professional exam track.

In doing some of my research today, I found this link on Cisco Education website – https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/docs/DOC-6738. I spent some time going through the Exam demo. It was a very humbling experience. My initial reaction was that it was the same question repeated 3 times just to show what the exam had the potential to be like. Was I ever wrong. While yes the question remained the same, the conditions that you were using to answer the questions were transparently changing on the back end. I would go through all of the links on this page and go over everything several times. It would be a very good idea to download and print out the TSHOOT exam topology. From everything that I have read, it would be a good use of your study time to become very familiar with the three different exam topologies.

I have looked over the comments on the page. There are several that give you a good idea on how to budget your time. On this exam, probably more than the ROUTE or SWITCH exams, time management will become even more important. I got a taste of this process when I made my first attempt on the ROUTE exam. So magnify that several times with what you can probably expect to find on the TSHOOT exam since I understand it is entirely a scenario based exam where you are working with “trouble tickets” and not just answering a series of questions. I will have another post in the next day or so with some of the other study aids I have found specifically for the TSHOOT exam.

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Network Toolkit – Console programs

Posted on March 13, 2012 by ronald.nutter

When I first started working with Cisco products, my default terminal program was HyperTerm. Unfortunately with the recent versions of Windows, that ship has pretty much sailed of that being an option anymore. While I have seen various hacks and howto’s to get it to work on later versions of Windows, I need something that is stable and reliable. Here are several options that I use depending on the environment that I find myself in -

Putty is usually the one that I can use it almost any situation. When I need something quick and dirty, I can usually get Putty to answer the call. One thing that made me start using this several years ago when HyperTerm was still an option was Putty’s ability to use COM port numbers above 4 where I sometime ran into problems with HyperTerm working reliably above Com Port 4. If you haven’t given Putty a try, at least give it a look so that if you need to use it, you will have an idea of what to expect. Here is the URL to download it from – http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

One of the things that had me start using a terminal program other than Putty was the ability to have multiple sessions open to different hosts. I recently came across something called Putty Connection Manager. This does a very good job at giving you the “tabbed” approach to having multiple sessions open. You get the multi tab interface for Putty like you would see in ZOG or SecureCRT. The main page where I first found this wasnt available anymore but I did find it here – http://www.mediafire.com/?c0lslcio9d548qn. If you cant find it, let me know and I will see about posting on this site. I have run into one issue with the Putty Connection Manager when I allow the program to go “idle” for several minutes. It will still appear to be running but you cant get into any of the sessions you have open. The only way I have been able to recover is to go into Task Manager on Windows and kill the processes for Connection Manager and the various Putty processes.

Another one I use especially when I need to xmodem a Cisco binary into a switch or router is TeraTerm. Where I have found the most recent copy is here – http://www.ayera.com/teraterm/. This is an update to the original project so that it will work on the newer flavors of windows like Windows 7. Havent been able to try it on Windows 8 yet.

We have covered the freebies up to now. If you have a little money to spend, You can use ZOC or SecureCRT on the Mac. When I got my macbook pro, Secure CRT wasnt available for the Mac (it is now), so I found ZOC. For Windows, SecureCRT is the one I have used the most. Between these two apps, you will see a bit of one upmanship between them. Once ZOC comes out with a particular feature, you can be reasonably assured that SecureCRT will probably have that in the next release. While writing this post, I also noticed that ZOC has a version available for Windows as well. One thing I like about using a terminal app that is on Windows and Mac is that you can use the same app on both platforms and should be able to expect nearly if not identical functionality and features.

One thing I have been able to do with SecureCRT (havent tried this with ZOC) is to be able to install a copy of SecureCRT on a Flash Drive so that all you have to do is plug in a flash drive and you should be up and running in SecureCRT in less than a minute. There is a specific directory structure that you will need to copy to/from the Flash Drive so that you can have the same lists of hosts/systems available in SecureCRT regardless of where you use it. Here is the link from VanDyke’s website on how to do just that – http://www.vandyke.com/support/tips/usbdrive.html.

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Evernote – Using Evernote as an electronic notebook for lessons learned

Posted on March 12, 2012 by ronald.nutter

This post builds upon the previous one about using Evernote for Project Management and adds a few steps. I am sure that we all have geared up for a project that either got cancelled for funding or some other reason or was put on hold for another reason that you may not have been told about.

When you do get the green light for a project, you may be going into it full throttle. This is when I take what I have put together during the research/preparation phase and leverage it for implementation. If during the course of implementation, I have to make a change in the implementation scripts or plans, I keep notes about that in what started out as an Active Projects folder and use it as a record of lessons learned as a record of implementation. Depending on what type or level of Change Management Control procedures that you may be dealing with, having as much detail in your notes as to what deviations or changes that may be made to the initial plans, you will have good records as to what you did and why so that if you are asked why, you will be able to immediately call up your reasons instead of having to go through pages and pages of Post It notes or pieces of paper. The time spent on doing this will be well worth the effort.

Something else that has also served me well is that as I make changes and do the testing that is prudent at each step is to record any error messages or diagnostic logs. With that, as I need to engage the appropriate vendors support group, I already have things such as the current configuration changes that may have led up to the error message already in hand. Also, if I have to make any configuration changes in response to an error that I received in earlier steps, I have that documented for working with Support or in filing supporting documentation for submitting a bug report to the vendor(s) in question. It also helps in building a lessons learned when a particular feature is implemented in one version of firmware but due to changes or deprecation of a particular component, that I have the information as to why thing were configured differently and why.

In the process of working with Support, there may be an exchange of emails relating to the problem I am working that are worth documenting as a part of this specific project. With Evernote, you can have everything in one place instead of having several different places and not have to worry about remembering what you have and where (if you happen to remember all of the places you may need to look). Especially when you are working with leading edge (or should I say bleeding edge) technology, having documentation that shows you had guidance from a vendor to pursue a particular direction can be really helpful when you have problems or need to explain to management as to why you had to go in a different direction that first anticipated.

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CCNP – Study Aids for CCNP Switch Exam

Posted on March 11, 2012 by ronald.nutter

Now that I am starting to review the material for the CCNP Switch exam, I had to put together a similar set of study aids for this exam. Here is what I have put together for this exam -

CCNP GuideCCNP Switch 642-813 Exam Guide from www.ccnpguide.com. With the good overview of information that the Router version of this guide had, adding this one to the mix was the right thing to do. With using the same tools from the same companies, I am already used to the writing styles of the respective authors and have one less adjustment to make. I have had no problems in reading this in GoodReader on my iPad. Depending on the budget you are on for taking the exams, you can buy each study guide as you need it or hopefully, Aaron will have a bundle available for all three exams on his website soon.

As with the other CCNP Lab Manualexams, having a good source of labs to work through so that I can absorb as much of the information as possible has been a challenge. This book, originally intended for the Cisco Networking Academy program, gradually builds one concept on another. By the point you should have a good handle on things, you are given a couple of “challenge” labs to walk through given very basic info to walk through, the basic router configs to start with and information as to what you should see on the routers when you are finished.

 

 

By nowCommand Guide you have figured out that when I find something that is good and works for me, that I stick with it. This reference is no different You can get this in either paperback or pdf form. For PDF form, you will need to buy it through the Safari Online website if you want a pdf or you can also get it as an eBook for the Kinda app or reader depending on which you have.

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Getting ready to go to a CCNP Bootcamp

Posted on March 10, 2012 by ronald.nutter

Going to a Bootcamp is not a decision to be made quickly or lightly. The cost of the class is just one thing to consider. The other is the amount of time and resources it will take is another decision. Your employer may not be willing or able to pay some or all of the costs. Just from mentioning a few things, you can see you need to think about this decision very carefully.

Another thing that you need to evaluate is where you stand professionally in terms of your career and experience. If you recently obtained your CCNA, I would look at getting some experience in the trenches. There was a time where you could move directly from one test to another. With what I experienced on a Cisco CCNP level exam that I took recently, the exams definitely seem to be leaning towards not just having read a book but having some practical experience to match what you have been reading in the books. There are some that would say that you should go from certification to another. I would respectfully disagree with them. Something else to look at if you decide to go with a Cisco Training Partner is what type of instructors they have on staff – are they just instructors or do they have recent practical field experience so that you are getting more than just what is already in the course books ?

Having been through a Bootcamp experience on another Cisco certification I have, it was the best decision that I could have made. It took over 3 weeks worth of material, removed the duplication of content that you would normally expect to run into with a common series of exams because what is the likelyhood that you will be able to take one class immediately after another ? Once you have made the decision to go, you need to start doing some preparation to get ready for a deep immersion into the content you will need to get a good handle on before you start the first day in class. It may seem like I am harping o things a bit but I have seen the situation before where someone has registered for a class and didn’t have the prerequisite experience to get the most out of the class. Just as importantly is that when one participant of the class doesn’t have a basic understanding of what is being covered, the instructor is put in a no win situation – slow down the pace of the entire class so he can the the least knowledgeable person up to speed or deal with the majority of the class and end up with a very frustrated student because they are getting cut adrift in a see of information that they probably haven’t dealt with before.

In my case, I am using the time required to renew my existing Cisco certifications and pick up an additional one in the process. I have spend the past two months studying the materials and after taking the CCNP Route exam for the first time, I could tell I wasn’t getting the exposure to the content in the manner I needed to. I had a decision to make, continue the studying for another month before taking the exam again not knowing if I was getting the coverage of the material needed so that I could pass the exam. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t just want to understand the material I need for this point in my career but also want to pass the exam(s) so that I can get the increased knowledge I want to obtain.

I have already posted one segment on some of the study materials that I have been using so far. Those same materials are also available for the other 2 exams in the CCNP Route Switch exam series. Having spent several weeks going over the Route exam topics, I will switch over to review the material for the Switch and Tshoot exams. I have made the arrangements to go to a Bootcamp for CCNP Route Switch. I have obtained permission from the company where I will be going to do a daily podcast to give you blow by blow on what you can expect when going to this type of class. During the 12 days that the classes will be going on, I will switch over to an audio podcast format that will appear on this website everyday reviewing what we have done in class, what we are doing in terms of daily homework and the other studying that I am doing at night to supplement what was done in class each day.

As class starts, I will let you know what Cisco training partner that I have gone with. At the end of the two weeks, I am planning on switch back to the written format that you have been seeing so far and do a review of what I experienced over the past two weeks. Be looking for this series to start on Monday, March 19th.

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