Today i welcome warren sullivan as a guest of insearchofthecert... i posted his stp enhancements a few days ago which was really well received... he has a site of his own now called http://www.mycertstudies.com/ which you'll want to pay close attention to as it progresses... i asked him if he might take some time and talk about his certfication journey, ups and downs, etc...
thanks for chatting warren...
Thanks for having me arteq....
give us a description of how you began, the road to ccna and then ccnp, study methods and materials, equipment, the whole smash...
No problems Arteq, first of all let me say that my website is in its infancy, there really is nothing of importance to see there yet, but check back in a few months time, there should be some worth while stuff in there by then….i hope! Ha Ha
Where I started is a funny one, it all started back in 2007 when i was on a work related training course and i tried to get a PC to talk to a router, sounds like a simple task doesn’t it…. obvously its clear to me now what the problem was, but at the time....it baffled me, and fascinated me all at the same time. The router already had an interface IP address of 192.168.1.254/25 and i had assigned the PC an IP of 192.168.1.1/25.....same network i thought....why isn’t his PC pinging! Thats what started it all, one of my more geeky course mates told me that they were on different subnets! WHAT! Different subnet?
So i decided to enhance my knowledge with some research into subnetting, and i learnt the basics and realized where i had gone wrong....it fascinated me to the point that all i could think of was subnets and how the mask defined them. I let it be and sort of forgot about networking for a while due to work commitments.
About a year later, my workplace enrolled me on an ICND1 course with a cisco learning partner here in Australia, i thoroughly enjoyed the 5 days, so much so that i decided to self study to fill in any holes in my knowledge and sit the exam, i joined the cisco learning network and started asking questions, i used the course material that i obtained on my ICND1 course, built a small lab of 4 2600 series routers and 5 2950 switches and passed the test with flying colors. My first Certification!
I fell in love with the exam, so well constructed, so well written, i knew i had found my new career path....networking
From there i jumped straight on ebay and purchased some new equipment, a 2511-RJ console server, a 3550 layer 3 switch and a few more 2600's, got some WIC-2t's and a bunch of serial cables from china....i was set, i purchased Wendall Odom's ICND2 Cert guide and Todd Lamlie's CCNA fast pass and i studied hard, reading every chance i had, labbing, reading and more labbing, cisco learing network for questions....i had all i needed, i sat the exam 3 months after my ICND1 and i was a certified network associate!
From here i had some big decisions to make, should i go for a specialization? should i go for the CCNP? i looked at wireless and security, and whilst i love the idea of getting in there and getting dirty with the technologies, i really felt i needed to learn more about core routing and switching, so i started studying for my CCNP.
My plan was an exam every 3 months, that would have me certified CCNP by christmas 2011, that was the plan anyway....
Starting with the ROUTE exam as that was what i was most comfortable with, switching was ok but i didnt have the funds for the required switches anyway at the time. I started by reading the ROUTE Certification guide, cover to cover, no labs, no notes, just reading, its a very in depth book that delves so much deeper into the technologies than CCNA did, i loved it!
Then i went back to chapter one and started reading again, took notes in an A4 book, lots of them and labbed everything i came across, and i mean everything, at the end of every chapter i did a consolidation lab with everything from that chapter in it, and only when i could talk confidently about a technology would i move on to the next one, and that went on for the rest of the book, i sat and passed my ROUTE exam around April 2011 from memory, it was a fantastic exam, really really enjoyed it, hard, detailed and edge of your seat type stuff from start to finish.
Then onto SWITCH, i had ordered the OCG and FLG 2 months prior from the states, they took 3 months to get here! never again amazon! anyway i managed to get together some temp funds for the purchase of 2 x 3560's and 2 more 3550's, my plan was once i passed the exam i would sell them and reclaim the expense.
I followed the exact same routine as for ROUTE, but i focused on the FLG as i had heard that the OCG was lacking somewhat, and i was brand new to switching. I was enthralled with SWITCH, amazing stuff, stuff i never knew existed, it was incredible, i had a small bump in my path to certification, my little baby boy matthew was born on the 8th of May, what an amazing time in my life, i gave myself 3 weeks off and got back into it....having taken that time off i found i had lost some of the knowledge i had learned, as you do when you learn things for the first time, so i started again, finally sitting and passing Switch in November 2011, WOW, what an exam, very tough and very well written once again, cisco has a knack of writing exams that will only be passed by people who know this stuff inside and out.
Passing SWITCH in Nov created a problem with my "certified by christmas" plan, so i booked my TSHOOT exam for December 23, i figured that i was all over the technologies, i just needed to hone my troubleshooting skills, so i watched nuggets and to be honest, it wasn’t a great help, Jeremy has done some amazing work in other series, but the TSHOOT series just didn’t gel with me, so i employed the help of the Cisco learning network, i built my lab buy mimicking the TSHOOT topology with GNS3 and real switches, i bought a truck capable NIC for my PC and i had the lab humming well, a mirror image of the actual testing environment, i uploaded my topology to CLN and ask people to break it for me, and they did!, i would go through and fix it and PM the problems and fixes to the people who broke it, i did this about 20 times and i had a great feel for the environment.
One great piece of advice i received was to treat the environment like your own network, get to know it, inside and out, for example, you should know what would come up on a sh ip route on any router without even hitting the CLI...and i did, a trick i learnt was to simply draw the topology on a piece of paper, all IP addressing, HSRP configurations, VLANS, allowed VLANS....the lot, all on a piece of paper, without looking at any reference material, id then check it against the actual topology and screw it up.....and do it again, and again.....by the time i got in that exam seat, i knew that topology backwards.......i passed
with 100%
I was a CCNP! YAY!
what's next on your agenda?
Present day - I have made my mind up after weeks of thinking, do i go for CCIE? Specializations? or Service Provider certs?
My dream job would be a network engineer at a commercial ISP....so Service Provider Certs it is, starting with CCIP then maybe CCNP SP Operations, then some specializations in wireless, voice and security, then eventually onto CCIE, the Mecca!
