No Cisco Live For Me…This Year At Least…(Sigh)

It’s time to register for Cisco Live, the Cisco flavor of all the other great conferences out there, chock full of training, demos, certifications, and fun! Unfortunately, not only can I not afford to let go of a few thousand dollars to go this year, but one of my husband’s friends is getting married that weekend, meaning that we need to travel out of state that week. For those not quite as unlucky as I am, please take advantage of this opportunity and go ahead and register at www.cisco-live.com/2008/itip I’m certain you won’t regret it.

CCNA Study Methods – Hardware or Sims?

We get this question a lot on Proprofs and I pondered it quite a bit as well when I began studying for my CCNA.  For a Cisco newbie, trying to decide how to set up a decent study lab without going broke is a daunting task.  In my opinion, the answer to whether or not to spring for hardware depends a lot on why you are studying for the exam to begin with, your intentions after passing the exam, and also your financial situation.

If you are a system administrator, for example, and your main reason for wanting a CCNA is so that you can communicate better with your network team or grasp basic networking concepts and you really don’t plan on pursuing future Cisco certifications, then I would probably say you should opt for a good netsim, like the Boson netsim.  This would give you plenty of labs without investing in equipment and should be sufficient to pass the CCNA.  I bought mine online from a discount book seller for about $89, far cheaper than the cost of setting up a hardware lab.  If you intend on going further in Cisco, then things get a little murkier and I think more depends on your finances.  If you plan on working in networking long term and you can manage the cost, I’d say spring for the equipment.  Nothing beats the hands-on experience you get troubleshooting your own hardware to set up a lab.  Hardware never works quite as “neatly” as a Sim, so you will get to experience first hand some of the issues a person in the field might encounter and you’ll become more familiar with cabling and managing the devices.  You can find decent used hardware on ebay and build a lab for a few hundred dollars.

That’s great, but what if you are trying to break into networking, but you aren’t making a CCIE’s salary?  Then I suggest the route I took, which was a combination of hardware and a sturdy Sim.  You can get some good experience with the hardware by either borrowing or renting equipment for a short period of time.  There are many companies that will rent you a lab of real equipment you can access remotely for a period of time.  Some are even free.  You can also take a week-long class that uses hardware and pair that experience with longer hours spent with a Sim.  For me, this combination approach gave me some familiarity with the hardware as well as a sim that I didn’t have to troubleshoot and came loaded with dozens of labs to work through.

Either route you take, I’ve found that from most candidates I’ve spoken to, it’s the time you spend actually working in the IOS doing labs that really makes the difference between passing the exam(s) and failing.  (That plus being able to subnet in your head, of course!)  You just really have to feel comfortable with the commands and be able to quickly identify what you need to do in order to be able to meet that time limit.  In the end, though, if you love networking, it can be a fun time!

Where Have All the SNPA Labs Gone?

When you’re studying for your CCNA, there are a plethora of labs out there you can use, from the kind you buy made up of either equipment or Simulators, to the kind you can download for free which are practice labs you need to provide your own Sim or equipment to use.  For SNPA, I’m finding very little of either available, but definitely plenty of very expensive 5-day courses.  I think I’d rather save up my cash for a CCNP bootcamp sometime down the road.  I’m hoping once I’ve finished reading my Cisco Press book that the labs it contains will be of some help along with the experience I’m getting working with the 5505’s at work.

In the meantime, I found the following link to another person’s experience taking the exam at PCMag – http://tcpmag.com/exams/article.asp?editorialsid=109  It sounds like he found it challenging, but doable…we’ll see if it’s the same for me.

Insomnia!

One of the few downsides of working in networking is that you often have to work when everyone else isn’t.  That generally either means late nights or early mornings.  Since where I work is a little bit of a drive and I hate leaving home once I get there, I choose the early mornings to do any work that requires rebooting anything.  Today I need to be in at 6am for the second time this week.  I don’t mind so much the early hours, but the problem I’m having is that I keep going to bed earlier and then that leads to my body thinking it’s time to get up at some obscene hour…like 3am.  I guess my internal clock will need resetting this weekend!

Right now I’m working on 2 separate certifications.  On the one hand, I’m just wrapping up studies for Microsoft’s 70-291, the last of my core exams for my MCSA-Security.  It’s been difficult keeping my focus on this one, or any Microsoft exam for that matter.  I just don’t use the technology much as I used to and it’s so easy to get distracted by subjects that would be more directly applicable to my work.  I hope to be ready to take “the beast” in 2 weeks.  In the meantime, to help keep my sanity and balance my brain, I have been reading my new book for Cisco’s SNPA (Securing Networks with PIX and ASA).  The company I’m currently working a contract for has ASA’s throughout their organization and I just keep running into them when I’m troubleshooting, so I decided it was definitely worth it to study up on them.  It’s also pretty interesting material.  As soon as I finish my reading, I plan on typing up a study guide to post here and on proprofs.com to share before I dive into some lab work.  I’d really like to take the Cisco SND (Securing Network Devices) exam along with the SNPA this summer to complete the Cisco Firewall Specialist certification, the only problem is that I also need to complete my MCSA and possibly start on my MCSE exams.  I just find it hard to get my head back into Microsoft after working so intensely with Cisco.

Other than my studies, life has been good…chaotic, but good.  I survived the rest of the team being gone for Disaster Recovery exercises and even had a productive week.  I’m looking forward to resting up and studying this weekend and perhaps even doing a little “cube decoration” if I can scavenge the free time.  If I manage it, I’ll be sure to post some pictures here of the results.

Organization, Schmorganization!

I am trying to gather up my blogs and posts and condense them into something usable here. I tend to be a bit frenetic about what I write about. Right now, it’s all about firewalls and I’m working on a study guide for SNPA. I find firewalls interesting and confounding all at once and I just have to understand them better. I’m especially interested in learning more about IDS/IPS. In the meantime, I will go ahead and post a collection of links I’ve stumbled upon lately that have been helpful.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/474/index.shtml – Links to Password Recovery Procedures for All Cisco Devices
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/ssh.shtml – Tutorial on How to Configure SSH in Cisco IOS – Add greater security to your network by accessing your devices using SSH, not telnet!

http://forums.cisco.com/eforum/servlet/EEM?page=main – Cisco Embedded Event Manager Scripting Community – Can you script in Ciscoland? Of course, and it can help with troubleshooting as well.

http://www.blindhog.net/ – My latest favorite site for Cisco tutorials. I have especially been enjoying their series using the gns3 network device emulator. It’s free and as long as you have access to IOS images, it’s easy to create a virtual test lab.

http://www.garethevans.info/products/acleditor – Gareth Evan’s ACL Editor – I stumbled upon this while trying to learn ACL’s for my CCNA exam. This gentleman wrote an ACL editor that simplifies creating ACL’s as a college project. At the time I downloaded it, it was free, but I see that he is charging a small fee for it now, although it does have a free 30-day trial.

A New Home for my Blog

I never thought I’d be the sort of person to “blog.” I don’t know if anyone even reads the blogs I have created over time. Still, blog I do, if only for my own sanity, which at times is rather questionable. After starting several different blogs in several different places, I realized that I really do need a “home” for all this, a centralized repository for all my thoughts that I scatter across the internet. So, here it is and we’ll see how it goes.