Well, I have survived both the first part of the data center move as well as the first game of the softball season, so I am ready for a new exam to study for. I am going next for the BCMSN and I received my copy of the BCMSN self-study guide from Cisco Press. It’s definitely the heftiest of my Cisco books right now, even outweighing Routing TCP/IP vol 1. I’ve just started digging into the first chapter and already, from judging the table of contents, I’m wishing I’d read this one about 6 months ago! There is an entire chapter on dhcp snooping, something which was giving me fits at one of our autonomous wireless sites a few months ago. It would have been easier then if I’d been familiar with the concept of dhcp snooping. Oh well! I always feel like I’m 1 exam behind what I’m doing at work.
This ought to be a great exam for me to study for right now. We don’t have many routers in our enterprise, but mostly rely on big layer 3 switches. We use HSRP heavily and have rapid-spanning tree implemented. These are all things I’ve worked with in practice but never had the time to dig deeper into how they actually work. My studies for the CCNA-Wireless ought to also make the wireless portion of this exam a little easier to handle and I’m thinking that having already taken the ONT will help with the QoS portion. There really is a good amount of overlap in some sections of these exams, which might be why everyone thinks their last 1 or 2 CCNP exams are the easiest of the bunch.
This weekend is all about resting up and relaxing. I’m planning to do some reading, some grilling, and maybe playing catch with the family, but nothing hardcore. The past 2 weeks have involved a lot of physical work in the datacenter installing switches, running cables, and labeling the heck out of everything. The payoff is a brand new datacenter with a 10 gig backbone which hopefully will lead to fewer calls of “application slowness” when I’m on call!
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