Looking at doing in the next few months, having just done MCP in windows XP PRO and getting 968/1000, just wondering how hard the CCNA is going to be.

I assume it will be a bit harder than Win XP.

If you have done and passed, what study material did you use and how long did you study for?

im doing it in parts, so far i have done CCNA1 and CCNA2, just use the online material to study for it, they ask really stupid questions and the wording is really really anoying..so make sure you have some good english skills.

so you have CCNA certification now, by doing exams 640-821 and 640-811 ?

not sure what u mean by CCNA1 and CCNA 2.

the CCNA is split up into 4 sections, and then a final exam.

Beleive me, its a waste of time. The only thing they are interested in is memory retention of things like "HOW MANY BITS OF PREAMBLE ARE THERE IN xxx PROTOCOLS FRAMES". It will give you a good understanding of networking if you didnt know much in the first place, but its not really that good.

You do learn a bit but nothing in great depth. They cover stuff like the different Routing and Routed protocols, Switching (e.g. VLANS, Trunking and Spanning Tree), Subnetting, Access Lists and touch a bit on different technolgies like DSL and ISDN. I found that there was a lot of troublshooting questions in the exam, so they'd give you a network diagram or a config and get you to pick what was wrong with it, thats what really takes up most of the time in the exam, at least it did for me.

edit/ btw it's not divided up into 4 sections, it's divded into 2 at most (Intro and ICND), when you do the exam you can choose to do them seperately or both together. The benefit of doing them both together is that there is ultimately less questions but of course you have to know more... but i found that doing the full exam practically only covered ICND material anyway apart from subnetting.

last edited by Nailbomb at 14:46:22 15/Feb/06

yeah, didnt think it was divided into four sections, just the 2 as you mentioned, not sure what the other people are talking about with ccna 1 and ccna 2 etc. From what I can see there is only 1 ccna and 2 different methods to get it.

BTW, the exocom training centre want over $3000 for the 1 week boot camp, yeah right. (unless work is gonna pay for it, which they wont.)

? every training place in Canberra does it divided into four sections, with an exam at the end of each module plus the final exam =\

I'd have to admit, most of the hard questions were either about troubleshooting a config, or just one of those silly questions.

last edited by King Of Shibby! at 15:05:23 15/Feb/06

last edited by King Of Shibby! at 15:05:25 15/Feb/06

the hardest questions I found regarded what different outputs belonged to what different debug commands.

I started the CCNA program during my CISCO course in school.

Completed CCNA 1, but for the meantime they've switched us to some ITE course, not sure if were going to be continuing with it.

As stated before, just study the online material, it's all you can really do without having any previous knowledge on it

If you have done and passed, what study material did you use and how long did you study for?

I did the course at UQ (you don't have to be a student) - http://www.its.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=28693

$600 a semester, so $2400 for the full course. Every module, you do an electronic exam, and sometimes have to pass a lab to, for example, making the difference kinds of network cables, testing cables, (to start with), then configuring switches, routers, etc.. You have to pass these exams / labs to continue on to the next semester, 80% is the pass mark.

Then at the end, you're ready to sit the CCNA certification. You get a 50% discount on the exam if you get above 80% for the exam prep exam.

Was it hard? Well that all depends. Hard in this case is a a subjective opinion based on what you already know and your IQ.

What I will say is, the course is very good and I learnt heaps. I thought I was good before I did it, after doing it, I realised there was lots I didn't know and it filled gaps I had. Like before I did it, I was doing lots of sys admin, but not much network admin, after doing it, I could talk tech with the network admins. So yeh, awesome course in my opinion.

What I also liked was I was in a classroom again after working in the industry for like 5 years, so it was a refreshing change and very cool to hang out with uni students who were curious about working in IT. I enjoying experiencing a 4th year engineering student teach me about networking who didn't really know much about computers. :) I'm a weird guy though. And yeah, I threw a few questions at him to make the class think, without ruining his great performance.

It's a good course, and if you want to get into networking, just f***en do it. It's not hard if put some time into it. Read ahead, and make sure you know the s***. It's not handed out to the limp wristed.

Study material? They give you quite a bit, but also check out the boson stuff, http://www.boson.com/, and maybe testking stuff, http://www.testking.com/CCNA-certification-training.htm.

If this is what you want to do, be, just do it. Otherwise, don't bother, it's not "easy", it's not "hard", it's like, I wanna do this, so I do it? It's entry level Cisco Certification. You want "hard", try and do a CCNP or CCIE. :) But, you have to do a CCNA first anyway, so give it a go, nothing to lose mate!

What Shibby said.

Yeah? well my opinion is, the people who undermine and pay out those with certs are people who don't have any, and probably don't have the skills, or motivation to get one themselves, yet still think they are pretty good! Good luck.

Instant respect and props for those with a cert, even the microsoft ones.

*edit*

Besides the fact the post was total ass, I mean, wtf, are you on crack? Have you even done the cert? Jesus Christ, I wish people would stop and think before posting sometimes. There is far more to the CCNA than the WANK you posted Shibby. I had a guy at work try and say the CCNA is just subnetting and undermine it in front of my peers. I refrained from killing him and laughed, and explained how much of a dips*** he is, and just because he felt threaten by me, was no need to try and undermine me in front of others who have the cert and make himself look like a fool.

OK? GG. Thanks.


last edited by gimpy at 00:29:32 17/Feb/06

I recently brought my self a few routers and switchs to so my exam next month.

I got 2 2520 routers, 2 1924 switchs and a 2550 switch.
It is easier getting all this and studying at home, than going out and spending $X amount on a course where when u finshed all you got is a router sim to do anything on.

Speakig of that I went for an interview the other day and when I said I brought routers and switches to do my ccna on. They gave me the job straight away :)

Thanks guys, IT looks to be from what everyone has said, that its a bit more invlolved than say the MCP 20-270 (XP) exam i just did, which I found pretty easy.

But that makes it better I reckon, makes it more credible as a cert. Work seems to be pushing everyone down the microsoft cert path, probalbly becuase they wanted to keep their microsoft gold partnership, which requires a certain amount of staff with certs. But now that i've done 1 I reckon CCNA is the way to go.

People with cisco skills are harder to find than microsoft I reckon, which would make me look better If I had a ccna.

SNAP QUIZ!!

What steps would you take to diagnose a fault whereby there are two subnets on a network that are addressed using DHCP. The networks are separated by a 3xxx Series Cisco router. On one of the subnets all the hosts are recieving DHCP leases just fine. On the other they are not.

Answers away!

last edited by trillion at 19:40:26 17/Feb/06