Study Update Numero Uno

Well I'm a little over half way to finishing the ICND2 book, I'm averaging 1 chapter a day a long with labs and additional studying. This comes out to about 5-7 hours total I spend a day studying for the most part. I should be done reading the official book around May 18th, then I'm going to study and lab for the next week or two in hopes of taking the last part towards my CCNA. During my CCENT studies last month the hardest thing was getting subnetting down good. When I say good I mean being able to subnet within 30 seconds and pretty much to the point where I can do a good majority of it in my head. CCENT was mainly theory with some basic router and switch configuration thrown in. To be completly honest I knew about 80% of the material already I just needed to either brush up or learn more detail about certain subjects.

So far during my ICND2 studies there's been a lot more topics I've needed to grasp in more detail. So far I've learned about switching using VLANs, VTP, STP, and of course the beloved Route on A Stick (RoAS). This was the first 3 chapters of the book by the way just to give you an idea of how in-depth the second part of CCNA is. I also recently learned how to create and trouble shoot standard and extended ACL's, verify subnets within VLSM, Routing Protocol Theory, and route summarization this past week. It's a lot to take in but my plan is to understand each topic and then go back to each one in detail to learn everything in between.

Today...well yesterday (May 7, 2009) I spent time reading theory on the difference between Distance-Vector and Link-State Routing Protocols. I want to say I spent about 5 hours going through the chapter of about 30 pages and doing some additional course work along with taking some brief notes. Everything with this chapter was self explanitory but I have to remember not to get many of the Distant-Vector loop preventing tools mixed up. Mainly I need to remember the difference between split-horizon, poisoned routes, and poison reverse. These are all used on top of a few other things to aviod packets from continuelessly looping in a routing network.

After reading this chapter you'll finally realize why Link-State protocols can converge much faster. Link-State protocol uses an algorithm on each router to determine the best route. So unlike Distant-Vector, routers doesn't depend on it's neighboring routers to tell it which route to take. It simply calculates all the info its recieved from every router in its network and picks which path it should take on its own.

I rested for a little while along with setting up some more of my social networking accounts (LinkedIn, Twitter, YoungEntrepreneur) which I'll post links to a little later once I have some more posts up and going. I then went to Cisco website to go over some free webinars they have there which is great by the way (www.cisco.com) to go over some more information about VLANs an VTP (VLAN Trunking Protocol).

Tommorow I should have some new routing protocol theory down which is dum dum dum...OSPF. I have a feeling tommorow is going to be a long day of studying, a lot of labbing is going to be involved plus I'm going over access-lists later that night, wish me luck!