CCDA Test Scheduled

After a deep dive review of all CCDAtopics, I finally scheduled the test for next week. As part of the review I completely read through the Campus Network for High Availability design guide along with skimming through the Cisco SAFE reference guide. Looking up a few Cisco SONA white papers didn't hurt either.

By far my weakest topic is security, it always has been for me. But I feel a lot more confident about my network security knowledge at a high level than ever before. Going in to this exam I didn't expect to gain as much design knowledge as I did considering that this is supposed to be an Associate level cert. I was surprised by how I view my own networking projects with my employer compared to this time next year.

Once I get through this cert, I plan on taking a break from Cisco centric certification for at least a few months. I'm plan to deep dive into WireShark along with reading a book or two on specifically the TCP protocol. My goal is to be well rounded with the fundamentals before deep diving into a specific area of networking. This will allow me to be more versatile and more open to what possibilities are out their with network implementation, design and configuration.

Almost Ready for the CCDA Test....I think

The CCDA OCG book was polished off a few weeks ago. I haven't been able to schedule the exam yet due to projects and work travel. I hear that this test is a beast so I went well beyond just the Cisco press books. The design certs isn't about just knowing the technical aspects within the CLI. In fact I only recall a few sections that even mentions or references a CLI command. It's meant to show you how to gather business requirements, plan, implement, and operate within the business constraints given. At least on a very high level; the knowledge I've learned over the last 8 months has already helped me with many of the projects I'm a part of.

CCDA DESGN OCG Progress

Typical world of IT to make everything an acronym. So many that there are multiple acronyms that are the same but mean something different depending on what you're referring to (i.e. RFC).

Anyways, I'm slowly making my way through the OCG book, finishing the small section on Data Center. If I recall the FLG book never really hit this topic at all so I learned quite a few cool new things. Especially on the virtualization front which lightly touched on Virtual Device Contexts and access layer switching within the virtual environment.

I'm hitting every practice quiz, study reference, and additional study topics that the book is offering me. This will give me the right amount of repetition I need to be ready for the exam itself. Honestly I felt like I should of studied for the CCNP R/S this way. At my current gig, we didn't touch routing too much besides DMVPN. So a lot of the intricate routing theory I'm starting to loose.