Study Update # 4

I finished up the night by going over one of the Cisco CBT Training which was actually pretty good besides to Q & A's section at the end. I went over 802.1w/RSTP (Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol) which is a newer updated version of 802.1d/STP. It was good to hear material from a different source and learn some new detailed topics that will help me in my exam and a real environment. Tomorrow is Frame Relay finally, as wierd as it sounds I'm kinda nervous for it. Mainly because I hear this will be tested on pretty hard on the actual exam. This is unofficially the last topic that I don't have a foundamental understanding of. Even still I have 6 whole chapters to complete still, about 100 pages!

Finished PPP Chapter 12

I finished studying the ICND2 Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) chapter which is pretty straight forward. Honestly if you went through the ICND1 PPP chapters then you can skim through most of this as it's basically the same info. There really isn't to much to PPP at least at the CCNA level besides setting up Authentication. The two ways to authenticate is by using PAP or CHAP with CHAP being the preferred method. Reason being is that it encrypts the password and actually never sends the password across the serial WAN link. Troubleshooting PPP might be tricky becuase of the way it sends keepalives compared to other protocols such as STP, OSPF, etc. Reason being is that it sends what's called a host route to it's neighbor router. This host route is the enitre /32 mask so there's no way to know if the link is in the wrong subnet through PPP. Therefore two interfaces might be in UP/UP statuses but in different subnets. So while they can ping each other they can't ping further than that because routing tables see these two interfaces in different subnets! Hope that makes since some how lol

Briefly reviewed IPv6

Well we're all going to have to get used to IPv6 sooner or later so I decided to get a head start (plus it's on the test anyways). While I won't be getting to this chapter until this Saturday, I went to Cisco's Learning Center and watched one of the related IPv6 videos. I have to admit I was intimidated at first but by the end I understand at least basically what the major changes are to this protocol from IPv4. One thing I can say is that you can still subnet IPv6 but at this stage there's no need to learn it. But when it comes time to learn how to subnet an IPv6 address I'm sure more than a few upcoming engineers heads are going to explode trying to figure it out!

Study Update # 3

Yesterday I was exhausted so I didn't go through some of the Cisco Web Video for PPP over serial router links. However today I managed to wake up pretty early so I started with that and knocked it out pretty quick. There's no new topics to learn today in my Cisco ICND2 book. Chapter 11 is mainly different ways to approach questions that may come up in the Cisco exam regarding routing protocol sims. So that means it shouldn't be to hard of a day hopefully however I need to lab some things out Packet Tracer. It's a crazy feeling knowing that I have a least some understanding of most of the topics to obtain the CCNA. Also as I'm going through this preperation I'm seeing how everything builds on top of each other and starting to realize why there are other higher Cisco exams (CCNP, CCIE). CCNA seems to cover a lot different topics and going into just enough detail to keep you from wondering what else can be done. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go for my CCNP once my CCNA is done, something I thought would never come out from my mouth!

EIGRP Theory/Basic Configuration

I just finished studying the EIGRP routing protocol chapter. It's similar to OSPF in a lot of the ways it works but it's easy to point out the differences. The main one being that it only works on Cisco products. It has a lot of the same features of OSPF such as Hello Updates and even authentication although they are named differently and setup a little differently. Overall not to bad, the chapter was only around 20 pages so I got through the chapter, a lab, and practice questions in about 2 hours. It's Saturday so it's time to go out play for a little bit!

Study Update # 2

Well after studying OSPF earlier today I took a break and ran some errands along with hanging with family. I finished up the night with reviewing access-list information from the Cisco learning Network. I began by going through some of the Cisco web video but I decided to lab up a quick network using Packet Tracer first. I set up two Class B networks using the default mask along with a gateway to the internet using a Class A address. I used two routers in Point-to-Point configuration which had one router being the gateway to the internet (Class A network). I practiced some commands on the other router such as turning auto-summarization off and setting a default-network to reach the Class A internet. Last but not least I practiced creating an extended ACL that would prevent a particular host from sending SMTP packets to the internet but could allow all other traffic. All went well so I decided to finish up the Cisco web videos and now it's time for bed!

OSPF Chapter 9 Completed

After about 4 hours of reading theory and labbing OSPF configurations with GNS3, I believe I have the basic concepts of this routing protocol down. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be but I did get tripped up over the initial configuration. First I tried creating a simple 3 router topology using a simulator program called Packet Tracer. However I noticed that OSPF protocol would never start, after a little research it turns out that OSPF doesn't even work for Packet Tracer! I had to use the GNS3 emulating program that uses the actual IOS to implement the protocol. I still had problems though until I realized that I was in correctly inputting my wild-card masks. I was using "10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0" as the subnets I wanted OSPF to look at. I failed to realize that when you use 0.0.0.0 you're pretty much telling the router to look for that specific subnet number. Once I changed the logic to "10.o.o.o 0.255.255.255" on all the routers OSPF sub-commands everything came up perfectly :)

(P.S. when you use 255 intead of 0's in the wild card mask you're pretty much telling the router to ignore that whole octect. So when I put 0.255.255.255 instead I told the router to look for any subnets with 10 in the first octect number but ignore looking for any specific numbers in the other octects.)