Review: CCNP Route Cert Kit

Most of my CCNP studying has been through either on the job experience or self-study: working through the books, experimenting with things on my lab kit, etc etc.  That being the case I thought I would review a few of the study materials that I’ve been using.

First up is the Cisco Press CCNP Route 642-902 Cert Kit.  This is a set of three different products that retails for around £45.00 but which I managed to get for less than £30.00 from Amazon UK.  The three components are:

• CCNP ROUTE Quick Reference Guide
• Routing Video Mentor
• Online Certification Flash Cards

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Home Lab: DIY 19″ Rack

This will hopefully be the first of a series of blog entries on setting up a home lab for CCNP study.  I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to cover in each post, but bear with me and we’ll see where this goes!

As part of my studying I decided it was high time I got myself some Cisco gear of my own.  While you can gain a lot of experience from the workplace there are obvious limitations – you simply can’t just start playing with things!  Also, unless you work for a consultancy or the very largest organisations it’s highly unlikely that you will use every single CCNP-level technology in your everyday job.  Companies that use OSPF might not necessarily use EIGRP, or companies will use MPLS for WAN connectivity over Frame Relay for example.  Equally not all organisations will be totally Cisco shops – Check Point or Netscreen might be used for firewalls/VPNs and F5 or Barracuda might be used for Network Load Balancing.  There’s simply too many variables to be able to cover the whole CCNP syllabus on kit in the office.

I’ll go over the kit that I bought at a later date, but tonight I wanted to pay some attention to housing all the kit that might make up a lab.  Unless you’re single or have a dedicated workroom it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get away with leaving your kit piled in a heap on the dining room table.  That might work until someone finds an DB60 DCE/DTE cable in their soup, but trust me, it’ll be downhill from there!

So the problem here is to come up with something that doesn’t look too awful and yet can hold a decent amount of kit and doesn’t cost the earth.  While there are ready-made racks on eBay and other sites, they all tend to be a little too big/imposing or expensive.  Not good.  So it was with some amusement that I came across the concept of the Rast Rack!  Put simply this is a Ikea bedside cabinet (nightstand for our .us friends) that happens to be more-or-less the right width for 19″ gear and vertical rack rails so the kit can be properly mounted.

I picked up a couple in Ikea over the weekend and together with some 6U rack rails bought from a music/stage supply store online, put together a rack in about 30 minutes or so this evening.

[View with PicLens]

On the whole I’m pretty pleased with it.  There’s only one problem I have with it – it could do with being a few mm wider as it’s a real squeeze getting kit in there with rack ears on.  However that could just be down to my dodgy aftermarket rack ears!  This does mean that taking stuff out will require slackening the bolts that hold it together, but that’s no real hardship.

Also, let’s do the math as to how much this cost: £7.99 for the Rast cabinet itself, £6.00 for the rack rails and maybe £5.00 for a lot of 50 cage nuts, washers and M6 machine screws.  I already had the screws that I used to fit the rack rails.

Grand total: £18.99.  If I make two of them that’s £32.98 (I don’t need more screws/nuts etc).  Still a good saving over £50.00 for a large metal monstrosity that’ll loom in the corner of the room…

CCNP – and why you shouldn’t let it expire!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m studying towards my CCNP – Cisco Certified Network Professional.  However, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to do this.  According to the Cisco certification tracker, I first gained my CCNP back in July 2003 and my CCNA in July 2000.  This was at the end of my industrial placement while at Uni – a year that I spent working for Cisco doing various consultancy-type things.  I was very fortunate and was able to get a lot of training – the joys of the dot-com boom era!

This placement (and my background) left me with skills in both Linux/UNIX Admin and Networking.  I ultimately ended up in a job as a UNIX admin and my Cisco skills atrophied – I eventually let my CCNA and CCNP lapse in 2006.

Roll on a few years – I’ve now managed to move into a network admin role at the same company.  I re-certified my CCNA in 2007 and started towards CCNP in 2008.  CCNP is a very different ball game now compared to back then: while the core technologies are the same there are many differences in the syllabus to reflect products, technologies and protocols in use today.  Being out of the loop for a few years means that it’s taking me far longer to get through the exams and having a family now means  I don’t have as much time to study as I used to.  Letting my CCNP lapse has cost me a lot of time and money to re-certify – but given my circumstances it was probably unavoidable!

Things seem to be going pretty OK at the moment.  I passed the ISCW exam in December 2009 (after failing it in April) before the syllabus change was announced – however it did serve the purpose of re-certifying my CCNA.  I took SWITCH earlier this month and passed and am now working towards ROUTE.

If I can get ROUTE and TSHOOT sorted this year, I’ll be very happy indeed!

Blog Reboot

So having neglected this blog since 2007, I’ve decided it’s time for a reboot.  I’m currently studying for my Cisco CCNP certification and want to try and share some of that with the web at large.  Hopefully it’ll be useful for other folks in a similar situation and if nothing else I hope to invite some useful comments.

I’m debating if I can try and do some video blog entries too – mixture of video and screencaps perhaps.  Have to be careful not to let it get in the way of studying itself though!