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

I’ll start with the Quick Reference Guide. Written by Denise Donohue, this slim volume (128 pages ) quickly summarises each of the main technology areas covered in the CCNP syllabus.  There’s a certain amount of mapping between the chapter titles of this book and the ROUTE Official Certification Guide which makes it easy to flip from one to the other.

The Quick Reference is very much aimed at late-stage revision.  It certainly doesn’t cover enough detail to learn the relevant technologies from scratch, but that’s not the point.  It provides a simple way of reviewing topics that you’ve already covered in depth at an earlier date.  This will definitely be forming part of my certification arsenal!

The second component is the Routing Video Mentor.  This comprises 15 videos, some six hours of footage in total, of instructor Kevin Wallace covering the topics of the CCNP BSCI exam.  Yep, you read that correctly – despite this being the CCNP ROUTE cert kit, the videos haven’t been updated for the new exam.  This means that EIGRP gets scant coverage (a single forty-minute video), while IS-IS and Multicast are still included despite their notable absence from the syllabus.

Personally I find this the most disappointing part of the kit.  Not only have the videos not been updated to reflect the new requirements, I find Wallace’s pace agonisingly slow for what is meant to be a CCNP-level tutorial.  As a case in point – the first video spends nearly twenty minutes covering routing generalities, administrative distance and static routes.  The next video spends over forty minutes covering RIPv1 and RIPv2.  I don’t know about the average bear, but that’s way too slow for my liking.  Like I said, very disappointing.

The final part of the kit is an online flash card system.  It does pretty much what it says on the tin, which is to allow you to pick different areas for questioning and receive a set of questions.  You fill in the free-text field with your answer, click ‘Show Answer’ and say whether you got it right or wrong.  At the end you get a summary of what you got right and wrong.  Well at least I presume you do as my browser took me to a blank page at that point.  Equally disappointing.

As you can probably guess I won’t be buying another one of these cert kits.  The quick reference guides are available separately and are excellent.  The online flash cards I can imagine might be helpful if I worked out how to get them working properly. The videos, in my opinion, aren’t the best way of learning.  They might work well for some, but personally I found them paced far too slowly.  The fact they hadn’t been updated to cover the new exam topics just reinforced my view of them.

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…

http://packetlife.net/library/cheat-sheets/

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!

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!