I have decided that I needed to get another piece of paper to continue on proving myself to the unknown masses of tomorrow.
I feel that with my experience that the CCNA test is something that I should be able to tackle in a fair amount of time since my daily workday is full of Wireshark captures and troubleshooting network issues of the customer.
It has been some time since I have logged into a Cisco device as recent jobs have had me working a Fortinet Firewalls and switches as well as Symantec Proxy, Content Analysis, Management Center and Reporter devices. The Symantec devices at least retain many of the Cisco formats with the enable, config t type layout.
I first looked through the LinkedIn Learning library as that is something that is offered through my current employment but the only CCNA course that I saw was the CCNA security lesson. I am sure that will be great but wanting to make sure that I have all my bases covered before I drop $300 on a test I went over to Udemy and decided to go with Neil Anderson @flackboxtv and his Cisco CCNA 200-301 – The Complete Guide to Getting Certified.
I appreciate that he has a Study plan setup and there is some solid steps laid out to follow, as I am one of those set path types of guys.
Now granted I did do the first weeks of lessons on day 1 as there was little that was new to me here as the OSI model is something that I was studying back in 1999 (man I am old, lol)
I think the only thing that might have made this a little better is if he explained some of the network details with Packet Capture program like Wireshark.
Here is a review of the sections in the course:
- Welcome – Discuss how and why he has set up the program in the layout he has.
- How to set up the Lab – Cisco Packet Tracer setup. It has been quite a while since I have used this but it is a great free tool to learn the Cisco devices
- Host to host communications – A high level overview of the OSI model, a bit boring for veterans but good review and some new acronyms that I hadn’t heard before… Please Do Not Take Sales People’s Advice – Please Do Not Touch Superman’s Private Area
- The Cisco IOS Operating System – Summary of the structure and review of the different OSs from the past and current.
- OSI Layer 4 Summary
- OSI Layer 3 Summary
- IP Address Classes
- Subnetting – I haven’t had to do this manually for so long, I didn’t realize how rusty I was. I will say I appreciate a good IP calculator
- OSI Layer 2 Summary
- OSI Layer 1 Summary
- Cisco Device Function – Switches, Hubs, and Routers oh my…
- The Life of a Packet – I will say the last two parts were overkill. If you don’t understand ARP after this you either don’t want to or you should be looking at a different profession.
Bring on Week/Day 2!!