Wednesday, June 22, 2011

CCNP - TSHOOT - The Plan of Attack

For my final CCNP exam I've fore gone the Cisco Networking Academy and I've decided to self study. The main reason for this was a that I've moved jobs and the costs associated with attending the course are no longer being met by my employer.

Feed back I've had from fellow students who I was with on the CCNP SWITCH course has been that the TSHOOT academy course has not really been up to much. One student reported that he felt that he could have just bought the course manual and studied at home.

I find that disappointing as I had such a positive experience of the Cisco Networking Academy doing my CCNA, ISCW, BSCI and SWITCH Courses. In general I'd recommend that if you get a chance to attend a Cisco Networking Academy do it.

Moving on I think I'm about half way through my CCNP TSHOOT studies. At the present time I'm using the following materials to self-study:

CCNP TSHOOT Official Certification Guide by Kevin Wallace CCIE #7945
CCNP TSHOOT Cert kit by Kevin Wallace CCIE #7945, Brent Stewart, Eric Rivard
Troubleshooting and Maintaining Cisco IP Networks (TSHOOT) - Foundation Learning Guide by Amir Ranjbar CCIE #8669

Also I've taken a look at the TSHOOT demo questions - here - which are a great example to give you an idea of the test environment.

Finally, on the Cisco Learning Network you can obtain the actual L3, L2 and IPv6 topologies use for the TSHOOT Trouble Ticket Questions. You can find them  - here.

Use these topologies well. Inspect the lay out and inspect the notes. Can you see any Video Conferencing (therefore Multicast)? can you see any L3 redundancy? Which? Which VLAN's are in use? what do you think should be present in any trunk configs? Which routing protocols are in use? what would you expect the config to look like using these protocols? can you see any redistribution? can you type up any associated config?

This is where I'm at so far. Next stop my plan for approaching the TT questions in the exam.