Credit Crunch – What Credit Crunch? 

Introduction

If I hear another news story about the credit crunch I swear I am going to blow.

If you are hoping to get a career break into IT or move into a networking role then I can tell you for sure that there are plenty of contracts and jobs out there. You are going to have to work to get them but the first step is to believe that you can get that dream job if you are persistent and willing to work hard to get it.

Global IT Infrastructure

Today is no different than six months ago before we never realised there was going to be massive changes in the market. Cisco are still the biggest internetworking company in the world and millions of companies all over the world are still using their equipment to managed the network infrastructure.

I was at a marketing conference last week in Boson and in my room was a small DSL cable modem which had a Cisco log on. They had over 500 rooms in that hotel and this hotel has over 50 locations in the USA. Somebody has to install and support them.

Just do a quick search today on www.jobserve.com for ‘CCNA’ and you should find a large number of jobs and contracts there. Here are a few of the results I saw when I looked a few minutes ago:

‘Cisco/CCNA Support Engineer
Wolverhampton, West Midlands
England
Salary/Rate: Market Rates Depending On Experience
Major UK IT Services company urgently requires a qualified (or equivalent) CCNA to join its busy and expanding Networks team. You will be troubleshooting Cisco and other network faults along with day to day outages both remotely and on-site. If you have Network/CCNA level experience, with a team player attitude and are available shortly, please submit your CV now to be considered for this great opportunity with long term potential.’

You don’t even need the CCNA for that. Just to be CCNA level. How about this one:

‘Network Operations Centre (NOC) Support – Cisco CCNA
Location: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Country:Australia
Do you have current or recent NOC experience and hold a CCNA? Would you like to contract with Australia’s leading Telco? This client, one of Candle’s Major Accounts have recently opened a new managed network operations centre to manage some 1100 corporate networks for their external customers. The new state-of- the-art NOC offers a range of network services such as monitoring and the management of around 37,000 devices. A brand new contract requirement has just been released which offers the..’

Network Operations work is ideal for the newly qualified CCNA. You may need to get a littile NOC experience first doing something low level like monitoring faults (very basic monkey level work) but after 2-3 months of doing that you could easily apply for the above role.

What to do Next?

I would honestly advise you stop watching the news, reading the papers and listening to the radio. Today it is the global credit crisis, before that it was the housing crisis before that it was the global pandemic where we were all going to die from bird flu, before that the terrorist threat, before that the war…and so on.

The news sells news which is of no use to any person who wants to go and find a Cisco job or contract. You won’t be asked to quote the Dow Jones for the share index for any companies during your technical interview. Trust me.

I would advise you to continue with your studies, apply for at least 2 roles per day and tailor your resume for each role you are applying for rather than sending out a standard ‘one size fits all’ application. Hunt for roles with local companies who have several routers and switches to support or draw up a list of ISPs in your area and call them up to see if they are recruiting.

I would continue to study and improve your Cisco skills beyond the CCNA with some security and voice configurations. You don’t need to take more exams unless you want to but do keep on learning.

The End?

There will always be a need for Cisco engineers so long as Cisco exist which by the looks of things will be a very long time. Avoid news because it is all bad news designed to induce panic and despair. Stick with your study strategy and apply for 2 jobs per day.

Best of luck.

About Paul Browning
Paul Browning owns Networks Inc. Ltd who have been teaching Cisco courses in the UK since 2002. Customers include BT, Shell, British Army, Jaguar, Ford and many many more.Paul also owns the worlds only complete end-to-end CCNA training sitewww.howtonetwork.net which is one of the fastest growing training sites in the world. Paul believes that anybody can pass their Cisco exams if they are prepared to put the work in and follow a proven successful study method. He is the only person in the UK to have authored his own Cisco CCNA study guide – CCNA Simplified.

 

 

 

 

CCNA Cram Guide.

The latest version of your CCNA cram guide is now out and ready for download. Just hop over to the download area and look under study tools to find it.

Thanks

Paul

Cisco SDM Simulator

I hope you enjoy this really cool SDM emulator from Cisco. It is free to download and use and will come in very handy for your CCNA exam studies. It isn’t connected to a live network but is set up for you to be able to use most of the commands you will need to know for the CCNA.

http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/sdm-tool-demo

Remember that there are some SDM videos on the site for you to refer to.

Route Summarization

Introduction

There are many millions of routes on the internet. If these routes all had to be stored individually the internet would have come to a stop many years ago.

Route summarization is also knows as supernetting and was proposed in RFC 1338 which you can read online by clicking on the RFC or if you have printed this document by visiting www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1338.html. If you want to read a very comprehensive guide to route summarization then please grab a hold of Jeff Doyles excelling Cisco book Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 which is in its second edition now.
ZIP CodesZIP codes were used by the United States Postal Service to improve routing of letters to addresses within the USA. The first digit represents a group of US states and then the second and third digits represent a region inside that group. The idea is that letters and parcels can be quickly routed by machine or hand into the correct state and then forwarded to that state.When it reaches the state it can be routed to the correct region. From there it can be routed to the correct city and so on until it is sorted into the correct mail bag for the local postman or lady.

The system was devised to make routing of mail more accurate and efficient. The sorting office in Atlanta doesn’t need to know which street in San Francisco the packet is destined for. Having to store that information would make the sorting process unworkable.

Route Summarization Pre-requisites

In order to use route summarization on your network you need to use a classless protocol such as RIPv2, EIGRP or OSPF. You also need to design your network in a hierarchical order which will require careful planning and design. This means that you can’t randomly assign networks to various routers or LANs within your network.

IP Addresses

See what I did there? I cleverly used the example of letters and will now apply it to IP routes. Well, in fact I think I have made my point so I won’t labour the point. Let’s move onto an example of a network and what the problem will look like on your network if you don’t use route summarization.

Here is an example of how summarization would work with a range of IP addresses on a network.

The router has several networks attached. The first choice is to advertise all of these networks to the next hop router. The alternative is to summarize these eight networks down into one route and send that summary to the next hop router which will cut down on bandwidth, CPU and memory requirements.

Firstly, write out all of the network addresses in full and then the binary versions to the right of that.You can only really work out a summary route by converting the IP address into binary (sorry). If you don’t do this then you have no way of knowing if you are advertising the correct summary route which will lead to problems on your network.

172.16.8.0	10101100.00010000.00001000.00000000
172.16.9.0	10101100.00010000.00001001.00000000
172.16.10.0	10101100.00010000.00001010.00000000
172.16.11.0	10101100.00010000.00001011.00000000
172.16.12.0	10101100.00010000.00001100.00000000
172.16.13.0	10101100.00010000.00001101.00000000
172.16.14.0	10101100.00010000.00001110.00000000
172.16.15.0	10101100.00010000.00001111.00000000
Matching Bits	10101100.00010000.00001 = 21 bits

I have italicised the bits in each address which match. You can see that the first 21 bits match on every address so your summarized route can reflect these 21 bits:

172.16.8.0 255.255.248.0

One other significant advantage of using route summarization is that if a local network on your router goes down, the summary network still be advertised out. This means that the rest of the network will not need to update its routing tables or worse still, have to deal with a flapping route.

Exercise 1

Please write out the binary equivalents for the below addresses and then determine which bits match. I have written the first two octets for you to save time.

172.16.50.0	10101100.00010000.
172.16.60.0	10101100.00010000.
172.16.70.0	10101100.00010000.
172.16.80.0	10101100.00010000.
172.16.90.0	10101100.00010000.
172.16.100.0	10101100.00010000.
172.16.110.0	10101100.00010000.
172.16.120.0	10101100.00010000.

What summarized address would you advertise?

I make it 172.16.0.0 255.255.128.0 or /17

Exercise 2

The below company has three routers connecting to their HQ router. They need to summarize the routes advertised from London 1, 2 and 3.

10.1.0.0	00001010.00000001.00000000.00000000
10.1.1.0	00001010.00000001.00000001.00000000
10.1.2.0	00001010.00000001.00000010.00000000
10.1.3.0	00001010.00000001.00000011.00000000
10.1.4.0	00001010.00000001.00000100.00000000
10.1.5.0	00001010.00000001.00000101.00000000
10.1.6.0	00001010.00000001.00000110.00000000
10.1.7.0	00001010.00000001.00000111.00000000

Let’s start with London 1.

We have 21 common bits so London 1 can advertise 10.1.0.0 /21 to HQ router.

And for London 2.

10.1.8.0	00001010.00000001.00001000.00000000
10.1.9.0	00001010.00000001.00001001.00000000
10.1.10.0	00001010.00000001.00001010.00000000
10.1.11.0	00001010.00000001.00001011.00000000
10.1.12.0	00001010.00000001.00001100.00000000
10.1.13.0	00001010.00000001.00001101.00000000
10.1.14.0	00001010.00000001.00001110.00000000
10.1.15.0	00001010.00000001.00001111.00000000

London 2 also has 21 common bits so can advertise 10.1.8.0 /21 to the HQ router.

And onto London 3.

10.1.16.0	00001010.00000001.00010000.00000000
10.1.17.0	00001010.00000001.00010001.00000000
10.1.18.0	00001010.00000001.0001010.00000000
10.1.19.0	00001010.00000001.00010011.00000000
10.1.20.0	00001010.00000001.00010100.00000000
10.1.21.0	00001010.00000001.00010101.00000000
10.1.22.0	00001010.00000001.00010110.00000000
10.1.23.0	00001010.00000001.00010111.00000000

London 3 has 21 common bits also we can advertise 10.1.16.0 upstream to HQ router.

In Conclusion

You will be expected to understand route summarization for the CCNA exam. If you can quickly work out the common bits then you should be able to answer the question quickly and accurately. If you want to read up to learn more about route summarization then please get yourself a copy of Jeff Doyles book Routing TCP/IP Vol 1 2nd Edition.

Here is the answer to Exercise 1:

00110010.00000000
00111100.00000000
01000110.00000000
01010000.00000000
01011010.00000000
01100100.00000000
01101110.00000000
01111000.00000000

Parts of Ten

So the results are in.

Three months ago I launched the pilot of the ‘Pass Your CCNA in 60 Days’ programme. I sent out an e-mail asking for people who were deadly serious passing their CCNA, committed to spending 2 hours per day for 60 days at the end of which I guarantee they would pass their CCNA exam.

As you can imagine, I was inundated with requests. I chose seven good candidates and just as I launched I was asked by three people if I could include them. None of them knew each other but they all said the same thing. They were desperate to pass for work or personal reasons and were 100% committed to passing so could I permit them to join the challenge. I did let them join.

Things started well with plenty of e-mails and chats on the special discussion forum I set up on Google. One person passed after only 3 weeks which seemed to excite everyone on the pilot programme (including me). As we approached the final couple of weeks I wanted to launch the programme to the general public. I asked for feedback and received a couple of responses but a few others went quiet.

By the end of the programme one other person had passed, one failed and one became injured and couldn’t study.

Missing In Action

What happened to the other six you may be thinking to yourself? I can only guess. They were given everything they needed to pass. Study tools, cram guides, videos, advice from me and a forum where they could get support and answers. Despite several e-mails asking for feedback or any news I still have heard nothing back. Nada, nil, zip.

This came as no surprise to me although I find it a bit rude of them to not even acknowledge my e-mails but this comes back to my title of the parts of ten.

I have taught over one thousand CCNA candidates and they can be trended in the same way. Be it home study, howtonetwork.net or an expensive CCNA course. Out of every ten students about two will pass. On some courses you will have six pass the exam and on others none will pass. When I mean pass I mean they don’t even attempt the exam in fact. I find that those who fail on their first attempt become very determined to pass on their second attempt.

What happens to the others or more to the point what happened to my passionate and determined group of ten? Well since they never bother to reply I can only guess. Things get in the way, one day they have a study session planned and something happens at work or a family member is ill and they don’t study that day. The next day they have two days worth of studying to do. They manage one session and tell themselves that they will catch up over the weekend. They miss another before the weekend and then it is too late.

Force of Habit

It is just like the person on a diet eating just one cake which turns into two. Before you know it, the norm is not to study rather than study. The massive gravitational force of former habits pulls them irresistibly towards the TV and their mission to pass the CCNA once and for all and have the chance at promotion, their own business or a break into the IT industry is dead.

It is a sad thing for me but after being in the police for 12 years and running IT courses for 6 years I have learned a lot about human nature. We are creatures of habits and if our habit is not to do then it will take a big effort to change this to doing. Funnily enough, once this new habit is formed then that feels like the norm and not to study feels uncomfortable.

I am not judging anyone here but at the same time I often find myself sitting there shaking my head at how a grown up can often have the same attention span and discipline as a five year old child.

The Secret

Do you want to be a CCNA, CCNP or CCIE? There is no secret if you do. Study every day until you have reached your goal. Study when you feel ill, study when you are busy, study when your friends are inviting you out for a drink and study when you don’t feel like it. This is why one of my friends is currently making $24 000 per month on a Cisco design contract. He sits in a nice cosy office with friendly people and does what he loves which is to design Cisco networks. He is a short stroll from the coffee machine and goes for a nice walk in the fields outside during his lunch.

I wish you all the best in your studies.

Paul Browning

 

CCNA Cram Powerpoint

Thanks to Faruk Marmaniat who converted my Cisco CCNA cram guide into powerpoint format. Here it is for download:

http://www.howtonetwork.net/members/programs/fileinfo.cfm?id=40&action=display

If you are Struggling with your Studies Then Read This

If you are feeling overwhelmed with your studies or just feel that the information is simply not sinking in then I know how you feel, I felt the same way until I found out my learning style

About Me

Out of a class of 30 students at school I was probably just below average. When I stayed on for advanced exams aged from 16 to 18 I was probably among the lowest graded students. The average grades were B and mine were around a D.

I did feel at the time that I was just a bit stupid or perhaps a slow learner. I was only staying on at college until I was old enough to apply to join the police anyway so exams were not that important to me. It wasn’t until a few years later when came to do a part time law degree that I had to pick up the books again. For law there is an incredible amount of reading and case law to learn and be able to recite from memory. You need to know names, dates of the case and which court it was heard in (along with the result).

I actually did well in the degree because I stripped everything down into very small chunks and just wanted to know the facts and why it had been decided that way. Once I knew the how and why I would read the more thorough text books if I wanted to go into more detail.

For the CCNA I made the mistake of trying to drum everything into my head, a bit like a brute force attack. It worked eventually but I’m convinced that if I had taken some time to work out how I could best learn and understand the content I would have saved myself weeks of effort and frustration.

About You

I have probably never met you and probably never will but I can tell you one thing about you and that is you are unique. You have pretty much the same DNA as every other human being but your personality is unique and also your learning style. I’m afraid that schools are all designed to cater for one particular learning style which of course may not be how you best learn.

If you are finding studying hard then it isn’t because you are stupid so don’t bother trying to tell yourself that you are. You have the same amount of brain cells the rest of us have give or take a few million. The problem is that you haven’t worked out how to best use your brain to serve your needs.

How You Learn Best

Schools tend to teach by rote where you are given a set of information either in a book or on a board of some sort and then expected to read it over and over again until it finally sinks into your brain. This style works really well for about thirty percent of the population. If you are not within that thirty percent then I’m afraid that as far as the school is concerned you are educationally subnormal.

Learning styles can be broken into three main areas:

Visual – need to see it done and prefer vivid colours and shapes

Auditory – need to hear how it works so prefer verbal communications or to read out to yourself

Kinaesthetic – need to actually do it to understand so a hands on approach

or a combination of all three and even in a certain order. For example, I need to have something explained to me (preferably with diagrams) and then I would need to do it myself several times over in order for it to sink in. When I worked at Cisco I couldn’t troubleshoot a network without drawing it out on a piece of paper first. Many of my colleagues didn’t need to, they just logged into the equipment and quickly built up a mental picture of the network.

My point here is that if you are trying to learn in the wrong style for you then you are really going to struggle. If you prefer to be a hands on person then start with the labs or do a quick read of the theory and then do the labs. If you are a visual learner then watch the videos of the labs, make some notes and then either read up or do them yourself. If you are more auditory you may want to read the notes out to yourself (voice in your head) and then do them.

Most people go through their entire lives never understanding themselves or what makes them tick. I have taught over one thousand Cisco students and most of them were trying to learn in the wrong way. This is why I have had such massive success with my Cisco CCNA training courses and get better results in two days than most companies get with two week long courses.

Moving Forward

Take some time to think about how you have learned something in the past. It could be how to fix a car or build a PC. What did you do naturally? Did you read a book on it, get somebody else to show you and explain it or did you watch a video or look for diagrams? These are all hints as to your preferred learning style.

Thanks

Paul Browning

 

How to Fail Your Cisco CCNA

I have helped over 1000 students study for thier Cisco CCNA, CCENT and CCNP exams. I have seen people from all walks of life including builders, van drivers, plumbers and even some elderly people study and pass their exams. I have also seen a very large amount start their studies and then stop. Some of them take years to stop, having the occasional burst of enthusiasm only to fall back into old habits.

So, if you are going to fail your CCNA exam I think you should do so in style. This tongue in cheek article will help you fail in spectacular style because if you are going to do something, do it well.

Step 1 – Get a temporary case of enthusiasm

It’s no good if you go and get all excited and actually follow through with lots of regular study. The best way is to decide that you are going to pass your CCNA, CCNP and CCIE within the next 12 months and then become a Cisco consultant earning millions every year.

Step 2 – Spend lots of money

Order lots of books, pay for lots of expensive DVD sets from companies who sell stuff for every certification available. Keep your credit card out and don’t put it back until you have spent at least $2000 on Cisco CCNA goodies. When they all arrive make sure you leave them in a box on your shelf should you ever need to refer to them they will be within arms reach.

Step 3 – Go on a two week course

See if you can book yourself on a nice long course. Make sure there are lots of boring lectures presented by a trainer who has never seen a live network in his entire live. Also, make sure your trainer teaches at least three or four other subjects such as Microsoft, VMware and Linux. Also, check that he is a CCNA or lower.

The idea is that by the time you have reached the first Thursday you will have forgotten everything you did on Monday and Tuesday.

Step 2 – Take advice from lifes inadequates

Visit lots of discussion forums and ask advice from people who have no clue what they are talking about. Make sure you seek out those people who seem to spend hours on the forum every day because they have nothing better to do and who collect certifications like rockers collect tattoos. In fact they spend most of their day sitting in a basement somewhere bored out of their minds wondering where it all went wrong in their lives. They can’t wait to tell you what to do with your IT career so they can feel good about messing your life up as well.

The best advice you will receive is to do some useless qualifications first such as A+ and Network+ and not to even dare consider taking the CCNA until you have served three years penance on a helpdesk somewhere.

Step 3 – Fit your study in around your social life.

Make sure you can still see all your favourite programmes and don’t alter your social life in any way. Always be available on the phone if any of your friends or family need free tech support setting up their home broadband. Also, make sure your wife or partner is very demanding and bullies or threatens you every time you say you want to spend an hour or two studying.

Step 4 – Avoid live Cisco equipment

This is very important. If you are going to fail your exam, make sure you only use router sims or Packet Tracer. You don’t want to be wasting your time using real Cisco kit when simulators will do the job.

Step 5 – Don’t dedicate 2 hours per day for study

Probably best if you just flick through the book now and again or watch the odd video. That way you can stretch your studies out for years rather than pass in about two months.

Step 6 – Don’t take any practise exams

This is very important. You don’t want to use practise exams to gauge your level of knowledge in key areas, what a waste of time that would be! Just roll up to the testing centre and take the exam.

Conclusion

Failing the CCNA exam takes careful planning and a lot of effort so please make sure you do the job properly. If you want to actually pass then please re-read the article but do the opposite.

Paul Browning

FREE Cisco Exams

You can now resit your Cisco exams for FREE if you fail on your first attempt. Just visit the below page at Pearson Vue to find out more.

http://www.pearsonvue.com/cisco/comeback2009/

On Failure

Shocking to hear I know but not everyone passes their Cisco exams first time. I failed my CCNA first time and most CCIEs fail around three times before they pass. One colleague at Cisco failed five times in a row and at $1500 per attempt plus travel, rack time and study manuals he must have lost about $10 000 in total.

We all react to failure in different ways, we often beat ourselves up and kick ourselves for not being perfect. I’m afraid that at school we were all brainwashed to fear mistakes and to believe that failure is bad. We were punished with an F grade on our papers and fellow students looked down upon us.

The truth is that failure is a part of success. It is impossible to win at something without also losing. I have lost in relationships, business deals, job interviews, exams and a lot more but I still regard myself as happy and successful. I’m actually glad that some things didn’t work out actually because I have ended up doing something different and enjoying it.

Whilst it is not a particularly enjoyable experience to fail at something we have to face facts that we were not prepared or that some event outside of our control affected our performance. I have heard from several students that the router emulation software didn’t work properly in the exam which of course was out of their control. For my first CCNA exam, I didn’t really understand subnetting so I failed. That was in my control but I just took a chance that it wouldn’t be in the exam.

Moving Forward

When you fail an exam have a sit down and have honest chat with yourself. Did you give it your very best shot? Were you as prepared as you could have been or did you skip study days and take it on a wing and a prayer? What did you learn about the exam and yourself?

If you do fail an exam you have lost the money you spent on it and the time it took to sit it but in the grand scale of things, it wasn’t much to sacrifice. You will have had a chance to see what to expect during the exam, no doubt you will be asked some of the same questions next time round as well.

Next Steps

I would immediately book the exam for a couple of weeks away. You have built up enough momentum to actually take the exam so you can spend the time working on the areas where you need to improve. Don’t waste your time studying things which you found easy. If you can subnet easily then don’t do it, what would be the point?

If you failed dismally (under 600 /1000) then either something went very wrong or you were not prepared at all. Nerves to affect many exam takers. If you do suffer from anxiety then use the hypno track on howtonetwork.net downloads or get some relaxation tracks from a hypnotic inductions web site.

I don’t know anybody who has passed every exam first time and I have never been to a job interview where they asked me if I had to take the exam more than once. The exam is there to prove your knowledge for a particular role and once you pass it you will have proved you are up to the level Cisco require to carry out that role.

Best of luck with your next exam!

Paul Browning