Friday, February 27, 2009

I am now getting ready for yet another exam and cert. I have gone as far as I can go with the linux certs, so I am switching over to the cisco certs. I will be starting with the CCNA which I am about to schedule for soon. I have read the entire todd lammle book for the CCNA, yes all 870 pages of it. I am doing a two week study cram with labs and exam sims to prepare for this test. If I pass, I plan on diving into the CCNP right away.

Here are my current certs.

CNA = Certified Novell Administrator
LTS = Linux Technical Specialist
CLA10 = Certified Linux Administrator
CLP9 = Certified Linux Professional "SLES9"
CLP10 = Certified Linux Professional "SLES10"
NCA-AS = Novell Certified Administrator - Enterprise Services on SLES10
NCA-ES = Novell Certified Engineer - Enterprise Services on SLES10
CLE10 = Certified Linux Engineer "SLES10"

My goals for the remainder of the year are the following:
CCNA = Cisco Certified Network Associate
VCP = VMWare Certified Professional
CCNP = Cisco Certified Network Professional
CCVA = Cisco Certified Voice Associate

If I can get two of my goals done for the end of the year I would be happy. The cisco certification exams appear to cover a lot of the fine detail that we as engineers or administrators tend to forget about. We know that large networks should be seperated with VLANS, and we know how to do this, but cisco wants to know if you know what the packet that goes between the switches has tagged on it before being delivered to the destination address when using a VLAN. What type of User ID is on that packet and when is it removed? The Linux certification exams that I took where all about putting your skills to the test and making things happen. Walking into a Lab and given a lab manuel saying make sure these 24 tasks are complete in 4 hours, and then doing it. No questions to answer, just show that you can apply what you know to real world scenerios.