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CCNA class rant

yeah, it's generally a waste of time IMO.

It was my first exposure to networking though, so is it a bad thing? Not at first, but as you go on and once you get to the EIGRP and OSPF parts of the 2nd semester (CCNA 2 = Routing) you start to feel like you can possibly push further and learn more quickly the rest of the stuff, that's basically how I approached CCNA 3. In October, I finally got tired of the teacher doing nothing more than just reading back to the class EVERY damn word of the online material and I decided to do all the CCNA 3 Packet Tracer labs in class instead of wasting my time having stuff read back to me that I can read for myself online. I feel that my teacher's class is a waste of time. But however, me and a classmate who feels the same way approached the head of the IT department, we're going to try to get him to open up a lab (we have several, and sometimes 1 or 2 are unused) for us at night while we have class so we can go in there and get far more hands on experience than we currently do. I feel that will help us infinitely more than listening to my blowhard of a teacher regurgiate every damn word of the online text.

I feel like I learn better by DOING, I didn't even read the chapters on STP, Inter-VLAN routing or configuring wireless (chapters 5, 6, and 7) I just downloaded the packet tracers and just did them instead. The first lab of every chapter just gives you the basics of what the chapter is all about, the last packet tracer or the one before last is usually a troubleshooting lab (I like) and if the one before that is Tshooting, then the last one is a complete integrated skills lab of what you've learned up to that point. The chapter 7 labs covered everything we've learned in CCNA 3. I thought that Routing was harder to learn than switching. Switching seems easy compared to routing.

The main problem with learning routing is static and default routes for me, I have everything else down cold, I need to brush up on static and default routes (mainly understanding where the next hop goes and how and why to configure a static route in a certain way)
 
I wasn't prepared for the way that Cisco would present the questions and how they word things. I froze up on the first question and you can't skip and come back. It got better the further I got into it. The second test I wasn't so nervous because I kind of knew what to expect then.
 
They word things kind of ambiguously sometimes. There's some questions on the tests (from my CCNA course) that are easy and obvious, THEN there's others, those little simlets where they show you a diagram or an output and ask you to diagnose or explain what's in it. Sometimes there appears to be 2 correct answers, and sometimes you have to guess which one is more correct. There were a couple of times over my CCNA experience that I've answered a question that was factually correct but the course material said otherwise. In CCNA 1 or 2 I can't remember, I came across a question like that and told my teacher, and he had the whole class give the same answer in the middle of the test because of how it was worded.

It's bullshit like that that I don't like, BUT you do gotta admit it can help prepare you further when you're out there, because the real world really does throw you curves, not softies
 
Yea, it's theoretically a good thing if you have no experience. I had very little experience as well, but I couldn't put the time and effort into it for two years, I'd have gone crazy. You will actually learn a lot more with the Cisco Academy than I did just from the books and vids. The downside is that you spent two years and you still come out with no real world experience, which means you're no more valuable to an employer than someone who did it in two months.
 
I agree with what you're saying from an objective perspective, but if you had access to the online material AND Packet Tracers, you'd seriously have learned everything I have, only difference would be that you wouldn't be tested on it (unless you got some tests from somewhere to practice on?) untill you actually took the CCNA.

Now, while I think the testing and all does me some good, because it gives me a lot of exposure to Cisco's testing process and procedures. It's nice to have an idea of what to expect.

I do feel in hindsight that semester 3 has been a huge waste of my time. Switching is NOT hard to learn, all you basically do in CCNA 3 is understand how VLANs work, set up VLANs, set up port security on switches, learn about how to sticky MAC addresses, set up access to VLANs on trunk links, and allow access on certain switchports, and how to set up VTP, and switchport trunking. Spanning tree protocol is in there as well but isn't that complex. Inter-VLAN routing wasn't hard, it's basically adding a router on a stick configuration to the topology, or allowing inter-VLAN routing across switchport links.

The first lab in CCNA 4 covers everything I learned in routing and switching, it combines 3 routers, 3 switches, 3 computers, and a web server into the topology, nothing really complicated. The only thing that tripped me up was configuring a default route and propagating it using OSPF, and for some reason I think there's a bug in Packet Tracer, because even after configuring priority, bandwidth, and shutting down the interfaces on the routers and bringing them back up to force OSPF election, it doesn't seem to want to work. OSPF itself works, but the election process does not. I think it's something wrong in Packet Tracer, because it shows my lab as 99 percent complete except for the default route.

Anyway, seems like all that's left to learn is frame-relays, PPP, ACL's, Security, Teleworker Services, IP Addressing Services, and Network Troubleshooting (I'll probalby like Security and Network troubleshooting here).

I'm beginning to think you guys are right, I should just learn all this shit, get it over with, do all the packet tracer labs, do as many labs as I can with hands on equipment, and then just get the test over with.
 
You don't think STP is complex? Just wait. Maybe old STP isn't complex, but once you get into RSTP, PVST, CST, MST, etc, the shit gets pretty annoying.

And, PT is very buggy, it blows. You don't have to be in the Academy to have access to that stuff. This is the internet, there's very little we don't have access to.
 
well, we learned a little about each STP version, but we didn't go into hyper detail about it, we configured RSTP, PVST, but I don't think we did MSTP at all, and I think we only touched on CST and didn't go in depth on that.

PT is buggy, I agree. A classmate couldn't get a WEP password to work on his Packet Tracer even though he implemented it the same way the lab said and the same as the rest of us did.

The password worked but PT didn't grade it like it did for the rest of us.

That's why I prefer the open labs, so we can work on actual equipment, if something fucks up, it's more instructive to learn how it fucked up and how to unfuck it on actual equipment.
 
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