BSCN before or completely skipping ICND, a problem??

[Santa]

This is a question for those who have been through both tracks. I am in a small dilemma right now because money is spent but the ICND course that it was spent for was so sucky the entire class walked out. Now there are no more course until Feb next year at a competitor site (Babbage and Simmel) but I do not want to let the money go to Finance black hole when they have allocated it to me.

Will BSCN be much trouble without having gone through ICND? I know how to configure most of the router options but I have not touched VLANs or switch operations. Will there be any switch training in BSCN? I got bored with the 2500 series routers anyway in the class we did have an I also have my own 7507, 2600, 1700 routers to play with on top of some 2900 series switches.

 

[Routerjunky]

"was so sucky the entire class walked out"

I find this somewhat disturbing, so I?ll address this item first. Cisco has Cisco certified training/courses. The certified courses are taught by a Cisco Certified Systems Instructor (CCSI). The CCSI needs to be certified in the course they are instructing to be Cisco Certified.

You should be able to verify ahead of time, with the training partner, the course is in fact a Cisco Certified course and instructor. There are a lot of training vendors offering Cisco training, not all of them are the Cisco Certified courses. I?ve lost count at 15, on the Cisco certified courses I have attended, and I have not had a bad experience yet. *Knocks on wood*

Skipping ICND to go to BSCN, only you can answer. Some things to consider:

What are your goals? Are you going to start down the certification paths?
Or Are you getting training to maintain your current position or to make yourself more marketable?

How valuable is instructor lead training to yourself? Or Can you teach yourself? Such as reading a book or practicing hands on labs from fatkid.

I would go to Cisco?s web site and look at the course description and objectives, and then assess how well you understand the subject matter covered in the ICND course. Based upon that information, you should find your answer.

Cisco training courses link

 

[Santa]

I am worried about VLANs primarily . I think I can figure out simple things like router inferface changes, and setup and TFTP transfers. There were a few things such as his supposide "breaking into the router" in case we forget the password deal which was supposed to happen at the end of class but since we didn't get that far I wonder if its little tid bits and tricks like that which aren't taught in the books.

I ended up having to buy the Cisco training books and I do belieave eKnowledge is certified but I won't be going back there anymore.

I don't know what happened for the guy seemed like he knew what he was talking about but wanted to teach the course without anyone asking any questions is not my idea of learning.

Beyond the ICND and BSCN any of their other training track worth wild to take? I was looking at the CIT but training money will be running out soon this year because of security, firewall, and cluster training. ack so much things so little money and time.

I feel confident in most of the ICND basics but was worried about the little gaps that perhaps only someone who has taken it might be able to say I need. I want to go as far as certifying for CCNP but I am in no rush. CCSE, MCSE, and perhaps a security cert is also in the works but I will probably work on getting CCNA and CCSE first off.

 

[Routerjunky]

I dont recall covering VLANs in any depth, in ICND. Most of what I learned about VLANs comes from the BCMSN course, cutting over our 1500+ node network from Bay to Cisco, and the Cisco Press book Cisco LAN Switching (ISBN 1-57870-094-9). The book is sound. If you have access to it, you will find chapters 5 and 12 useful
for VLAN information. In other words, if VLANs is your sticking point in passing over ICND to take BSCN, I would skip ICND and pick up VLAN information from BCMSN or the Cisco LAN Switching book.

Biggest gotcha I can think of when working with VLANs, is when connecting a Cisco switch to your network, by default it comes up in VTP domain server mode. The issue here is if the switch just plugged in has a higher revision number than the VTP Domain server, its vlan database will overwrite the VTP domain servers database. Hence, if the newly plugged in switch only has 3 or 4 VLANs configured and the actual network has 30 to 40 VLANs, guess what, you just lost connectivity to all VLANs which the new switch does not have configured.

Some steps to prevent this are: 1) configure a VTP domain password 2) Change the VTP Domain to something other than the default 3) Pre-configure the switch to come up in VTP client mode.

Other head bangers for VLANs: 1) Trunk port configured in wrong native VLAN 2) One side of the trunk is configured to pass the VLAN traffic needed and the other side is not 3) Along the lines of number 2, make sure all trunks in the path to the switch which a node a VLAN is configured in, is passing that VLAN information 4) Mismatched Speed and Duplex settings of trunks


I agree, the Security track would be worth while.