Study Tools

I’ve become aware of some tools that I find quite useful for studying, and I figured I’d pass them on. The first is freemind, an app used for making mind maps, and the second is mnemosyne, a program that is used for making flash cards that has an algorithm to show you the cards you get wrong more frequently than those you get right. The former is a good note taking and general studying tool. The latter is great for pure memorization.
Since I started getting my teeth into Routing TCP/IP and the BSCI Exam Cert Guide, I find that mind mapping can be helpful to organize the information I have in my brain after reading. Doyle and the BSCI Guide combined for 140 pages on EIGRP. That’s a fair amount of info to remember passively, and I know that it will get worse with OSPF. Mind mapping is one of several tools you can use to help set the information more permanently in memory and it provides a great review tool as you get closer to exams. You can easily test your knowledge by collapsing nodes. The key is how you organize it in the first place. I find that even just organizing the information takes some time, but it forces you to understand how things relate to each other, and the process helps you remember.

There’s also an application called MindBerry which can import mind maps from Freemind, so that you can have your mind map with you wherever you are, making it an invaluable study tool. I hate wasting time, and this will allow me to make better use of the time I’m on the subway commuting to work. I don’t have this program yet, but when I upgrade to a new blackberry in the near future, I will definitely be getting it.

EIGRP DUAL finite state machine and the query origin flag

I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for a useful blog post. You should have a copy of Doyle’s Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 to be able to really follow this post, as it refers directly to figure 7-7 in that book. I am not attempting to explain everything that Jeff has explained. I just want to clarify what is going on in the figure. Jeff and the people at Cisco Press have graciously given me permission to reproduce the figure in this post.

copyrighted by Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights are reserved.

Now, maybe I am a little slow, but it took me a some time to wrap my head around this one. First of all, you need to look at both the Figure 7-7 and Table 7-2 together (the figure in this post is mislabeled because it is from the First Edition). When you first look at the diagram, all you see is a series of circles and ellipses with arrows pointing around and between them. You see references to input events. You see circles with text in them. It’s all very confusing. To make sense of it, you have to understand what the diagram is trying to represent.

When a route goes in to an active state, it can either get stuck in active, or eventually return back to a passive state. The diagram is illustrating the various input events that can cause a route to go from active to passive, vice versa, or to stay in its current state, and it shows how DUAL keeps track of the state with various flags.

Looking at the diagram, there is only 1 passive state. Passive is good. When the route is passive, r=0 and O=1. Everything is working. However, there are 4 different types of active states where: (r=1, O=0), (r=1, O=1),(r=1,O=2),(r=1,O=3).

To understand, look at the bottom left circle and the ellipse below it. What the ellipse with the text IE4 and the arrow around it is really saying is that “if we receive Input Event 4 (any input event other than last reply or a query from the successor), we are going to stay in an active state where r=1 and O=0. As long as we keep receiving IE4, we will stay in this state. However, if we receive IE11 (Last reply received; FC met with current FD), then we will return to a passive state. If we receive IE9, we will become active( r=1,O=1). If we receive IE10, we will become active (r=1,O=2).

It’s that simple. If you have any corrections, don’t be shy. I’m just learning this stuff too. FWIW this level of detail is probably overkill for the BSCI exam, however I’ve decided to study in such a way that I’m almost ready for the CCIE written by the time I finish my CCNP. That means i’ll be spending as much time in Doyle’s book as the BSCI Cert Guide. The extra detail and complexity will hopefully give me ideas for useful posts, so you don’t have to spend too much time reading about what kind of cheese I like.

Brillat-Savarin = best cheese ever

Trust me and try it. It is absolutely fantastic. Buy it here: http://www.artisanalcheese.com/prodinfo.asp?number=PC-10090

Anyway, I started studying for the BSCI today. I read chapters 1-4 in the official BSCI cert guide. For the CCNA, the Cert Guide by Wendell Odom covered the material very well, with a good description of troublehshooting, the various show and debug commands, etc. I find the equivalent for the BSCI to be lacking, however. Fortunately, I already have Routing TCP/IP by Doyle and Carroll, so my routine will be to read that, and then read the Cert Guide. Doyle is much more comprehensive, but then it should be, because it is a CCIE level book. I’ve just started reading the section on EIGRP, but I flipped through it and it seems to talk about things that were completely avoided by the BSCI Cert Guide. The Cert Guide may or may not be good enough for the exams, but I figure there’s no harm in some extra knowledge right now, as my goal is to do the CCIE once i’m done with CCNP. I would love ot do the CCIE written by the end of the year. I will probably do CCDP as well, since it is only a single extra exam.

Anyway, I am trying to pick up the pace again. Hopefully work won’t interfere too much.

CCNA done

I just got back from the ICND2 exam with a score of 945. I didn’t feel that it was any harder than ICND1, although I had less time to answer more questions compared to the ICND1 exam. I felt that I had to go fast, and at times didn’t check my work as well as I would have liked, particularly with anything related to subnetting. Regardless, the ICND2 book by Odom prepares you well.

I have to say that that night I was kind of freaking out… I just didn’t have time to review. I had originally rescheduled from Tuesday to get an extra couple days of review, but it didn’t work out like that. I made the decision yesterday morning not to reschedule again. I got home late and finished reviewing the book at around 1am , and then did a practice test. It was the first that i was doing for ICND2, and I got 2 frame relay sims.

I have to say that Boson sims are really lame. I can’t imagine that people actually use these things for training purposes (real equipment or dynamips, or a combination of the two is the only way to go imo). Anyway, I read the question and…. nothing. It just didn’t make any sense to me. It wanted me to make a full-mesh frame relay network work so that all the hosts could ping each other, and it specifically said not to change any ip addresses. The scope of the question limited what you were supposed to change in the configuration, but the configuration was practically blank. None of the IPs were set on any router interfaces. There was no routing protocol configured on any of them, etc. Anyway, after scratching my head I clicked show answer and based on that it seemed like the configurations of the routers for the sim were totally wrong, because it listed only a couple ospf commands to get everything working, when in fact you would have had to configure everything from scratch. I clicked next to continue with the exam and got another frame relay question with exactly the same problem. Boson needs to fix these questions. They somehow expect you to make things work without IP addresses…

I finished the test and didn’t do so hot, probably because i was tired, so I ended up taking the day off of work so that I could review before the real test and go in with a clear mind. Some people would say that if you’re still reviewing the day of the test, you’re probably screwed. I feel I’ve learned things well, but with cisco exams there are always little bits of trivia that can come and bite you in the ass. I ran through the boson practice exam again right before the real test. I skipped anything with subnetting though. I don’t have problems doing the math and they tend to tire me out if i’m trying to do them fast.

Anyway, I’m on to BSCI now. I like the routing stuff so I think that should be a fun course. Maybe the blog will get a bit more intersting then. I just felt like everything was so basic at the CCNA level that it wasn’t worth writing much about. For anyone that’s wondering, there’s nothing really surprising on the CCNA exams. Read the books, make up your own labs with either real gear or dynamips, practice subnetting math if you’re bad at it, and don’t worry about it too much. The exams really aren’t very hard.

So I took ICND1

I had a rough day at the office. I got in to work and the internet was down. We have two links, but for various reasons services are segregated between them for the time being. I’m also putting in an ASA soon and I only want to screw around with the network configuration once, so i’ve been holding off. Anyway, our ISP told me it would be 30 minutes, but when it took longer than that I decided to move stuff to the other link. Once I get the ASA in place I’ll set the two connections in an active/passive configuration. This still creates problems for my asterisk server though, and I haven’t really thought about a solution yet. It will probably involve SNMP traps and some scripting. Anyway, after doing a debrief on the morning’s troubles with the management, I left for my exam.

I had originally been planning to go home at around noon to do some review, so I left my ID there (I almost never carry an actual wallet). When that didn’t happen I had to go home, then get back downtown, and then run to the exam from the subway. Being my first exam, I wasn’t sure how strict they would be about arriving 15 minutes early. To top it all off, it was pouring rain and I didn’t have an umbrella. It was only a 3-4 minute run from the subway, but I was totally drenched, right down to my pretty shoes. When I got up to the testing center, I was only 10 minutes early instead of 15, and they told me the woman that administered the exam had left. They tried reaching her so that they could log me in, but it was looking like I was going to have to reschedule. I was actually happy about this turn of events. It had been a bad day, I was wet, there was no A/C, and I didn’t get to do my review. The woman returned their call as I was walking out the door. Anyway, I rolled up my sleeves so that they didn’t stain from the marker and that horrible erasable board (why can’t they give you a proper pencil and paper?). I finished the exam in 60 minutes and got a 944.

ICND 2 is on Tuesday, but I will probably reschedule to Thursday because I think I’ll end up doing over-time tomorrow night. I spent most of the weekend reviewing the ICND2 book but I want a bit of time to do the boson practice tests, and fix anything I’m not 100% on. I’m not going to violate NDA, but I will say that it was easier than the Boson practice exams that come with the ICND1 book. There was one question with terminology that didn’t appear in the book, but that’s all I’ll say about it. I’m too lazy to read the NDA and remember exactly what it covers, so I’m just going to limit what I say when it comes to the exams themselves.

Overall, I am behind schedule. I finished the ICND1&2 books about a month ago, but am just now getting to the exams. This is irritating to me, but I have had a lot of over-time at work in the past 3 weeks. I was going to quit my job on the 30th, but one last thing has come up that will make a good point on my resume, so I’m going to do that before I give my notice. Then I will be able to go full speed ahead on the certifications. Regardless of that project, As soon as I am done ICND2 I will begin studying for BSCI. I’d like to take the test before the COMEBACK2009 promotion is over on July 20th. That gives me about 3 weeks. It might be pushing it, but I have nothing to lose. If I believe others on how hard it is, I will probably fail, but I figure I can get through the book in a week, then do labs the second week, and review on the third week. We’ll see, but if I fail it’s not a big deal because of the free retake. Then again, if I’m really not ready, and think I don’t even have a shot at passing, I won’t take it. I’d like to go through the cert process without failing anything, if at all possible.