Two days are left before my TSHOOT exam. I feel confident about it since I have a first taste of it. I read feedback given by test takers that it is a a nice experience. I ought to be ready for both scenarios. If I succeed, then I know that all my limiting beliefs about CCNP were false. Then, I’ll know that I was prisoner of my false beliefs. And if I fail, then I should remind myself about all the courageous people in the IT world who spent a lot of money and time in the pursuit of their certs. Either way, I’ll learn something, and that’s my own choice. I made my choice to enhance my career, no matter what the sacrifices are. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear” - Mark Twain

I gathered these notes to mentally prepare my Troubleshooting methodology on the exam day:

• Follow the path
• divide and conquer
• Move the problem
• Bottom up
• Top down After watching Kevin Wallace Bull’s Eye videos and INE Tshoot Exam Demo video, the best method is to use a combination of Divide and Conquer-Bottom up/Top Down-Follow the path. There’s not really one single method that will lead to finding where the problem lies.

This is a collection of possible troubleshooting tips I collected over my studies. They are organized by OSI layer:

Enabling Loop Guard on an interface level does not enable it for the whole system. In fact, a “show spanning-tree summary total” is a bit misleading in this case.

To configure loop guard on an interface:

“loop guard default” is disabled because we haven’t issued a “spanning-tree loopguard default”. Easy:

verify that QoS is enabled:

Enable QoS:

At this stage, all interfaces are by default untrusted. This means that any frame with a priority value will be remarked as CoS/IP Precedence/DSCP value = 0.

Trust CoS values of incoming frames. Useful for trunks:

Trust CoS values only if an attached Cisco ip phone exists (conditional trust):

At this stage, the trust boundary moves to the IP phone. Any priority value of any attached PC frames is untrused, thus remarked with priority 0.

In this lab, I learned the following:

• configuring a HSRP group on physical interfaces,
• testing how a PC can reach a remote subnet through a redundant gateway, by configuring its default gateway as the HSRP virtual address,
• testing how the second router becomes Active,
• testing interface tracking.

For interface tracking, at first, I thought there was a problem with the lab. Topology: configure interface tracking and a decrement value: When I shut down ser0/0 on R2, I expected R2 to become Standby router. But reality bites: Then I checked on R3. R3 is still Standby, not Active ! So what’s wrong? Here’s what Cisco says: How Object Tracking Affects the Priority of an HSRP Router

Score is 822. Passing score was 790. It came after four days of reviewing IPv6, Route maps, BGP,… In the beginning of the test I was taking enough time to read and answer the questions. However I lost much time in my first lab simulation. The scenarion wasn’t clear to me. And each time I had to click on the console button to reach a router. And I was not seeing changes in the routing table so it confused me a lot. I began to worry about my score. And I got my second lab simulation. And immediately after, the third. I told to myself: “man, what did I do to Cisco to treat me this way?” So I had almost 38 minutes to do the third lab sim and 32 questions ! Besides, the test supervisor was tearing papers on her desk. And the other guy in the room was complaining about the bug in his exam. I was going to scream. At the end, I was almost flipping through the questions. I finished the test. The test supervisor told me “congratulations!”.