Finally, I passed. I feel so happy that two years of discontinuous study and a lot of frustration paid off. I deserve this nice recognition :) Now, I can tell that it takes a LOT of patience, focus and self confident to pass not only this exam, but the whole track. Why? because many guys fall in the trap of cramming questions in order to become CCNP fast. I began the CCNP journey in 2009. I only became CCNP in 2011! certificate tracker Some guys may tell me that I was not serious about my studies. But here are my arguments:

  • I only have access to L2/L3 switches in production network,
  • I did not cut off my leisure activites because I still did not have enough discipline. So I lost considerable amount of time during weekends.
  • I had to print study material by myself, since Cisco books are not available in my country, and I had to pay 10% of my salary for each book!
  • I used to love to sleep :-) ,
  • I don’t deal/haven’t dealt with most of the technologies I learned,
  • I feared failure, since the exam costs 35% of my salary. So I mentally delayed studies and exam schedule. By the way, from now on, I’ll schedule my exam date while I’m half in my studies.
  • Limiting beliefs: I can’t stress that enough. Along the studies, I often wondered “what will I use CCNP for? How am I going to keep it active? what type of jobs could it land me to?”… you ought to work on eliminating them. Trust me, they made me feel depressed and frustrated often times.
  • GNS3 crashes a lot :-) In the publicly posted official TSHOOT topology, we have a DHCP client (client1) on vlan 10. Broadcast traffic from the client to the DHCP server should be allowed to pass through DSW1 and DSW2. So where to put “ip helper-address”? it depends on which switch will take the HSRP Active state. First, check the spanning-tree instance on vlan 10. Then, see which is the HSRP Active gateway. If for example DSW1 is the Active HSRP, then “ip helper-address AddrA” should be put under “interface vlan 10” of DSW1. Beware that AddrA is the ip address of R4 interface. And this value is:
  • 10.1.4.6, if DSW1 is HSRP Active gateway,
  • 10.1.4.9, if DSW2 is HSRP Active gateway. This took me an hour or so to figure out, maybe because I’m a little tired :-)