Anyway I’d like to hereby write down about my record of taking CCNP Route.
【Test Details】
Test Date Time: January 28th 2014 15:30-17:30
Test Duration: 120mins
Questions: 50 questions
Study period: 1 and a half month from Dec 13th 2013 to Jan 28th 2014
【5 Things you would want to know before taking the test】
1. Focus on 3 major routing protocols, and then you would pass.
This is my ultimate thought after passing the test. CCNP Route includes 3 major routing protocols (OSPF, EIGRP, BGP), route redistributing and path controlling, IPv6 and Internet connection etc…
My opinion is you may skip Internet part and Ipv6 part since Cisco will not ask you the details on these parts. If you are so confident enough on routing protocols and redistributing, you are ready to go. ※Note: this is when your goal is just to pass the test asap because your company requires you to do so.
2. Scenario questions are always the same?
This may be the case only applies to Japanese version of the test. But it seems like scenario questions in CCNP Route test are somewhat determined. Many of my friends recently took the test and all said they faced the same scenario questions.
Besides, the points in CCNP Route are easy to be guessed. After all, what are asked to answer in a test are actual problems we network engineer or our ancestors have faced before. Below is the list of frequently asked scenario questions.
・OSPF-EIGRP Redistribute
(there are OSPF area and EIGRP area, two area cannot communicate each other. Use redistribute to fix it as keeping the redundancy.)
・OSPF isolated Area 0 outage
(an outage occurred within OSPF area 0, and then some routers lost their routes a lot!! How can we fix it though another area?)
・IP Policy packet distribution
(A site has two ISP paths to choose. They want only html packets to go to ISP1 not ISP2, use PBR to make it happen.)
・EIGRP stub + summary
(There are R1 and R2 and R3. They communicate with EIGRP. Someone botched the setting and no more connections between them. What happened and how to fix it?)
3. You are allowed to use Tab-key and ? key
This is the most important thing I wished I would have known before taking the test. You can use “Tab-key” auto-fill-in system, and “?” during the test! That’s something!
I thought, of course because this is something we call TEST, we would not be allowed to use these fancy commands and be asked to put all commands in my mind. Cisco thinks more realistically than I thought it does.
If you are working with actual Cisco devices, you will never be banned to use these fancy and nice helps like Tab and ?. However, LPIC Lv1 asks you to memorize all the basic commands with their brutal options. Unrealistic.
So you can stop memorizing the commands with your flip card.
4. If you think they will not ask something, they would not.
Just as its title says, they actually didn’t ask any questions on routing protocols’ authentication, IP SLA, DHCP and IP helper address. They are actually useful skills which come in handy in some ways but I sensed just as many other CCNP holders did, these topics cannot be the face of the test.
5. If there is a list on your textbook, memorize it completely.
Opposite advice from the previous article. There are lots of “lists” on my CCNP Route textbook like OSPF neighbor status, OSFP and EIGPR packets types, OSPF LSA types, how BGP chooses the best path, IPv6 address types. If a list is shown on your textbook, memorize it all.
Please feel free to comment and share your opinions!
