ROUTE Exam Study
Update
OK – this time I have finally got back in to the books and begun to really get in to the studying for the CCNP ROUTE exam. It can be hard to motivate yourself after long days at work but now I am committed to spending time reading and configuring devices to learn the exam objectives of the CCNP ROUTE.
I have only just discovered the GNS3Vault site. This site along with the configuration examples that Rene has posted on to YouTube are really excellent for giving you hands on experience and real life lab examples. I would recommend checking it out.
Once I get some labs under my belt I will try and post a few variations of my own up here.
ROUTE Exam Prep
At Last!
After passing my SWITCH exam last year, I am now finally ready to put in the work and prepare for my ROUTE exam. I have been putting it off for a long time now but this post is a step in the right direction. This time with the blog in place already, I plan to update posts as I learn about things. When I studied for the SWITCH exam the blog didn’t exist so I had to manually write pages out in HTML which took a lot longer than I liked and resulted in me putting up very little info about the stuff I was learning while studying for the SWITCH exam.
Tools
I have now got my books and I am currently reading through the official certification guide and watching the video mentor CD. I have also recently purchased a Cisco 3550 EMI switch to add to my lab which I will use to work along with the video mentor examples.
Network Documentation
Network Diagrams
The form of network documentation that you are all probably most familiar with is network diagrams. These are a great way to record information about your network layout. A typical network diagram will include network devices, key IP address information and interface information. Network diagrams are also very useful for planning out new layouts or scenarios that you intend to implement.
One of the key things about the network diagrams is to keep them up to date… easier said than done 
An out of date network diagram is as much use as a router without an IOS image!!
Wireless Authentication using WLC and Radius
Wireless LANs
This post is all about wireless networks. I am no expert at all when it comes to wireless networks using Cisco kit. Up until recently, the only experience I have had with wireless LANs is setting up home wireless networks. I had only briefly come in to contact with Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers but have never really had any chance to play with them and configure them… until now.
I had a requirement to setup a wireless network that used multi factor authentication for connection to the corporate LAN. In summary, a WPA key would initiate the connection to the network and then authentication would need to happen using a RADIUS server. A SSL certificate would be required for the default web authorisation login page (so that users don’t see that pesky warning about the site being unsafe). The user would then have to be in a certain group to be granted access to the networks resources.
After struggling along and seemingly getting nowhere I created this forum topic on networking-forum.com. A few people assisted me and gave me some great guides to follow. After piecing parts from these guides together I eventually got to where I wanted to get to. The details are described below.
Cisco Study Materials
Text Books
For many people learning Cisco and networking the place to start their learning is by reading text books… Seems like a no brainer as they are written by experts and claim to contain the key components and topics to pass the Cisco exams. I thought this way until I recently read this post by Jeremy Stretch on his blog packetlife.net.
Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with using text books to learn things. Most of the ones I have used and mentioned on my forum are excellent but I would agree with Stretch and say that these books are probably not the be all and end of of knowledge on the topic you are studying. They are great for giving you the knowledge in the first place but, as Stretch mentions, there are loads of other options out there.
Cisco IOS DHCP Config
DHCP
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is a protocol that allows you to automatically configure the settings of the devices on your network. For a device such as a laptop to be able to communicate with other devices on the network it must first have a correct IP configuration on it. This can be done by either manually configuring the IP settings or by using DHCP.
To reduce the tasks carried out by network administrators DHCP is often implemented. This allows for auto configuration for all devices that join a network. It will then also store these details in a centralized location which can be very helpful when troubleshooting. With DHCP, you are able to exclude certain addresses from being allocated and also able to manually assign a DHCP address to a device using the mac address of the device to bind the IP to that device.