Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Training: What Is Packet Switching?

Posted on June 7th, 2010

Cisco CCNA certification exam training means you need to learn a lot of new terms, and some of them can be a little problematic at first view.
To pass this hard certification exam,you definitely need to understand one term which is packet switching. The first question, of course, is “What is packet switching in the first place?” In today’s Cisco CCNA exam prep tutorial we will learn about this term.

Packets transmitted from “point A” to “point B” all have to arrive at the same destination, but with packet switching, they do not all have to take the same path to get there. If you and I are standing 10 feet apart and I want to throw a rugby ball to you, I’ve got some options. I could bounce the ball off the floor to you, I could throw it directly to you, or I could send it up into the air to you. Packet switching is pretty the same thing – packets will take different paths to get from source to destination, but the result is that all the packets arrive at the destination. Then they are then reassembled to take the form of the original message.

Packet switching may sound a little odd, but this is the most efficient way of transporting the data. Frame Relay is a packet switching technology, as is X.25, and both of these standards are very efficient.

When we have packets that must arrive at the destination in the same order in which they left the source, packet switching is not the best choice. For this situation, we’ll need to use something like circuit switching, and we’ll discuss that in tomorrow’s Cisco CCNA certification training article!

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Tags: CCNA，Cisco CCNA，Cisco
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8 Things to Help You Pass CCNA Exa

Posted on May 29th, 2010

I’ve seen many people failed on their CCNA exam while CCNA is the most basic exam of the Cisco certification series.

This is because most of the exam candidates didn’t prepare enough for the exam, got nervous at the exam and failed due to minor mistakes.

I have my own successful way to prepare for the exam, I’ve collected many things to help me pass the CCNA exam.

You may or may not agree to me, yet I got a pretty good score at the exam, only got 1 false answer.

I don’t mean to show off or anything, but my point is anyone can get this score if you prepare properly, so here is my 8 things to help me passCCNA exam:

It is natural to get as many resource about the exam, but too many information can seriously damage your brain. The key is to get the right resource to learn from and focus on them before you decide they’re not enough and search for more.

1. BOOKS

I like the work of Todd Lammle, he explains the materials in CCNA exam with easy ways to understand.
Although books are good but the problem with books is that you can get tired reading them all day long, so I figure I need some other resources.

2. VIDEO TUTORIALS

I highly recommend video tutorials from CBT Nuggets, especially the author Jeremy Ciaora, great video series.
The video is quite expensive US$ 399.00 for the CCNA Certification Package, but I’m telling you its worth the money.
In the video you can watch configuration of true Cisco devices along with the explanation, which Jeremy Ciaora did a great job in explaining the topics.
Video tutorials are great but sometimes they don’t cover everything about the exam – due to the limited time I suppose, that’s why you also need the books to complement each other.

3. BLOGS/SITES

Browse the internetnet, find free exam questions that you can try answering, find out how everyone did the exam, how they succeed, how they failed, this can be a very valuable lessons for you.
Visit my blog often at http://networking-newbie.blogspot.com

4. CISCO SIMULATORS

You can get many free or paid Cisco Network Simulator from the internet, some are good, some have limited functions:

Dynamips – free router simulator using command line interface (no GUI)
GNS3 – GUI version of Dynamips
Boson NetSim – paid simulator complete with labs samples
Cisco Packet – free simulator from Cisco

It is very important to get your hands on one of these simulators, you need to get yourself a hands on experience configuring cisco devices.
If you have more budget, build your own Cisco home lab.

As one of the readers commented on this post (thank you Robert Williams from certguard.com), I realized that using braindump softwares are illegal, I decided to empty the following two points:

5. QUESTIONS BANK

6. EXAM SIMULATOR

7. TIME

I can’t stress you enough about this, time is very important, you have to invest your time seriously to take the exam. The CCNA exam is not the kind of exam where you can cram yourself to study in the weekend and hope to pass in the following Monday.

When I talk about time, it also means that you have to practice yourself in answering questions as quick as possible, remember you have a very limited time and you can’t go back to previous questions you’ve answered.
So you need to know your self capacity and try to do the exam in a limited time and remember you’d be in a pressure when dealing with the real exam.

8. D-DAY PREPARATIONS

The d-day has come, you’re nervous as hell, plus you can’t bring anything to the exam class except for pens or pencils.
You’d be given a scrap of paper to calculate subnets or something else.

This is a good news, you do allowed to take notes on the paper when taking the exam. Before you get even more nervous, you can write down the keypoints in calculating subnets, for example 8th bit = 128, 7th bit = 64, 5th bit = 32, and so on.
You’d be presented with the exam rules, etc before taking the exam, you have to know well the rules before and take this time to write down your notes.
But remember don’t write down any configuration commands because they might think you’re cheating.

This method of writing notes can help speed your time in calculating subnets.
Why only subnets? I have to remind you that CCNA exam will test you heavily on subnetting, and in my opinion it will be the topic that is taking most of your time in the exam.

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