ISCW/ONT Certification

Although Cisco are removing the ISCW/ONT exams at the end of July this year, it is stil a worthwhile content to cover outside of basic certification and for those still planning on sitting it.

With that in mind, I'll also be covering topics within those subjects and tagging them as ISCW or ONT. I haven't done a full breakdown of the new cert as yet so I can't confirm what is moving to Route/Switch/Tshoot and what is being dropped altogether as they bring the cert more in line with the new version CCIE route/switch.

Personally I think it's been slightly short sighted of Cisco as the ISCW and ONT gave good foundations on subjects from other areas of study, without you having to study fields like CCIP,CCVP or CCSP. Many people taking the CCNP will already work in the network admin field so useful though the troubleshooting will be to some, to many of us its a null topic (or should be) but missing out on some of the other data is a shame just to make the certs more linear.

That said, I haven't seen the full breakdown of the new exams so hopefully most will survive.

To save confusion later down the line, I'll dual tag the posts for the subject area and the old/new certs so make it easier for people to see.

Topics covered in ISCW/ONT are :

IIN/SONA - Hierarchical network models.
Cable
DSL
Wireless
Entry level VOIP
Frame mode MPLS
basic MPLS VPNs
Quality of Service
AAA
Router hardening
Basic SNMP
VPN (ipsec/gre)
IOS Firewall (CBAC)
IPS/IDS (basic router version, not dedicated devices)

So keep following folks! as ever, suggestions/requests can be submitted by comment or email.

Emulating Cisco Routers.

For many people, the biggest challenge in learning Cisco when you don't work with it on a daily basis or have access to often quite expensive hardware, is practising your new found skills and cementing them in your brain.

For the CCNA in many respects it's not too bad as a 1600/1700 series router will cover a lot and shouldnt' be too hard to come by and basic 2924 12 ports aren't too expensive if you can find them but higher up the chain, like the BSCI and BCMSN (for the more advance spanning demo's) and to an extent just general pottering you need a lot of kit.

Fortunately, help is at hand!

I'm a big supporter of the GNS3 toolset. There are a number of tools out there but I often fall back to this one. It works on Windows and Linux (i've not investigated the Mac side of things) and it allows you to build networks in a Visio-esque environment, then configure the devices as if they were live routers.

Even better you can add it to a PC's NIC and connect it to physical networks, effectively extending any phsyical labs you may have.

The software can be found at http://www.gns3.net/ but please note it does require access to the full Cisco IOS file you plan to use per device.

For those of us fortunate enough to work for an ISP this is not tricky, for others you may have to "shop around" on the internet and look in some of the usual places , which naturally none of us condone but know are there.

I'll run some more posts around using it at a later date!