Good morning! Woke up a little early so going to try to knock this out before work. Excited about the day and waiting to see how the day goes. Hopefully, we will resolve issues.

This one, we sort of covered in the last post but this is the first part of the equation in PPP connections. I haven’t seen BRI or ISDN talked about much in other questions so for now, we are going to skip that.

As you can see, I’ve chosen 3 when it says 2. For starters DR for packets not listed in the routing table is kind of confusing for some reason. The point being it sends packets to another if it doesnt know where its going. a Stub network, per this, is a network that has only one connected default gateway. So this is starting to click a little better but I still have a ways to go before totally understanding it. Man, this one is hard lol

So there’s no two ways around this. This test is hard. I’m currently in the 50% margin and really trying to get this done soonish. How soon? Umm well I paid for 3 more months of the VCE player so in that amount of time, ideally. There are lots of other things going on though so its going to be a lot of pressure. This week I’m doing blog posts then hoping to get 150 questions done over the weekend. Given that there are 450 questions on the entire test, this isnt going to be the sum of the questions I missed going through the entire test bank but you know, im going to try. Time for questions!

• Link Control Protocol – In computer networking, the Link Control Protocol forms part of the Point-to-Point Protocol, within the family of Internet protocols. In setting up PPP communications, both the sending and receiving devices send out LCP packets to determine the standards of the ensuing data transmission.
• NCP – Network Control Protocols (NCP) used to negotiate optional configuration parameters and facilities for the network layer. There is one NCP for each higher-layer protocol supported by PPP.
• LMI – Local Management Interface is a term for some signaling standards used in networks, namely frame relay and Carrier Ethernet

Im going to be honest here, this isn’t super helpful info in 2021. Regardless, its on the test.

It’s almost painful to read all of that but I did. Will I remember it? I Hope so!

No idea why it doesnt work in data centers. https://networklessons.com/cisco/ccna-routing-switching-icnd2-200-105/introduction-to-apic-em

Ok im going to sleeeepppp!!!!!

Well its Tuesday. I got a flat at work and I think its resolved. Not looking real good for job prospects after this. Nothing is really showing up on LinkedIn or CareerBuilder. Thankfully, my boss is great but offers no long term potential but is happy to announce when you have a flat tire. Awesome. Anyway, this sandwich is awesome. It came from Arby’s.

Lets get to the questions though.

I wanted to take a closer look at this but again, its diagraming an output. It may be good to know what all these codes are before testing. Regardless of if I’m within acceptable testing range. Anyway, in this case it means router.

I really just guessed on this one but I don’t think I really understand what CDP is.

There is a lot to know and generally I find that Cisco is not the most helpful when it comes to documentation. However, this page is great: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/article/cisco-discovery-protocol-cdp-x

I’m kind of confused as to what it looks like when you configure this or how you configure this which could be in a later question about the output of some configuration. This entire page is helpful, as in, it has information on it but not this specific scenario and im going to be honest, this is actually usefull information and im pretty sure I can figure out group config at some point if I put the time into it https://www.routerfreak.com/how-to-configure-hsrp-on-a-cisco-router/

So if im understanding this correctly then the brief output displays it more, organized? This is kind of an odd revelation but good to know, none the less.

ok, what the fuck. I just pick the one that looks maybe right? There is no chart here haha

PErsonally I like the real Sabbath but whatever.

Happy Monday. I’m having a great time and trying to learn a little about electronics. It seems overwhelming but you know, money and time. Thankfully its not that expensive…so far I’m at about 100 dollars into it and have,,, a working guitar and a pedal that will not power on for what ever reason. I think the pedal not powering on is a result of a grounding issue but I could be wrong. The LED doesn’t power and as long its wired right if your getting power at all it should light. The pass through signal works fine though. This is for guitar pedals. I play a lot of doomy type stuff. Basically I like music that sounds like its for stoners in space. I don’t really enjoy marijuana that much but I do for some reason like that type of music. Maybe it was in a past life. Obviously, none of this is going to help me pass CCNA but having a basic grasp on analog circuitry seems like a good idea. So I bought a kit for 50 dollars that’s a clone of a pedal I like and it turns out it has lots of issues. For starters it didn’t ship with a 9v DC in jack that would actually securely fashion to the enclosure. Which tells me, the guy that sells the kit, is kind of just an asshole. He also doesn’t answer questions haha

This is kind of tough because the answer D relies on assuming 100 is the default. Ok, real world you are for sure going to be relying on context clues but its still hard to figure out exactly what’s going on and honestly I think its a mix of “the test” and the fact that I am still learning. The P is confusing

This is interesting to note that some routers appear to show what this in the output text.

Not really much to know here. Other than the “Cisco three tier architecture”? The fuck is this haha

Well thats good to know that it exists. It also makes sense. as in… routers are core, switches are distro and access is users. Amazing.

I got this right but still its good to look at like, wireshark drops

So here is what I think about this. In network administration this could be a helpful defensive tool to learn what people or doing or on the off chance you getting errors with DHCP that seem to be networkwide. This whole concept of hacking being cool because of a TV show is very naïve and frustrating. Your going to want to read this but you will find it also, over the top yet helpful to learn a lot about this from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol

Lets define these, I’m not sure what they are.

Lol why the hell would you do that? This makes zero sense, a LAN on fiber. ok. Token ring network makes zero sense in 2021

This is actually interesting. I’m not sure how it works but it does exist and anytime you see Circuit, its guaranteed to be a wan

Synchronous optical networking (SONET) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) are standardized protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams synchronously over optical fiber using lasers or highly coherent light from light-emitting diodes (LEDs). At low transmission rates data can also be transferred via an electrical interface. The method was developed to replace the plesiochronous digital hierarchy (PDH) system for transporting large amounts of telephone calls and data traffic over the same fiber without the problems of synchronization.

What the fuck, root switch location to be optimized? I’m not sure I understand.

Honestly, this one does not make a ton of sense as it doesn’t say ST “protocol” or anything like that. None of these really say anything about a router location. Which is super weird. and as you can see PVRST isnt even listed on this diagram. It may be a bit of information overkill that we just have to remember. Anyway, here is some for sure southern doom. Maybe I’ll post a loud ab demo of my strat and SG. The squire strat sounds better haha but i still play the SG more? Who knows why. Only god frens

Its Friday and its kind of a slow day at work producers.

So its time to get to work on some blog posts and so forth. Anyway, might have this done in the next month or two if I really honker down. I might not take that route though. 2 months is a realistic goal.

We are going to have to figure this one out.

Here is what I don’t get this link local thing, on a PC that has no outside connectivity so how does this work in a router?

I understand this but I’m not explaining but basically it has more than one interface and is communicating with a specific one and routing traffic to it? I think I’m understanding that, maybe.

you see this says 2269571 and then it says 90 in the explanation? This is confusing because it seems to be telling me its using 3 protocols and none of them make any sense other than “this one is best” so why not just use that one? I’m confused about this for the moment, but ok.

This says ‘not’ which in fact changes the answer. Not that I really knew this very well but sometimes, you can take a good stab at thing. It’s also good to know the actual order of sla, sla schedule and icmp-echo

This one is actually weighted by the following metric, which you will need to have memorized.

Actually I still don’t understand why the subnet doesn’t need an associated mask. Is this like AI figuring it out? I mean, anything that has that IP in a network? So I can just shoot any ol’ number in there. cool….really im still highly confused by this but its fine.

What are my context clues here for EIGRP?

Oh yeah, those letter things. Ill have to keep reminding my self of that. Next question what the fuck is this load balancing thing??? ohhhh ok, if they have equal “actual equal values as determined by the algorithm” then it “load balances” which, ok. Right. I mean, it works on a larger scale.

Thats all for now but I do have 2 more folders to go through so I might do more later today.

I’m making great headway, learning a lot and now im into the familiar groove of getting through the VCE. Honestly its easier than Security+ but I wouldnt go so far as to say that the material is easy. It is a smooth transition into this after going through the books so I’m feeling well prepaired to at least begin to study the material covered. I realize that seems confusing but you kind of have to drill down with this stuff. Like Dante’s layers of hell.

So let’s break down some of these slides

I pulled this out but you know, there isn’t much to go over here. RSTP is worth mentioning that Rapid Spanning Tree Spanning Protocol is what it stands for and I can promise, I will read that later and be like “I have no idea what that is” but I actually do know what it is. And now I know that there are two port types to use, backup and alternative.

This seems pretty straight forward as well. It’s nice to know that you can abbreviate. in Cisco CLI.

This is one of those “hot standby router protocol” where if you remember that acronym then you golden.

After having gone through several more questions, I realize this to be true. This answer continues.

It took me a while to understand this one but I started to understand that BF is in the routing table and of the options the only routing table missing mac is the C. So I suppose this does make sense.

I walked through these and they look pretty good. May do another post today. Not sure. I have 3 more sets of 5 questions to cover from a lot of 125 questions I went through over 2 days. So clearly, less than the running at covering 1/2 of all questions on the blog. Learning a lot and most of it is somewhat repetitive.

Well, its Friday, I’m at work, at a temp job and its going fairly well. Two other jobs called back and said they decided to pursue other candidates. Which is ok but seriously is no one capable of hiring a network admin in Atlanta? What a weird town sometimes. Less weird than others but regardless I’m entertained. I like living here and I’m focused on studying though running slower than previous years for fear of educating my self out of a job. Which is kind of odd but its ok. Some people still seriously do not think that I actually study for and pass exams and dont simply cheat on them. I have no idea why this is. Probably because they tried to take them and failed because they are extremely hard. I have passed 5 exams without failing in a row. Hopefully, this will be my 6th. We will see. I havent checked into pricing but I don’t think its cheap.

Anyway haha, its 300 dollars. So you know, its a good idea to make damn good and sure your ready. Honestly, I think I’ll be fine if im about 95 based on the material ive seen so far which is around 25-30 percent, so long as im in the 95 percentile.

300 is a ton of money but I mean, its worth it for sure.

This is literally just facts so there isnt much to know here other than 96/8 for HT

I almost got this one right but then went for the additional switch. Which was incorrect. And again HSRP is a high availability thing that stands for Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) 

you would think that Dynamic Trunk would be a mode but I guess it is in the name. but it looks like ‘trunk’ is also in the answer….Maybe what they are getting at is that turning it on with out a mode puts it in dynamic trunk?

Looks like it is trunk but not dynamic trunk. tricky but ok.

I’m not sure I understand this at all. It makes zero sense to me at this point. I may come back to it and find out.

This is some Security+ type of stuff that would require a lot of info and we might have to loop back around to it. This was not covered on Security+ to my knowledge.

This is slightly confusing. The answer B is not that confusing but the odds of .1 and .2 being in different subnets, seems possible but not likely. Reguardless I kind of understand the point of it being “possible”

That’s all for now. Here is some Nazareth (doom metal dudes love slightly obscure 70s rock. Guess why) I basically get down on doom and love anything from Texas (DJ Screw). No idea why.

Its Monday and I’m making progress. I’ve also come into possession of a guitar amp (because it was unreasonably cheap) and thus had to buy a cabinet to run it into and now have an Orange 2×12 cab in my room which is much larger than you might expect. The guy is shipping the head in the next day or two from Louisiana so hopefully it wont take long to get here. I need to order a speaker cable (like a guitar cable but thicker and made slightly different) and im not sure how long it needs to be because I cant decide if I want to put it on top of my bookshelf or on my dresser. Really I think the dresser would look cooler but its farther away and would be annoying to run a cable to from my guitar. Wireless recevers are not super expensive these days but because of that I think it might be better on the book shelf. Regardless, I’m excited about it.

This study stuff is going pretty good though. Learning a lot. I’ve got 100 questions done and am hoping to get another 50 done today as its kind of a slow day. My retention level seems like its currently above 50% but I’m thinking over all it will still be in the neighborhood of 40-50% at the end of the pretest. Which is no where near where I need to be to pass but I will for sure pass this thing one day. I feel good about that.

This whole wildcard mask thing is, wild.

There is lots of math here but basically an OSPF wildcard mask looks like the opposite of a regular subnet mask. Why? I’m not sure because they keep talking about binary which has nothing to do with the logic, which is what I’m looking for. But regardless its the same answer that its the inverse of the subnet mask.

I’m not really sure what HSRP is…lets start with that

Looks like the answer is missing the group-number situation but I’m confused about this slightly but I think I’m starting to understand.

I mean, I had no idea on this one and was thinking it would be good to post but as you can see the answers … are in the answer… as to what the lights are.

This doesn’t make a ton of sense but I’m ok with it. After that “will” shouldn’t there not be the word “not”?

I’m not exactly sure what NTP is. I should check on that.

Ok, so it lets the other routers know what time it has and sends that out through 0/0

Also, the -8 pacific is simply the regular label for pacific time so the minus -8 is kind of added information?

Thats all for now. No way am I getting 50 questions done today but maybe 30?

Well its friday, I had another interview for a temp job yesterday and I think it went it ok. No real complaints but for some reason people have a hard time believing that I actually acquired certs through study. The point being I work hard, get good customer service stats and the economy isnt great and I have trouble finding stable long term employment but keep plugging away at these certs to be told I haven’t done things that I have in fact done. It’s fine, do what you want but im going to sit here and keep studying and working hard regardless of how it makes someone feel that I like to work and learn. Not sure what is so complicated about the fact that im a smart hard worker that engages well with end users and doesn’t like to play games but prefers to drive results and provide solutions on any scale. Whatever, there’s a pandemic and everything is absurd. Like education does not mean any thing yet they require it but at the end of the day someone’s ego or emotions around a situation is more important than the end results. For example, what does the word helpdesk mean and what is a specialty helpdesk and why did you pick different terms for them. Was it so you could belittle people and make your self feel important? Regardless of if im super polite and ask questions pointed in a direction of respect or cut to the chase with bottom lines, ive found the results are usually the same with that type of personality that isn’t looking so much for results driven architecture but seeking some sort of personal validation that has nothing to with corporate (which often times, if actually results driven and people focused, looks somewhat like small socialist communities validated by Marxist ideals) goals.

I really like that quote and this came up from last year as a flash back on my Facebook. I don’t know, I guess some people take existence seriously and pay attention to what’s going on.

Well, lets get into some questions

Still slightly confused about the EIGRP stuff but I’ll check into it. So lets look at that and the show IP output.

Cool, this actually covers both. The guy kind of hotdogs a bit without getting right into detail but its still very helpful helpful.

This is much more helpful, overall but he does cover (lol) what EIGRP is. Going to have to eventually make like a diagram to understand those.

Im confused as to the difference here between speak and active but this looks like some OSI BS. I may or may not need to really figure that. We will see how many questions have this on it. You know its like drilling down thing I do. Obviously, I’m putting more research time into these than the previous ones but you dont want to chase rabbits too hard just yet.

My question is why does this even exist? if every router has to have the same number for this process why does it matter at all? This is simply a bit to be misconfigured. Its helpful to start understanding the CLI. I’m not sure how to say that. When I say ‘the CLI’ I mean the nomenclature or verbiage around the output and the displays of the commands.

This is probably a google as the answer output is slightly confusing to me. actually this is more than slightly confusing. This is hella confusing. So far no luck on finding more info on YouTube, so I’m going to move on again and maybe come back to this but I did find this helpful. The Cisco docs on this are Cisco docs and this is a situation that appears to require some amount of experience with the command in a live environment.

http://docs.ruckuswireless.com/fastiron/08.0.60/fastiron-08060-commandref/GUID-FFF41BCD-16F2-4C44-8438-FC628BEF2553.html This website is cool but this state thing does not explain the full/dr thing while later showing that in the output of command haha

leaving me to think the world is /null and without value of even 0

This is really easy if you remember the layers lol, which obviously I didnt.

lol ok “All = Application Layer People = Presentation Layer Seem = Session Layer To = Transport Layer Need = Network Layer Data = Data Link Layer Processing = Physical Layer” This is blessed assurance to me.

Anyway, lets keep making the same mistakes and being the same type of people and wondering what is going on. All the while not realizing the root cause is insecurity that we that try to fix by feeding our egos and caring nothing for truth. That’s all for now. About 100 questions into this. It’s learning and its hard haha but its do able. It’s, you know, a new thing that requires a lot of diligence to understand.

This is going pretty good. I’m learning and getting the hang of things. On a pretty basic short term project that may last a few months. No one is really sure but I got to come up with something perm or there may be some problems with, you know it costs money to live and stuff. Which is problematic for some reason. Any way, lets do some studying before I start talking about average income scenarios for the certs that I have. Really liking this one and the studying, is going.

I dont really understand this at all to be honest. Route one goes from nothing to the second router. Assuming that takes all traffic in the attached vlan that its acting as a gateway for and pushes it to R2

Ok, this is actually where subnetting, starts to click. As in, see why would you make a route for every destination in a subnet when you could just target the vlan and then send all traffic to that router. This is actually interesting but realizing that R1 is a default gateway is a helpful start.

ok lets take a look at the basics before we look at what the answer says the basics are and realize, this is a lot of text to read on a test… the second part isnt really related to learning. So there are a lot of terms here and they all kind of mean the same thing. Which is a thing in computers for some reason haha

This I found super helpful!

This is also helpful

I almost got this one right

Ok, the fuck is a trunk? I think I sort of understand but not really.

So basically its a link between routers? I think I’m good with that. That was really all there was to cover here.

Basically RIP sucks so classful must mean its terrible. IE doesn’t pass through subnet masking info. I may have to come back around to this but we will see.

But honestly, thinking not.

Also its EVH’s birthday and im wiring up a guitar tonight using his schematic. You wouldn’t think this would make a big difference in tone but it actually does. This photo is hilarious just FYI. There s some basketball back stage business you may not be aware of. A music man?