100 questions, took me 32 of 120 minutes allowed, and I walked out
with an 839 and my spiffy new CCDP :-)
The exam has the following sections and I've listed my scores
1 Intro to Internetwork Design 62%
2 Campus LAN design 62%
3 TCP/IP network design 88%
4 desktop protocol design 80%
5 WAN design 76%
6 SNA design 71%
7 security issues 0% (!)(more on
this below)
For prep I used the Cisco Press CID book and the boson.com
pretest. I spent about a month after completing my CCDP just letting my
brain cool off then I crammed for the CID in about two weeks.
The BCMSN material does an excellent job of covering the Campus LAN
design portion, BSCN takes care of the TCP/IP network design, and BCRAN
covers a bit of the WAN design questions.
I studied for the CCNP 1.0 track and I took the ACRC exam last
spring and missed it by one question. I mostly took it to get that stuff
out of my head so I could work on switching and I didn't bother to
retest but I feel that working through the Sybex ACRC book and the IPX
and Appletalk labs in the CCIE Lab Study Guide really carried me on that
portion. The information in the Cisco Press book is NOT I repeat NOT
sufficient - you really need ACRC level skills to get by this thing.
There are a number of questions on Stratacom stuff in the WAN
portion. On pp367 of the Cisco Press CID book you will find this URL
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/wanbu/82/switch/sysm/sysmch01.htm
Learn all of the magic incantations on this page and you will be
protected from the ATM demon during your 640-025 exam :) I am a big fan
of mastery rather than rote learning but in this case the boson.com exam
proved invaluable - their questions are very, very close to what you'll
find on the actual exam and you can practice test your way to a passing
grade if you need to do so.
As gross and as useless as it is for 92% of the people working on
this certification, you *must* know a little bit about SNA.
I had done workstation support in a huge SNA shop so it wasn't
entirely foreign and a long time ago (5+ years), for reasons I forget, I
purchased and read a large portion of Communications for Cooperating
Systems - OSI, SNA, and TCP/IP. This book is a psychotic piece of
IBM backed propaganda which argues for the subordination of TCP/IP and
the OSI model in the perfect (I use the word in the facist sense) SNA
world. If you can shield your mind from the IBM borgification procedures
its actually not a bad read if you want to get some background on SNA.
FWIW it is ISBN 0-201-50775-7 and my copy was 'updated with corrections'
in 1992.
If you don't have the aforementioned marvelous tome of IBM wisdom
the CID book covers a lot of what you need to know.
The 0% on security was quite a suprise and I still wonder if it
isn't a misprint from the test software based on my final score- I was a
script kiddie way back when before there was even a word for it and I am
very used to looking at other's stuff with a .... probing eye. I guess
the mindset of those that are trained to defend is a lot different than
that of those of us who took the Wyatt Earp route to getting our
sherrif's badge.
Good luck, good studying, and if you're tired of people 'borrowing'
your linux box take a look at www.openbsd.org - its the best script
kiddie repellent I've found so far.
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