Cisco finally has announced what we’ve known was coming for about 6 months or so….an update to the CCNP Exams available starting March 10th, 2010. The new exams are simply called ROUTE, SWITCH, TSHOOT, with the latter not available until April 30th. So, if you’re working on your CCNP, you have until July 31st to finish using the old exams: BSCI, BSMSN, ONT and ISCW. The new CCNP offers a nice, new path for Cisco CCNA® certified network engineer and will provide you with a solid foundation for those interested in the Cisco CCIE® R&S.

There are two nice benefits about the latest exams: you’ll spend only $450 instead of $600 to get your CCNP (we’ll see how long that lasts), and you now get 120 minutes instead of just 90 to complete them.

Cisco has provided four various paths to achieve your CCNP, depending upon how far along you presently are with your CCNP Studies and exams. You can find the page describing each of those four paths here.

There are some interesting changes in the courses that will definitely affect the way that I’ll be teaching the 12-day bootcamp. First, the ROUTE and TSHOOT courses have some very cool e-learning lessons that you can only get from a Cisco Authorized training company. This means that if you do not go to an authorized bootcamp or class, you will not get said e-learning modules and yes—the information in them is absolutely vital to meeting the exam objectives! I’ve always wondered about people who claim they’ve passed the exam by just reading a book or using brain dumps, but now, I no longer will. In the new Cisco World, without attending an authorized course, getting the information required to pass will be next to impossible without doing something really shady—something that honest people with well, brains will realize is just not worth the risk. Cisco is not known to be the least bit forgiving of ill-gotten certifications! I am not saying you can’t self-study, it just seems that Cisco is making it harder to do so. Inside the Cisco Authorized kits will be a CD that allows access to the all-so-important material. So, how can we pass these exams without the new curriculum? Beats me.

Okay—that said, the ROUTE part of the CCNP provides you with information and labs on how to plan, configure, and verify the implementation of complex enterprise LAN and WAN routing solutions, using a range of routing protocols and securing routing solutions to support branch offices and mobile workers. There are more than 7 hours of extended e-learning outside of the classroom needed to meet the exam objectives.

The SWITCH part of the CCNP gives you with information and labs on how to plan, configure, and verify the implementation of complex enterprise switching solutions, using Cisco Enterprise Campus Architecture. The exam objectives also cover securing integration of VLANs, WLANs, voice, and video into campus networks with switches.

Lastly, The TSHOOT part of the CCNP supplies you with the information and labs on how to plan and perform regular maintenance on complex enterprise routed and switched networks, plus use technology-based practices and a systematic ITIL-compliant approach to successfully pull off complex network troubleshooting. I’m really interested to see what Cisco will use from ITIL in this exam. BTW… This course is all hands-on labs and has 9 hours of extended e-learning lessons.

With all this in mind, I really can’t say the CCNP will become any easier to attain, that’s for sure. The writing on the wall is that it’s going to be harder to instruct the course effectively and harder for the students to pass the exams unless they have some serious study and hands-on lab time. So if you are trying to finish your CCNP or wanting to get your CCNP, you’d better get with it. The bar is seriously rising soon!

Cisco has video information regarding these CCNP updates found here.

While we’re all waiting with baited breath for the new exams to be available so we can finally get the skinny about what’s going on, be sure and check out www.globalnettraining.com for some sweet New Years’ special offers from the only place that delivers the highest quality Todd Lammle Cisco Authorized training!

Cheers!
Todd Lammle

Taking off from where I left off last month….There are < 10% of the reserved blocks from IANA left to allocate, which means there is only about twenty-six 256 blocks. At this rate, the allocation of all addresses will happen on September 23, 2011. This is actually 17 extra days then I reported last month.

But wait- that’s only about 626 days from now….and when I wrote my last blog around Thanksgiving, 30 more days have passed- time is running out quick.

Also remember in my last blog I told you that a new RIR policy was created in 2008 that tells the IANA “When you’ve just allocated the last of six /8 network blocks, give us the remaining five unallocated network blocks!”, so right now we only have nineteen more block to hand out before this happens!

Looking back, It would have been helpful if the original designers didn’t reserve so many addresses to begin with when allocating IPv4 addresses. Here is the breakdown (remember that each /8 represent 16,777,216 addresses!):

• Sixteen /8’s for multicast use. This is probably the most useful reserved address space, but this is still more reserved addresses than are typically used.
• Sixteen /8’s for some unspecified “future use” that never happened…
• One /8 for local identification (0.0.0.0). Cisco had also reserved this range for router broadcast use that never happened.
• One /8 block for private use (10.0.0.0/8) – this one is actually helpful, and not too wasteful at all.
• And here’s a head scratcher for you…14.0.0.0/8…Something about public data networks, but I’ve never seen this used, and we never will either.

• And let’s just end with my personal favorite: 127.0.0.1/8. Now who was the genius that thought of this beauty? 16 million+ addresses wasted just to test your local IP stack. Nice.

• And the addresses ranges from 240.0.0.0 on up are reserved as well in RFC 3330 for some future use that we’ll never see as well.

Now I am no math genius, but if you take all those /8 addresses reserved (not counting the 240 through 255 addresses, which is a lot more addresses!) and if you multiple them by 16,777,216…well, now that’s a lot of reserved addresses. 603,979,776 to be exact, and considering that we only have about 318 million address left to allocate (to IANA & RIPE) worldwide – for the rest of our lives – this just shows how wasteful the designers of the first RFC’s were. And just as another reminder: we need about 190 million new addresses a year – and that is in this bad economy too. What happens if we get another rebound in the economy worldwide?

Sooner or later the unallocated address pools will run out for each RIR which means that life of an IPv4 network will be harder and harder to maintain, and certainly more expensive! Just try and buy some /28 or /29 addresses for your small company or home business and see how much the prices have already sky rocketed!

If this exhaustion problem hasn’t already made you very aware that you need to start deploying IPv6 products and services as soon as possible, then nothing will change your mind at this point.
So, what are your options? If you are an IT professional, get in an IPv6 class and just start learning some basics. If you are running a routed network, put together a test bed of routers running dual-stack routing and get some hands-on experience.

As for Cisco, my CCNP certification class is doing more and more IPv6 configurations every month now, and I have heard that Cisco is going to go even deeper into IPv6 even at the CCNA level. So at a minimum, get a book and start reading up on IPv6…it is in your future!

In the meantime, be sure and check out www.globalnettraining.com for some end of year specials and where you’ll find the best and only Todd Lammle Cisco Authorized training!

Cheers!
Todd Lammle