Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Passed the Cisco BGP Exam

Well I just got back from taking the 'Configuring BGP on Cisco Routers' exam, and I passed! I attended the Global Knowledge class for this exam, and I used that material mainly for studying. The class and instructor (Al Friebe) were pretty good, however it was really just a basic review for my current knowledge level (filled in a few cracks here and there).

Overall the exam was decent, it wasn't too badly written, but not that great either. Several misspellings, and questions with answers that they try to trick you with grammar.

Most questions were ok, but one of the simulations was off-the-wall horrible. It was a scenario where you 'fix the broken config and verify', however the explanation of what was wrong itself was completely wrong. It was as if there was nothing to fix, as the 'verify by checking this' was true without any changes by myself!

Then of course they specified to clear the BGP session w/o resetting the session (after making an inbound routing config change), however none of the clear commands worked except the hard clear (soft inbound or route refresh). Very frustrating, and I ended up wasting too much time on it (lesson learned I guess). Because of the time spent on that simulation, I ran out of time right as I finished the last question, pheeewww!


Next up: the QoS exam. Already have it scheduled for August 11th. I figure it won't be too bad, likely very similar in difficultly to the BGP exam.