CCNA - Strategy To Troubleshoot The Labs

[ElijahBaley]

Hi

I just wondered what your strategy for troubleshooting would be.

In the CCNA you get two or three labs to complete with a recommended time allowance of ten minutes, when I took the exam a while back I think that I was lulled into a false sense of security, the task was something like "Assign these IP addresses to these interfaces on routerC & Enable RIP on all three routers below and verify connectivity"

I thought 'piece of cake' and set about calmly configuring the routers - it was only when I started to ping that I realised all was not well, by this time 8 or 9 minutes had passed and I started to sweat, I found some address errors on the other routers and corrected them and tried to match the router specifications to the running configs but by this time I was flapping as 14 minutes had passed, it did not help that the Flash sim was taking seconds to update and refresh and just added to this great sinking feeling that I had, on only the very first question of the exam that things were not looking good.

I had to give up and move on after about 18 minutes, I had two easy multiple choice questions then straight back into my second sim...

I think that my confidence was dented from here on and I remember struggling with some subnetting related tasks (which I had been really strong on during weeks of practice leading up to the exam)

As it transpired I failed the exam with 838.

I am now trying to rebuild my confidence for another attempt but I know that I will need to deal with the sims in a different way. What advice would you offer for dealing with these sims in the pressurised environment of a 10 minute exam?

Thanks in advance for any comments,

 

[dogbert2]

first of all, this is where you need to hone your troubleshooting skills (which only get better with practice). Last night in switching class, we couldn't figure out why a VTP server wasn't sending VLAN information to clients, until I had looked and assigned the names of the VLAN's to the wrong module in the catalyst 4000.

On the sims, you need to look at the question carefully, and see if one, you have all your interfaces defines, and with rip, you just need to define the classful network to advertise, since rip v1 doesn't include subnet masks in it's transmission.

Once you have one side, up, go to the other and repeat. I had to set up frame relay in my remote access exam, but I almost made the same goof by mis-reading what the question wanted. Time management is critical, since you know that simulations take more of your time, you will need to speed up on multiple choice questions.

On subnetting, you NEED to be able to almost do this in your head, or be VERY fast with pencil and paper. I don't know HOW many times i've given students lectures on the CCNA exam, and I tell them, you BETTER know how to subnet in your sleep. A couple of questions missed is often the difference between passing and failing a exam (I know, i've had it happen to me).