I have finally taken, finished, done, conquered and passed my tshoot exam for CCNP Routing and Switching. I was such a relief! Just like the 2 previous exams, I was 2 months ahead of schedule. So it is possible to get your CCNA and CCNP R&S within a year. 

Arrived at the testing center 30 min before my scheduled exam. However it took almost 15 minutes before the proctor was able to set my up on my assigned PC. The blogs and forums were spot on, it is the easiest of all the exams. It is actually fun. Troubleshooting by pinging from hop to hop to hop. Comparing the configs from your baseline. 

I think I was able to finish the entire thing in close to an hour. One major bubu though, I have mistakenly clicked done in one of the Tshoot tickets completely getting a zero on that ticket. I bet it would have been a near perfect score if I didn’t stuff that up. 

At the end of the day, I got it. I am now a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) in Routing and Switching. Thank you to all my friends and people who’ve been there guiding me, praying for me. It’s been an awesome journey and I thank God, I couldn’t just do it myself…seriously.

Its assessment week for my cisco students for the next 2 weeks. It is also a way for us to gauge what the students body of knowledge and competency in terms of how they were able to learn for the last 7 weeks. The challenge I guess was the fact that we got students still coming in (newly enrolled) 5-6 weeks into the course. Not to mention staff whining about the system but not really doing something about it. 

I guess I am whining about whiners…

I gotta get those instructional videos up, I got my virtual machines, I got my wacom tablet (thanks to my fellow staff who gave it to me for free) bless you Shaun, I have my MS expression capture software and I am good to go. Just need to organise when to do them. Believe me there’s been attempts but so far I am not happy with them.

BTW, in 3.5 hours I will be taking my TSHOOT exam and will have to drive again for almost 2 hours to the Gold Coast for it. Just keeping up with tradition. I can always take it in the city (CBD) but whatever. That is probably the reason why I am up early. A bit excited because I am almost at the end of my CCNP R&S journey. 

A couple of weeks ago, Cisco released CCNP v2 exam. It will replace the current 642-xxx series exam by the end of January next year. Those who are currently finishing the series like me, don’t have to worry since everything maps out to v2. For example if you have done v1 of routing, you can still complete your CCNP by doing v2 of Switching and Tshoot.

This week is assessment week for my cisco students, I wish them all the luck. They’ll be going through assessment covered in book 1 ICDN1. The exams are pretty full-on starting off with a 2.5 hours practical build, followed by the theory and troubleshooting exam the following week. 

As for me, feeling a little confident with my studies and may decide to take my Tshoot (final exam) really soon. If that happens it will be way earlier than my target date. The next 2 weeks will be pretty slow since its assessment week so it will give me time to push for some review time. 

While going through my Tshoot materials I came across EEM or Cisco’s Embedded Event Management feature. Its one of those features that made me think “Whoa! this is awesome!”, what it does is you can automate monitoring and perform task triggered by events in your network. 

It supports 20 event detectors where you can create network policies that when triggered, actions will take place in response to a network event. You can create applets using the command-line interface or via a scripting language called Tool Command Language (TCL).

I created a simple EEM applet wherein if Interface fa0/1 goes down, IOS commands will be executed to bring the interface up again.

Just brilliant…