I used to get totally confused by default gateways. I thought they were some advanced networking secret. Then I realized a default gateway is just like the front door of your apartment building. If you want to talk to someone in your own building, you just knock on their door. But if you want to send a letter outside your building, you have to hand it to the front desk receptionist first. Your computer does the exact same thing. If the destination IP address is outside your local network, it hands the traffic over to the default gateway router to send it out to the wider internet. Once I pictured it like a lobby desk, routing local versus remote traffic finally clicked.

Hello , I’m currently scoring 90%+ consistently on Boson ExSim and I have around 2–3 years of networking experience.
Do you think I’m ready to take the CCNA, or would you recommend studying/testing myself with other materials first?
For those who recently passed the CCNA, how similar did you find the actual exam compared to Boson?

I used to freeze up every time I saw a subnet mask question in my study materials. The long strings of numbers and weird math formulas felt like a trap designed to make me fail. I tried memorizing charts and borrowing random shortcut tricks from videos, but the second the numbers changed slightly, my brain completely blanked out. I felt like I was trying to solve algebra puzzles in the dark.

The breakthrough happened when I stopped looking at subnetting as a math test and started seeing it like dividing a giant pizza. Imagine you have a single large pizza that represents your entire network. A subnet mask is just the knife you use to slice that pizza into smaller boxes so you can hand them out to different tables.

When you change the mask, you are basically deciding how many slices you need and how big each slice should be. If you want more tables served, you have to make the slices smaller. If you want fewer tables with bigger portions, you make fewer cuts.

Once I started drawing out these little pizza boxes on scrap paper instead of staring at raw numbers on a screen, the binary math stopped feeling like magic. You do not need to be a math genius to get it. You just need to remember that you are always sharing a single pool of space and cutting it up to fit your needs. If you are stuck on this part right now, put down the calculator and grab a pen to sketch out the divisions. It changes everything.

J'ai entendu dire que ceux qui sont d'expression française peuvent avoir 30 min de temps supplémentaire a l'examen ccna. Est vrai ? Comment faire pour l'avoir ?

How can I learn the field of networks and be able to it? Who has experience and experiences me?

https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/question/0D5QO00002esVjk0AE/why-is-my-ccna-voucher-ineligible-after-doing-everything?t=1788245705530

Hello everyone, i recently passed security plus with 830 score, now im heading for the next step, i wanna take ccna to build a very strong networking foundation, and make my knowledge general not just focused on security, please share some tips, anything helps, where do i start studying and is there notes, and any famous person that teaches , in security plus i had json dion and these guys were good, idk now abt ccna, any tip is helpful.

I got an email from INE (mainly known for cybersecurity certs) going over some of the changes to expect from the CCNA. It said that the new CCNA will prioritize troubleshooting the concepts you are learning. AI will be a bigger part of the exam as well as an expectation of deeper analysis during scenario driven questions.

Is there any information available on the expectation of how much harder the new exam will be? I intend on doing the current exam but in the event something happens and I don't pass in time I want to have an idea of what to expect.

Additionally what are the thought on these changes? Should the exam be harder? on average people studying the CCNA put in roughly 300 hours of study time with estimates of the fail rate being over 50% already. Whether that's true or just hearsay remains to be seen.

However, for reference the LSAT (the test to be admitted to law school) has study time averages estimated between 150-300 hours. While the MCAT, (the exam to get into medical school) is between 300-400 hours.

Who would like to be apart of a CCNA study?

We can meet 3-4 times a week.

I found this out after someone responded to my comment in Day 28's Lab.

Let's make it a quiz so it's more fun. Here's the scenario:

You have 3 routers (R2, R4, and R5) connected to the same Layer 2 switch, so they are all on the same OSPF broadcast network.

Their IP addresses are:

• R2: 10.2.2.2/8
• R4: 10.4.4.4/8
• R5: 10.5.5.5/8

R2 and R4 are configured with normal OSPF settings. However, R5 is initially configured with a 5-second hello interval and this prevents it from forming an OSPF adjacency with R2/R4

So initially, the DR/BDR election happens between R2 and R4:

• R4 → DR
• R2 → BDR

Now here's the interesting part:

I remove the custom hello interval from R5, restoring it to the default 10 seconds.

R5 can now form OSPF adjacencies with the other routers.

At this point, R5 has the highest Router ID.

What do you think happens?

A. R4 remains DR because OSPF elections are non-preemptive, and R5 becomes DROther.

B. R5 becomes DR immediately because it has the highest Router ID.

C. R4 remains DR, but R5 becomes the new BDR.

D. A completely new DR/BDR election occurs, replacing both R4 and R2.

Be honest and comment your what you think is the right response is before you see the answer and its explanation.

I'll post the answer/explanation below. 👇

Because of my work schedule, I don't have access to a computer throughout the week, so my only option is to watch Jeremy's YouTube playlist and do the flash cards during my lunch breaks, and then do the labs on the weekends when I'm home.

Is this an acceptable way to study for the test? Or do I really need to do the labs together with the videos in order to get a solid undestanding?

Thanks!

So i just finished doing some boson studies, got 80+ on practice test. But the labs are weird to me, so it counts it as wrong because i did my configs different but in packet tracer my configs work. And i dont think it read as do this exact same configs, it was more like create this, do this.

What i mean is for example they did network statements for ospf while i put ospf under the interfaces after i created it globally. Or they tell me to do ssh and i add a username secret, login local, but they did it as a login with no username but i thought you need username to have ssh to work? Or another example i needed to do port channels but apparently i didnt call it was lacp, even though i did active standby and calling it is optional from what i googled.

Is ccna going to be like this? Where if i add a config different from their pre upload running config, im pretty much out of luck? I am scared of missing a lab because i did ip access-list instead of access-list or some shit like that and they just assume my whole lab is wrong. Do i have to just kind of memorize how boson does it, and replicate that in the test?

Any tips? How do you guys know when you overthinking it and over configuring the labs i guess. I hope ccna is more straight forward with what they actually want configured.

Hey guys,

Currently a telecoms engineer in the UK working with fibre, FTTP/FTTC, ONTs, exchanges, patching and broadband fault finding.

I’m studying for my CCNA and doing labs alongside it. My goal is to move into a NOC/network support or junior network engineer role.

Just wondering if anyone here came from a similar telecoms/ISP/field background.

Did CCNA + labs + your existing telecom experience get you into networking, or did you still have to go through help desk/1st line IT first?

I’ve also considered doing A+, but I’m wondering if that’s really necessary when I’m already working in telecoms and aiming specifically for networking.

I know the market might be a bit different as I’m in the UK, but would be great to hear experiences from anywhere.

Cheers!