Skip to main content

I PASSED THE ICND1!

This is a Reddit post on the CCNA subreddit:

Hey guys! I did it! I scored 896/832 and passed the ICND1. I had limited money and couldn't afford to fail the exam. I am so happy that I cleared the exam!
I am a college student and travel 130kms everyday so I could study only from 8pm to midnight. I worked very hard for this exam.
In my country, people usually go to training centers and bootcamps to clear this exam, but they usually use dumps and don't teach well. I WANTED TO ACTUALLY LEARN. I needed the knowledge of these topics because I want to get into cybersecurity. So I took the Self-Study path.

I tried studying slowly from January of this year, but never really understood anything and just watched the videos for the sake of it. But when the Feb deadline news came I knew I had no option and became fully focused. I re-watched all videos and took ton of notes. Then moved on to the book and then finished with the practice exams.

What I used:
  1. CBT Nuggets: I cant thank Jeremy Cioara enough. He made understand the concepts well. But the most important thing is, he keeps you interested. Whenever I lost interest while studying a topic, I watched his videos and he teaches with so much enthusiasm that you enjoy studying.
  2. Official Cert Guide: This book is just golden. There is so much information in this book. If you study this from cover to cover, you will have no problem in passing. I made sure that I didn't move to the next chapter before completely understanding the previous one. The book is a bit dry and you get bored sometimes, but I tried to push through it and study.
  3. Boson ExSim: The number of people recommending Boson on r/ccna made me buy Boson.
Boson is the reason I was ready for the exam. The explanations on each question is beautiful. I scored 674, 722, 747, 771 and 845 on the 5 exams. I made sure that I studied my weak topics well and tried to see what questions I was taking too long answer and worked on that.

Overall I think Boson was equally hard as the real exam. But the scoring on the Boson exams were more strict. The ICND1 scoring was a bit lenient imo.

I used Packet Tracer. I never got to setting up GNS3 so I used only Packet Tracer and I think that was enough to study.

On exam day, I ran into problems at the testing center because my exam didn't load and it was delayed by 3 hours. But I kept calm and tried to not worry.

During the exam, there were some questions I had no idea about, but took my time thought about it and answered it. I had a lot of Drag and drop questions. I had 30 extra minutes in the exam because English isnt the first language in my country.

For the people who are studying: Understand Subnetting. DO NOT skip any topics, this exam doesn't discriminate on topics. There were questions on every topic. Know how to set up VLANs, NAT, NTP, ACL's and other important lab configs. Dont underestimate the exam. The exam is easy, but it can hit you where you dont expect it. Have fun Studying!
I want to thank everybody on r/ccna.

Reading everyday about what people were studying and their posts on passing the exam kept me motivated through these 2 months.

I wish the best of luck to everybody who is trying the get certified before February. You guys can do it!
I plan on writing the ICND2 around December. Onto becoming CCNA certified! :)

P.S. If any INDIANS need help with this exam, on how to pay for everything or anything, feel free to PM me and I will surely help. I had to figure out everything by myself because I couldn't find anyone to tell me what to do so I want to help others.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most Viewed Content:

I gave my first talk at a Security Conference

Last month I gave a fun little talk called "Plenty of Phish in the Sea" in my local security conference. It was a fun presentation on how I phished my friends in high school.  I used to make music back in high school and sent a phishing link to 3 of my best friends to my "Soundcloud" and asked them to sign in through their email. I had created a fake domain that copied the Soundcloud login page but the form to submit username and password had a php script that sent the credentials to a txt file I had on the server.  My friends had weird passwords of course, one guy had his girlfriends name, another had his favourite sport mentioned, and another friend literally had his whole phone number as his password.  I made jokes about it and kept the whole tone of the presentation humorous.   This talk wasn't very technical, but it was my first time and this was an actual experience. Hopefully, next time my talk is a technical one, where I teach the audience something I le...
Post a Comment
Read more

Final Year Project

I'm in the final semester of my degree and my project is something I've been thinking about for a while. I want to solve a problem, so I formed a team and now the project we are planning on creating is "DDoS Detection". We want to create an app which detects DDoS attacks and stop them live. I haven't really started doing much, but first thing I want to do is get datasets. I will search online for datasets on DDoS attacks. My mentor mentioned that I could create a virtual network in VirtualBox and simulate different types of attacks with some programs I can find online. That sounds pretty interesting and I'm going to do some research and find out if thats something I can do.   2 of my teammates are also helping me write code, we plan on using Python and a machine learning library, mostly Keras, to train the model and learn patterns. Lets see how it goes.
Post a Comment
Read more

Best Reddit Subreddits for Cybersecurity and Hacking!

Reddit is a very useful website for discussions about everything. For cybersecurity and hacking too, it has useful subreddits, in which, you will learn a lot of things you previously had no knowledge of. So, I have compiled a list of security related subreddits. 1. Active and Most helpful subreddits: /r/netsec /r/AskNetsec /r/netsecstudents These three are pretty much it. They have very active communities and are very helpful. I, personally use  /r/netsecstudents a lot because I'm still in the process of learning and that subreddit(if you look properly) will tell you how to make a career in every security field. 2. Security Certification Subreddits: r/CompTIA (for Security+) r/ccna (for CCNA and CCNA Security, also r/ccnp for CCNP) r/CEH (for CEH) r/cissp (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) r/oscp (Offensive Security Certified Professional) Really helpful if you're doing any of these Certs. 3. Other...
Post a Comment
Read more