Get my CCNA

All I could do today was go through the whole book, as I have the First Edition, and I corrected inline all the errors I found in the Errata. There’s quite a few. I found this to be actually an educational step, since I now know that RJ-45s are a registered jack 45. Little things like that I suppose sink in after you have to correct them on several pages.

I was stalling reading the next chapter.

Today I covered Chapter 10, it wasn’t long and I could have covered one more chapter if I didn’t slack off. VLANs and VTPs were concepts I had though of as quite complicated until now, but suddenly I understand this concept very well. I’m a bit puzzled why a VLAN must have a differnet subnet for each one, but in a round about way it does make sense.

So far so good, although I’m not sure how well I recall the first few chapters now that I think about it, so a lot of review will be in order.

Today I plowed through chapters 7, 8 and 9. Although chapter 9 had some questoins that weren’t specifically covered in the text, relating to VLANs, so it got a bit confusing, but I think I’m getting the hang of all this and I’m progressing quite well. Most of what I read I can recall so it’s going very well.

I felt a little hesitation in learning about BPDUs, bridges and switches and such, merely because I don’t deal with those on a daily basis, I think it was one of my weaker areas adn may require some extra studying, but after taking the Chapter tests at the front of each one, I feel I did pretty well. This is all so very encouraging.

Today I finished Chapters 5 and 6 of the INTRO book for the INTRO exam. I have been steadily covering about 2 chapters per day for the last three days and I feel I can achieve my goal.

The 6th chapter was a bit more dificult to understand, the whole SYn, ACK, FIN thing is still not sticking but it will soon enough. One thing they didn’t explain all that well is where the FIN bit was in the header. The SYn/ACK are part of the code bits, but what about the FIN bit? The diagram for the TCP header doesn’t seem to have any space for a FIN BIT, unless it’s part of the code bit…