TSHOOT Passed

Well the Journey is over. I'm finally a CCNP. When this exam was 1st announced a lot of people cringed about what they would or could ask you. I can say that they can't ask you much since they are running with a limited sim. The best advice I can give you is come up with a lab and get down a structured troubleshooting approach. We have 3 main ones that are discusssed in the exam. TOP DOWN, BOTTOM UP, and DIVIDE and CONQUER. Well TOP down kinda doesn't work here since we are only dealing with Layers 1-3. Divide and conquer and bottom up work great for the exam. If you haven't already you can get the exam topology.



So you already know what to build and what to look at. Next is how we approach it. I'm sure there are several methods and I will share mine. 1st thing I do is go to the Client PC and run a IPCONFIG. I see if there is a IP address and there is a default gateway. If there is one I ping it. If I don't get a reply then I know its a problem between the PC and the Distro Switch. If I do get a reply I know the problem is further up the topology. So lets say I got a reply I go the default gateway and I ping the Sever on the other side of the topology. Then if no reply I run a traceroute. That can usually get me to where the device is having issues. Once I'm at the device in Question I start the process over again with layer 1. Do a sh ip int br check to see if the interfaces are up. if they are move on to layer 3. Check to see if the neighbor relations have formed. If not find out why. If they have why aren't we passing routes. This is just a quick Idea into how I navigated the exam. I did pretty much the same 3-4 commands for every ticket which lead me to solving the majority of the problems. Happy Networking!!!!