CCNA Study

CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) is a certification from Cisco, the world’s most famous company that manufactures and sells networking equipment. This certification helps you to become familiar with a wide range of topics, including:

• LAN/WAN
• OSI and TCP/IP model
• VLANs
• Ethernet
• Switches
• Routers
• Network utilities (ping, tracert, arp)
• STP
• IP addressing
• Subnetting
• Routing protocols (RIP, EIGRP, OSPF)
• WLAN
• NAT
• ACLs

This website will try to cover all of these topics.

How to become CCNA certified?

You can become CCNA certified in two ways:

1. pass the CCNA 642-802 exam (250 $)
2. pass the ICND1 640-822 exam and ICND2 640-816 (125 $ each)

CCNA 640-802 covers the topics from both ICND exams.

If you pass the ICND1 exam, you will receive a certification called CCENT (Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician).

The CCNA 640-802 exam consists of 45-55 questions. The ICND exams have 40-50 questions.
The highest score is 1000. The minimum passing score is somewhere around 830.

UPDATE

In March 2013 Cisco has announced a new version of the CCNA curriculum. Passing the ICND1 exam now gives you the CCENT certification. ICND1 now includes more subnetting, ACLs, VLANs, OSPF and IPv6, among other content. RIP and wireless LANs have been removed from the curriculum. Things that have been added to the ICND2 course include STP, EIGRP and OSPF for IPv6, GRE tunnels and SNMP.

Passing the ICND2 exam determines the CCNA concentration.

The new exam code numbers are:

ICND1 – 100-101 ($150)
ICND2 – 200-101 ($150)
CCNA – 200-120 ($300)

The new exams contain about 50-60 questions. A score of about 85 percent is needed to pass an exam.

Where to take the exam?

To take the CCNA exam you have to schedule a test appointment through Pearson VUE, an electronic testing company. Pearson VUE has many authorized testing centers throughout the world and you can locate a test center in your vicinity.

The exam is available in six languages (English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian) and lasts for 90 minutes, unless you aren’t a native speaker of any of these languages. If that is the case, you will get a 30 minutes time extension. After finishing the test you will immediately get the results. Cisco provides just the basic information about your score, so you can’t be sure which questions you got right or wrong!