Recently I had a student (let’s call him David) ask me “Do you think I am ready to sit the ICND1 exam?”
Although David had studied the ICND1 text book, his skills were lacking when it came to configuring routers. He had a copy of GNS3 WorkBench, and a copy of the GNS3 Network Simulation Guide, but had not completed all the GNS3 WorkBench exercises, so I sent him off telling him that he should at least complete ALL the ICND1 GNS3 exercises that he had at his disposal. But It occurred to me that I didn’t have a monster exercise that I could give to David to test as many of the ICND1 Exam objectives as possible.
So David, I created that monster exercise. I called it the ICND1 Readiness Test. Be challenged!
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The ICND1 Readiness Test is part of the new v8.7 GNS3 WorkBench distribution. You can download the GNS3 WorkBench exercises (including the ICND1 Readiness Test) to run on your existing installation of GNS3 on your Windows or Macintosh PC here. Or if you want the full bells-and-whistles install, go to this download and follow the instructions to install GNS3 WorkBench on your Linux Mint 17.0 32bit (or Ubuntu 14.04 32 bit system). If you don’t have a Linux system but still want the whole integrated GNS3 WorkBench environment, you can download the GNS3 WorkBench VMware appliance here. |
[Edit 2014-10-08: Technical note: It has been found that the NAT portion of this exercise does not work if you use IOS c3725-adventerprisek9_ivs-mz.124-15.T14. I recommend using c3725-adventerprisek9-mz.124-15.T10]
The exercise looks like this (Click on the image for a closer look):
Your job is to design and implement IPv4 and IPv6 addressing schemes for your company rednectar.net.
The instructions go on to tell you
Rednectar.net’s internal devices are arranged on two VLANs – a Users VLAN and a Servers VLAN, with a third Guest VLAN providing web browsing access for guests. Rednectar.net’s Service Provider has allocated the public IP address range of 192.0.2.184/29 and informed you that it will provide Internet services for you via the public IPv4 address 192.0.2.185 and DNS services via their DNS Server at 192.0.2.192. The address range 2001:db8:beef::/48 has been allocated for IPv6 addresses.
To complete this activity successfully, you design and implementation must meet the following criteria:
And so on to describe the criteria in relation to the ICND1 exam topics. You can see the full description later in this post.
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If you can complete this exercise within an hour, I’d suspect there’s a good chance that you are ready for the ICND1 exam – although there are other objectives that are not covered here, so you’d need to be sure you have those under control as well. |
But don’t expect that you’ll do this exercise in an hour the first time you
try. In fact, you should probably take a good day or two to go through
it slowly the first time you try. But because you have to start by
designing your own IP addressing scheme, you can do this exercise over and
over again using different IP addresses. Or use this layout as a
template to create your own exercise.
As well as the full configuration exercise, you also get three troubleshooting exercises, each with three items you have to solve. And of course, there is a set of sample completed configurations and a ICND1 Readiness Test Testing Walk Through as well, that describes all the tests you need to do to verify that you have completed the task.
Here is the full description of the exercise. If you think you are ready for ICND1, give it a shot! Continue reading
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