certification

CTS 097: Studying For CCNP Wireless Certification

November 13, 2017 Rowell Podcast 00:31:31 2 Comments

François talks about this experience in studying for the CCNP Wireless certification and how you can get started.

This episode is sponsored by Metageek

Sponsored by Metageek

CCNP Wireless

Studying for CCNP Wireless

In order to get the CCNP Wireless certification, you need to pass the following 4 exams:

  • 300-360 WIDESIGN – Designing Cisco Wireless Enterprises Networks
  • 300-365 WIDEPLOY – Deploying Cisco Wireless Enterprises Networks
  • 300-375 WISECURE – Securing Cisco Wireless Enterprises Networks 
  • 300-370 WITSHOOT – Troubleshoot Cisco Wireless Enterprises Networks

François recommends studying them in the order above.

They are ranging between 55 and 60 questions each and you have 110 mins to complete them and each exam is $300 USD each.

How to study

Self study

  • Read the exam objectives
    • WIDESIGN Exam Topics – The Cisco Learning Network
    • WIDEPLOY Exam Topics – The Cisco Learning Network
    • WITSHOOT Exam Topics – The Cisco Learning Network
    • WISECURE Exam Topics – The Cisco Learning Network
  • Create a study book of all of the subjects you want to study
  • Research Cisco documentations to find more information about these specific subjects
  • Look at the Study Materials Tab on the exam page
  • If you have equipment, you can setup a lab and practise the configurations
    • Setup your own labs you will need at least 1 AP and 1 WLC
    • Configure dynamic interfaces
    • Configure Interfaces groups
    • Configure AP Groups and RF Profiles
    • Configure different SSID configurations
    • Troubleshoot an AP no joining
    • Ask a friend to break your config and try to troubleshoot it
    • Setup a freeradius server so you can test 802.1X even if you don’t have ISE
  • If you don’t have access to a WLC, you can download a virtual WLC with a 60 days eval license at Wireless – Cisco Virtual Wireless Controller – Cisco
    • It will be a .ova file ready to be used as a virtual machine
  • If you don’t have a Cisco AP, you can purchase an older one on eBay for cheap (ex: 3502)

Other ways to study

Interview with Rasika Nayanajith

CTS 067: Giving Back To The Wi-Fi Community with Rasika Nayanajith

February 27, 2017 François Vergès Podcast 01:13:09 0 Comments

In this episode, we welcome Rasika Nayanajith (CWNE #153, 2x CCIE) from Australia. We discuss the different ways to give back to the Wi-Fi Community. We hope that this episode will inspire a lot of Wi-Fi engineers.

Interview with Rasika Nayanajith

Our Guest

Rasika is the Team Leader Network at La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia. He created the well known mrncciew.com Wi-Fi related blog and he has been designated VIP by Cisco to be very active on the Cisco Support forum. He has done a lot to give back to the Wi-Fi community and we were very honored to have him on the show.
You can follow him on Twitter @mrncciew.

Discussions

We discussed the different ways to give back to the community:

  • Blogging
  • Participating in vendor’s support forums (Cisco Support Community, Aruba Airheads Community, Aerohive HiveNation Community…)
  • Becoming an Instructor
  • Presenting at conferences
  • Mentoring

We also deep dived into Rasika’s experience in creating and maintaining his blog. Rasika gives some valuable pieces of advice for anyone wanting to blog or participate in vendor’s support forums.

Useful Links

This Week In Wireless

WLPC in Phoenix

  • Really great event (about 250 WLAN pros)
  • Talks about packet analytics, machine learning, Wi-Fi analytics, algorithms used by survey tools
  • Videos and presentation will be made available publicly by Keith Parsons this coming week

Upcoming WLPC dates:

  • WLPC_LATAM in Bogota August 1-2 (En espanol)
  • WLPC_EU in Lisbon October 3-4 (In english)

Aruba Atmosphere

  • Aruba Atmosphere will take place this coming week and is held in Nashville.
  • Aruba should be covering their new os ArubaOs 8 in more details. Update next week!
  • To follow, hashtag #ATM17 on Twitter

Arris to Acquire Ruckus

Arris and Broadcom jointly announced that they have entered into an agreement for Arris to acquire Brocade’s Ruckus Wireless and ICX Switch business for $800 millions in cash.

Arris, which is currently mainly offering equipment intended to the home market, hope to expand its presence into other markets such as education, public venue, enterprise and hospitality.

Link: https://www.ruckuswireless.com/press/releases/20170222-arris-acquire-ruckus-wireless-and-icx-switch-business-800-million-cash

FCC Lets Wireless Carriers Use Wi-Fi Airwaves Critics Worry about Interferences

FCC has officially gave the green light to carriers for them to be allowed to use LTE-U over the 5GHz band. Carriers will then be able to offload some of their traffic to the unlicensed 5GHz band used by other technologies such as Wi-Fi.

Technically speaking, this is not really a good news for our Wi-Fi networks, since LTE-U is a less polite protocol, and Stations will start broadcasting a the less occupied frequency without waiting for a channel to be open. Most Wi-Fi experts are skeptical and a lot of debates and talks have been happening on Twitter since the announcement.

This is week is the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and we will see if people will be talking about it.

Link: http://www.govtech.com/policy/FCC-Lets-Wireless-Carriers-Use-Wi-Fi-Airwaves-Critics-Worry-About-Interference.html

Cisco Changes its Exam Fees

Cisco certification exams increase to $300 and over depending on the exam you are taking.

Link: http://blog.networkbulls.com/cisco-announces-changes-in-exam-fee-of-ccna-ccnp-ccie-written-certifications

CWDP logo

CTS 055: My Thoughts On The CWDP Exam

November 21, 2016 Rowell Podcast 00:16:45 0 Comments

Thoughts on CWNP’s Certified Wireless Design Professional (CWDP-302).

CWDP logoThe CWDP validates your knowledge of designing wireless networks where you need a pretty good understanding of spectrum, protocols used, security implementation, site surveys – including predictive, manual, hybrid, and validation.

An important part of CWDP, and also in the real world, is being able to gather requirements from the end user. Knowing what the end users need to do on Wi-Fi will help you build a successful network.

Some of the aspects of gathering requirements are straight forward, such as finding out where coverage is needed, what applications are going to be used, is VoIP going to be used, etc.

Knowing what type of devices are going to be used is also important. This plays a role into capacity planning with the applications that will be used. Other areas to consider are designs around regulatory requirements.

This part of the exam takes up 20% so take a look at the objectives. You’ll need to know how these requirements impact the design of a WLAN.

Design takes up 40% of the exam. In this area, experience really gives you a big advantage. Knowing the different architectures such as distributed forwarding and tunnel-based of client data traffic. How someone should design between single channel architecture and multiple channel architecture is something to consider. Although the most important thing is knowing the difference between the two.

Different PHYs will have different capabilities, such as designing for 20 MHz to 160 MHz channel widths. Know what the gotchas are with client devices when designing for a PHY such as 802.11ac.

When it comes to roaming, know the different kinds of roaming technologies and when they would be used. Do you know the difference between opportunistic key caching and PMK caching? Depending on client requirements, this may be important given that some of these roaming methods play a role with latency. Read More

Top 5 Episodes

CTS 086: Capacity Planner, Ubiquiti and Fedex Forum

CTS 064: Wi-Fi Roundtable 1 – Part 1

CTS 052: How To Validate Wi-Fi Infrastructure

CTS 084: Channel Widths with Devin Akin

CTS 062: K12 Wi-Fi Deployments with Jim Vajda