A bit of a late update but I failed my ICND2 exam a week ago.  I missed by around 80 points and to be honest i just ran out of time.  After I got over the disappointment I felt that this was what i had expected as I felt I had under prepared.  I found that I should have budgeted my time better on the early questions and by the time I had 10 questions to go I only had around 8 minutes, forcing me to push through them much quicker and making mistakes.

According to my results I was underdone on switching and scored less that 50% so this will be a big focus for me before my next attempt.  I have 2 weeks of work left before I am on annual leave (getting married) so if all goes well I may book a retake in the week before my wedding but time constraints for study may rule this out.

On another note, I was asked at work to help out with getting our partner certification for Brocade Elite Partner status which requires a Brocade Certified Network Professional (BCNP).   We had a day of training with Brocade (sort of CCNA to Brocade bridging course) which was quite good, this along with some BCNP in a nutshell info and I sat the exam last Thursday.  I just scraped through with a pass, and I mean scrape as in 60% was the pass mark and that’s what I got.

While not as challenging as the cisco exams (time and simulation wise) there was still a lot of fundamental networking knowledge required, overall I think the CCNA study I had done recently helped out a lot as there were quite a lot of questions on ospf theory, which I was quite confident I answered correctly.

I was very happy that I passed the BCNP even if it was a lower pass mark.  After being scalded on my ICND2 attempt I needed the boost in confidence as motivation for another attempt at the cisco exam.

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