Tag: certification

CCNP R&S

It’s been a really long journey, but finally i have become CCNP R&S

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Cisco is Good

After I passed my CCNA Security certification I was suppose to receive 2 papers: the CCNA certificate and a CNSS 4011 recognition. I’ve received the latter one only. I waited for months for the first one but I never received it.

Being sure I’ll never receive the expected certificate, I referred to cisco certification support persuading them to resend me the certificate because it was lost under the circumstances I could neither control nor influence. I didn’t have a hope to make them resend the certificate to me, but I decided to insist a bit. After a week of letters exchange they agreed to give me a PDF certificate for free, after 3 weeks of letters exchange they agreed to send me a paper version for free. After another month I finally received the desired package. Imagine, they could just just deny my request blaming me in lie or on behalf of some other reasons, but they didn’t, they believed me and fulfilled my request. Good, eh?

CCNA Security Official Exam Certification Guide (Exam 640-553)


Book is good guide for CCNA security exam preparation. It introduces you into First and third parts are easily readable and perfectly understandable, second part is not. Second part is really bad – it covers basics of 5 unrelated topics and covers them poorly. However, I can not blame the book – most likely it’s been dictated by exam topics.

Generally, the book is comprehensive guide for IINS exam preparation. I would recommend it to everybody who is willing to take the exam regardless of reader’s background expertise. For ones, who does not want to take the exam, but wants to use it for self education, below is the list of topic and my opinion about their coverage level.

Book covers Well:
– Firewalls theory and technologies
– Cryptography technologies, hashing and PKI organization
– AAA
– Network security attacks theory
– Switch port security and EAPOL

Book covers poorly:
– Endpoint security
– VPN tunnels
– SAN security
– VoIP security
– NAC
– Firewall applications: Zone-based and CBAC

Trip to Moscow

I went to Moscow to buy wool socks and hunt some bears lately. I didn’t buy the socks and was unlucky to kill any bear – they all ran away. It disappointed me and I went to take CCNA security exam. I have passed it.

As a bonus, I went to polytechnic museum (nice exposition), saw Resident Evil 4 movie (awesome action) and took a walk with fiskus (appeared to be a nice guy).