There's nothing I appreciate greater than teaching Cisco technologies, especially
ccie candidates. Whether it's in-person or online, everyone's excited to be there. Theres a sense of anticipation in the air, and everyone is ready to operate hard, get their hands on the racks of Cisco routers and switches I have available and then I break out the OSI design chart. Chins slump. People sigh, or at lowest wish they hadn't ordered decaf that morning.
Okay, it's not that bad. But it does temper the excitement a little. I always get a sense of "why can't we just hurry up and get on the routers and switches? Why do we have to learn this dry stuff?"One reason is the fact that Cisco
ccie demands you know the OSI design inside and out for both the Intro and ICND exams. You have to admit that's a pretty good reason, but still, college students find the OSI design details to be very dry.
I realize that, for the reason that I've been there. My first exposure to the OSI design was actually in a Novell "Networking Technologies"class, and man, was that chart ever dry. They crammed every known protocol into the OSI model. It looked like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and also the real problem is the fact that I didn't know what the heck the majority of that stuff was.
So I dutifully attempted to memorize this huge chart. I managed to pass the exam, but I wondered what all that effort had genuinely been for. It's not like you sit around in a server space or wiring closet and discuss the OSI model.
As a CCIE candidate, you don't have to worry about all the protocols I memorized way back again when, but you do have to learn what happens at every layer. Which qualified prospects to this question:
"If I work with
ccie routing and switching, why do I have to learn about all one other layers? Don't routers and switches just work at layer a couple of and 3?"
Yes, switches work at Layer a couple of and routers at Layer 3. But to really realize networking, youve got to realize what happens at one other layers. Why?
