COMPUTER CERTIFICATION

Whether you're on the road to the CCNA, CCNP, MCSE, or you're on any other computer certification track, the odds are that sooner or later, you're going to fail an exam.  It's happened to almost all of us, yours truly included.   What you have to keep in mind in these times is that success is not a straight line.  You've probably seen charts showing the growth of an industry or a business -- you know, the ones that go from left to right, and look kind of jagged.  The line goes up for a while, then down a bit, then up some more, then down a little.   The key?  While every business has its setbacks, the net result is that the line goes up and progress is made.  That's how you want your certification pursuit and your career to go as well - upward! I'm not asking you to be happy about failing an exam.  You're allowed to get mad for a few minutes, vow to never take another exam again, and be disappointed.  What you're not allowe...

CCNA and CCNP candidates who have their own Cisco home labs often email me about an odd situation that occurs when they erase a switch's configuration.  Their startup configuration is gone, as they expect, but the VLAN and VTP information is still there! Sounds strange, doesn't it?   Let's look at an example.  On SW1, we run show vlan brief and see in this abbreviated output that there are three additional vlans in use: SW1#show vlan br 10   VLAN0010                         active 20   VLAN0020                         active 30   VLAN0030                         active We want to totally erase the router's startup configuration, so we use the write erase command, confirm it, and reload without saving the running config:...