I decided to go for it and book my TSHOOT exam for next week, Tuesday december 20.

Do I feel ready? I have no idea. This exam is going to be more practical compared to ROUTE and SWITCH, so it’s going to be different. Luckily, thanks to my new job I feel confident about layer 2 troubleshooting, since that is what I’ve been doing mostly in the past weeks. A good thing really, because originally, layer 3 stuff like routing protocols was easier for me than layer 2.
In the past week I’ve set up a SPAN port, did troubleshooting on port channels, had to calculate PoE budgets on access-layer switches, checked VLAN usage and spreading, and so on. The SPAN port was one of the bigger challenges, as I had to do it on a Nexus, which is a whole different beast at times compared to a Catalyst switch. Perhaps more on that in an upcoming blog post.

Reviewing IPv4 routing hasn’t posed any problems so far. Even reviewing NAT again went easy. IPv6 had a surprise for me (note: redistributing something into RIPng requires a metric to be set), but no big problems either.

I’m putting more emphasis on ‘debug’ commands now. I’ve hardly used them so far, but I will need them on the exam. I was able to find out a typo in my EIGRP authentication keys with it in my lab practice. Together with the ‘show’ commands they’re probably my key to passing it.

So no new blog post until I’ve done the exam. I hope it’ll be a very happy one.

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