Hello!

Greetings!

I'm the Alaska Network Geek. I've been employed in I.T. in the telecommunications industry since 1999, working both on corporate networks as well as service provider networks. What's kind of funny is that, despite well over a decade in the industry, I'm now working on my Cisco Certified Network Associate certification. I earned a competing vendor's comparable certification (Brocade Certified Network Engineer) last year, but somehow seemed to never (yet) earn the CCNA. However, change is in the air, and as a result, I've decided it's time to earn the Cisco certification.

When I first looked at earning the CCNA certification, I was somewhat dismayed by the material that was available to help study. IMHO, the best way to learn a technology is to start playing with it. Once you can make the equipment sing and dance, so to speak, a certification test is easy -- or at least, that's been my experience. To that end, I've decided to create this blog to approach the CCNA from a different tack than I've seen elsewhere on-line.

When I was in seventh and eighth grade, I was fortunate enough to have science classes that took a more hands-on approach than any class I had ever taken. The class lecture was maybe five or ten minutes; after that, it was all lab. Those two classes did more to kindle my interest in science -- or learning in general, for that matter -- than the rest of my primary and secondary school career. And that's the approach I intend to take on this blog. I'll be learning the concepts covered in the CCNA exam through labs that emulate real-world scenarios. I have set up a small lab consisting of various Cisco routers and switches that I've managed to scrounge, and I'll be building the networks that I describe in each post. That's the way I learn best, and hopefully, you will pick up a thing or two as well :)

So...enough procrastinating. Let's get started on that CCNA!