IP Addressing
Complete mastery of IP addressing and subnetting is required for any candidate to have a
reasonable chance at passing both the CCIE written and lab exam. In fact, even the CCNA exam
has fairly rigorous coverage of IP addressing and the related protocols. For the CCIE exam,
understanding these topics is required to answer much deeper questions—for instance, a question
might ask for the interpretation of the output of a show ip bgp command and a configuration
snippet to decide what routes would be summarized into a new prefix. To answer such questions,
the basic concepts and math behind subnetting need to be very familiar.