Why ITWars exists

Most Cisco certification products are question banks with a timer attached. They are efficient at producing people who pass, and much less good at producing people who can fix a network on a Tuesday morning.

The problem we started from

Ask anyone who has hired junior network engineers and you get the same complaint: candidates arrive certified and cannot troubleshoot. Not because they are lazy or the exam is worthless, but because the way most people prepare — watching videos, grinding multiple choice — trains recognition, and the job requires production.

Recognising the right answer among four options is a genuinely different skill from sitting at a blank prompt with a broken network and no idea which layer is at fault. The exam knows this, which is why it has lab questions. Most study tools do not.

What we built instead

ITWars is built around a network simulator that runs in your browser. It parses a subset of IOS, keeps real per-device interface state, builds routing tables with administrative distance and longest-prefix match, and resolves ping by walking the topology hop by hop.

Labs are graded on reachability, not on strings. A lab passes when traffic actually flows between the endpoints in the objective. Any working configuration passes; any broken one fails. There is no expected answer to guess, which means the feedback you get is the same feedback the network would give you.

Things we deliberately do not do

• No exam dumps. Every question and lab is written against Cisco's published objective topics. Aside from being against Cisco's terms, memorising a dump does not survive a lab question.
• No flattering scores. Readiness is on Cisco's real 300–1000 scale, weighted by domain, and shrunk toward the mean while evidence is thin. It is designed to tell you when you are not ready, which is the only genuinely useful thing a readiness score can do.
• No third-party trackers. No analytics scripts, no advertising pixels, no fingerprinting. Our privacy policy is short because there is not much to describe.
• No fake urgency. The free plan is not a trial. CCST Networking and CCNA stay free, in full, with no expiry.

What we are honest about

The simulator is not an emulator. OSPF is shortest-path-over-enabled-links, not a full adjacency state machine. That ceiling is documented in the code itself, and we mention it in our own comparison of lab tools — including where other tools beat us. For CCNA-level reasoning the ceiling is high enough. For CCIE-level protocol nuance you want real images, and we will say so rather than sell you something that will not do the job.

Who this is for

People sitting CCST Networking, CCNA, CCNP Enterprise or CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure who would rather be tested than reassured. If you want a product that tells you that you are ready, there are many. If you want one that argues with you when you are not, this is it.