GCWN - Anyone taken it?

Hello all,

I did some searching on GCWN on the forums but didn't come up with many detailed posts. I will be taking this class in September. Has anyone taken it and if so, what was your experience with it?

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zxbane

84 views and 0 replies. I guess it is not a popular SANS cert!

jelevated

GCWN is pretty good. Who is your instructor? If you get Jason Fossen who wrote much of the content then you're golden, if its a different instructor you may want to just do the eLearning or pay extra for the elearning. Fossen is that good imo.

I think GCWN is sort of a masters degree in Windows Adminsitrator. It gets into a lot lof the nitty gritty, a lot of the stuff that people don't even know they don't know. Obviously you'll be familiar with some of it but a lot of material is covered.

I plan to hang onto mine as long as I can scrounge up the 400 dollars to renew every 4 years.

docrice

I might take SEC505 this year (likely OnDemand). I've become quite detached from the Windows side of the world in the last six years and I sort of miss it.

cyberguypr

I took the class in 2014 I think. It was with Fossen so it the experience was great. My class seemed to get a bit lost the day we covered PKI, but that's a function of the group and not the material.

docrice

PKIs require a fundamental grasp of several concepts at once and putting it all together to form the bigger picture. I've interviewed many job candidates who have worked with certificates and load balancers (configured for SSL/TLS terminations) but didn't really understand how everything tied together. Not surprising at all that Windows admins would find it difficult to absorb it in one sitting.

jelevated

docrice wrote: »

PKIs require a fundamental grasp of several concepts at once and putting it all together to form the bigger picture. I've interviewed many job candidates who have worked with certificates and load balancers (configured for SSL/TLS terminations) but didn't really understand how everything tied together. Not surprising at all that Windows admins would find it difficult to absorb it in one sitting.

Absolutely. So many things can go wrong. Deep respect for the gurus in that scene.

It took me several months to build an offline root with a single issuing CA (!) for 802.1x certs. Man. Never again.