SCNP exams

Danman32

I know this has been touched on, but there's not much detail available.

I have taken one of the courses for SCNP: Hardening the infrastructure, and I was wondering what the exam is like. The subject matter is generally simple, but there's lots of potential to be extremely detailed in the questions.

Anybody recently (last several months) take the exam? How well did you do? Did you use any practice exams, and if so, what source?

Danman32

OK, I'll answer my own question for the benefit of anyone else who might be interested.

I took the exam last week and scored 95%. I already have had exposure to most of the material in my studies for MCSE and CCNA, and have been working with TCP/IP for years, so I didn't have to study much for most of the chapters, except for review. Fortunately I have had some exposure here and there with Linux, so I was comfortable with that section too. My major study focus was on the chapter for Linux so as to remember all the pertenant commands, as well as some security technologies it comes with, such as the TCP Wrappers. Other chapters I glossed over, picking up any trivia detail that might be important on the test. I practically skipped the section on Windows, since I am quite familiar with GPO, Security templates and the like.

I used MeasureUp for a practice exams, which seems to be the only one available. Many questions on the practice exams were very close or right on in the exam. If MeasureUp wasn't sanctioned by SCP and wasn't known to be a reputable source, I might have thought it was a ****. But it isn't. Besides, some items they test you on can't be written any other way, so similarities can be expected. If you do well with the MeasureUp exam, you should do OK on the actual exam. Study the areas you aren't as familiar with, and concentrate less on areas you have experience in already, especially for areas that aren't weighed much. I practically skipped the section on contingency planning. Only one or two terms I needed to learn, which I was clued in on in the practice exam.

I found one absolutely bad question in the exam, and I made a comment about it in the test (each question has the option to attach a comment), and a couple of other questions that could be better worded, but it was possible to correctly answer the question.

Overall, I found the test was easy, but my background already provided 60% of what I needed to know. Much easier than Sec+ IMO.