642-511 CSVPN
Ahriakin
Member Posts: 1,799 ■■■■■■■■□□
Finally got to sit this one today (after putting it off a week and then having the exam center close on friday. It's number 3 for me in the CCSP track, SNRS and PIX being the 2 previous. Overall I didn't think the course was too hard but the exam was 'tricky'. It seemed to rely a lot more on vaguery and confusing wording than any other Cisco exam I've sat, at times I wondered if CompTIA had written it - eg. having a multiple choice concerning certificates where 3 out of the 7 or so answers were correct (one was just another name for the other) but it only accepting 2....which one of the renamed terms do you choose?..... On my own scale I'd rate this as about an 8/10 (SNRS being 7.5 and the PIX/ASA being 8.5). I think one thing that helped was having just completed the PIX/ASA and having a fresh/strong dose of IPSEC before event starting this one.
There were 2 sims : BTW thanks to everyone who has warned these are the old style sims. I wonder how many folks have been screwed over by simply not being warned to take down the data before starting. They were pretty easy, but then it's like Msoft sims, how hard can a GUI be? About 4/5 drag and drop and 50 or so std. questions.
Preparation: About a month, plenty of experimenting in work (the advantage of a system that needs overhauling, you get to poke holes an no-one notices before you patch them again
"That....not working?....oh...(resets concentrator)....look, it's fine now, must have been your imagination...back to sleep user, sleeeeeepppppp". The latest Cisco Press Study Guide, The Complete Cisco VPN Configuration Guide, Exam Cram CSVPN Guide and the CCSP Flash Card/Quick Reference book. I actually got the VPN config guide for the PIX exam and I can't recommend it highly enough, it's one of the very few tech manuals that is a joy to read, brilliantly written and extremely informative I'd advise going through it before the Study Guide (with the PIX I did the opposite presuming that it would be as deep and hard to start as the similar (orange cover/expensive as hell) PIX/ASA Handbook, not so). While the latest Study Guide is not on Safari Bookshelf the Exam Cram and Configuration Guide are (the Config guide costs the same as a 3 month subscription alone, and by then you can have enough tokens to download most of it as PDFs.....I kinda like Safari 
). The Exam Cram is reasonably old and definitely not to be taken on it's own, give it a quick read to see if you catch anything the others missed only, and then leave it. The Cisco Guide was pretty comprehensive but lacked one or 2 key items - mainly there was nothing on Auto-Initiation (which is a component of the exam, and while under NDA I will say I was glad I read that little section in the Flash Card/Quick reference guide), to be fair it wasn't mentioned in the Config Guide either. The Quick Reference guide is pretty sparse, you definitely could not rely on it on it's own but it has a few good fillers. Basically you could probably get by with either the Config Guide or Ciscopress Study Guide but they do compliment each other well when combined.
Like I said this exam was more tricky than complex, and if you have recently completed the PIX/ASA I highly advise you to take this ASAP as there is a lot of crossover on IPSEC principles and Certificate management. I was sure I'd failed, not by much but I had that sinking feeling. 967, so much for my guestimate ability, I was a wee bit shocked.
Now up for the SND and trying to get it done in the 10 days before my local exam center closes for Xmas and 551 goes away forever
There were 2 sims : BTW thanks to everyone who has warned these are the old style sims. I wonder how many folks have been screwed over by simply not being warned to take down the data before starting. They were pretty easy, but then it's like Msoft sims, how hard can a GUI be? About 4/5 drag and drop and 50 or so std. questions.
Preparation: About a month, plenty of experimenting in work (the advantage of a system that needs overhauling, you get to poke holes an no-one notices before you patch them again
"That....not working?....oh...(resets concentrator)....look, it's fine now, must have been your imagination...back to sleep user, sleeeeeepppppp". The latest Cisco Press Study Guide, The Complete Cisco VPN Configuration Guide, Exam Cram CSVPN Guide and the CCSP Flash Card/Quick Reference book. I actually got the VPN config guide for the PIX exam and I can't recommend it highly enough, it's one of the very few tech manuals that is a joy to read, brilliantly written and extremely informative I'd advise going through it before the Study Guide (with the PIX I did the opposite presuming that it would be as deep and hard to start as the similar (orange cover/expensive as hell) PIX/ASA Handbook, not so). While the latest Study Guide is not on Safari Bookshelf the Exam Cram and Configuration Guide are (the Config guide costs the same as a 3 month subscription alone, and by then you can have enough tokens to download most of it as PDFs.....I kinda like Safari ). The Exam Cram is reasonably old and definitely not to be taken on it's own, give it a quick read to see if you catch anything the others missed only, and then leave it. The Cisco Guide was pretty comprehensive but lacked one or 2 key items - mainly there was nothing on Auto-Initiation (which is a component of the exam, and while under NDA I will say I was glad I read that little section in the Flash Card/Quick reference guide), to be fair it wasn't mentioned in the Config Guide either. The Quick Reference guide is pretty sparse, you definitely could not rely on it on it's own but it has a few good fillers. Basically you could probably get by with either the Config Guide or Ciscopress Study Guide but they do compliment each other well when combined.Like I said this exam was more tricky than complex, and if you have recently completed the PIX/ASA I highly advise you to take this ASAP as there is a lot of crossover on IPSEC principles and Certificate management. I was sure I'd failed, not by much but I had that sinking feeling. 967, so much for my guestimate ability, I was a wee bit shocked.
Now up for the SND and trying to get it done in the 10 days before my local exam center closes for Xmas and 551 goes away forever
We responded to the Year 2000 issue with "Y2K" solutions...isn't this the kind of thinking that got us into trouble in the first place?
Comments
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Ahriakin
Member Posts: 1,799 ■■■■■■■■□□
Thank you sir. I don't spend enough time returning the favour of answering questions on here so I hope the mini-reviews might help a little instead.We responded to the Year 2000 issue with "Y2K" solutions...isn't this the kind of thinking that got us into trouble in the first place?
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mikej412
Member Posts: 10,086 ■■■■■■■■■■
Congratulations!
Ahriakin wrote:"That....not working?....oh...(resets concentrator)....look, it's fine now, must have been your imagination...back to sleep user, sleeeeeepppppp".
What? You didn't tell the user a reboot of his pc/laptop would fix the problem? That would give you time to save your configuration if you weren't done working with it. :mike: Cisco Certifications -- Collect the Entire Set!
