70-350 passed today! post exam tips

djabu

hello all,

first post here hopefully someone will find this uselful.

i just got my mcp in 70-350 isa 2004 exam. i found the exam to be bit easy al though i managed to score only 770.

i used the MS press book for study material. quickly skimmed the videos from CBT nugget and wasted many many days on Shinder's site (www.isaserver.org). That man deservs a reward (i guess he is a MVP) lol
he has so many scenarios which are well documented for newbies and i suggest you check some if you are going to work with ISA In teh future. His articles hardly helped me in the exam as they are not designed to help people pass the exam. If you really want to learn ISA, practise some of the setup scenarios described on the site.

Also transceder challenges you with some hard and tricky questions. Go through them. I went through the questions in the back of the MS Press book, but didn't help much. Transcender should be more than enough.

the exam hardly touched on the entreprise edition. i was practising lots of back to back array configs and having isa in a workgroup and domain environment scenarios. there was hardly any NLB questions. i'm guessing the book just shows that u can click on activate NLB and the rest is taken care of. yes or no. u gotta play with NLB to explore ways to wreck it as it is easily wrecable lol.

questions focussed on firewall policy (web publishing questions, enable TS access), various clients (securenat, webproxy and also be aware the specs with clients on non-windows based systems like mac and unix) and one question on reporting. some of basic questions on how to have multiple subnets hooked up to isa and having the correct default gateway configured in multiple subnet scenarios. there were a few caching questions and how to troubleshoot slow performance in caching environment. things like using system monitor to check the righ variables like memory use etc. there were few questions on communications between perimeter and internal (just make sure u know that in some cases you need to enable routing between these networks)

vpn questions were limited aswell. it's all about troubleshooting site-site vpn connectiivty - know what ports to open if u r gonna have IPsec L2TP (IKE and NAT-T)

that's all i can think of now. my caffeine is out. need to refill

doom969

Thanks for the review. I find it very useful.
I am currently studying this exam and i have to say i am a bit worried... I havent had much troubble with my previous mcp (270-282-290-291), but those are things I work with everyday, and i have a fair amount of experience... I did not work with ISA at work, of course I have a lab setup, but it looks like i'm missing something, cant really find out what it is. It might be my lack of experience with isa that has me worried, as its the fist time i study a test i have only lab experience with...
Anyway, i'm studying with mspress, isaserver.org, selftest, lab setup and webcasts.
I have no idea when i'm gonna sit this one, when i'm comfortable i guess. (I'm gonna spend the weekend doing lab tests and setups.)
What baffles me is that everyone seems to think its an easy exam, but i'm doing really bad right now. lol

Thanks again,
BTW, how many questions did you have, and did you get sims ?

Ty

Doom969

djabu

hey if it makes u confident, i had NIL real world experience with ISA 2004!

well i've played with ISA 2000 which comes preconfigured with SBS 2000. That's about it. But ISA 2004 is a big step up. few new concepts and much easier to understand. as i said earlier, if u can manage to pass Transcender, u are armed to face the test questions - i'm sure i'm not very wrong on that.

just make sure u know the main concepts as mentioned in my earlier posts and do as many prac questions.

from memoryi think i had only one interactive question. i had to fill in the gateway address for the client pc's.

if u just want to pass the exam don't spend too much time on practising ent config scenarios. they are the ones take lot of time to setup if u dont have real machines in your test lab. i had ot use vmware and my memory wasn't great and so took me a long time to setup.

i'd like to know from others as it's better not to take advice just from one person because i was given only 50 quetsions and there could be many in the pool and maybe i just got lucky and got all the easy ones

looks like you've done far more study than me. if u r not very confident, take the insurance and try it out. i've failed before, so what, u learn and don't give up until u pass!

Gluck with it. off to study for 70-292 - mother of all the exams i heard?

doom969

Thanks for the input !
Gl to you as well for 292, I hear its quite a beast too.
I did not try it, but I did 291... wasnt too hard one me. Lots of dns, wsus, ipsec, DHCP, a bit of ad, and a bit of subnetting. think got 4 sims, 46 questions. Ms-Press was pretty good for that one.
What kind of background do you have, what certs ?

Doom969

sprkymrk

Congrats djabu!

Sounds like you did your homework and it payed off.

royal

Congratulations and thanks for the review! What's next on your list to conquer?

Megadeth4168

Congrats!