I passed my GCIA with a decent score. I've been under a lot of personal stress lately, so I was not concerned about my grade beyond passing. I feel it was considerably more difficult than compared to the GCIH.
I feel like I missed some of the simple packet analysis questions because I miscounted the length of the headers.
I also felt that some of the other packet analysis was easy because there were shortcuts to the answers. I feel that there was a solid mix of package analysis, snort, tcpdump, and general knowledge of TCP/IP.
I forgot to take a break and just worked all the way thought. On my GCIH, I took a break after I passed, then came back, regrouped and continued on.
I feel I had too much preparation for the certification. I read and indexed the Northcutt and Novak book Network Intrusion Detection 3rd edition. It was a great book and I recommend it to anyone, but it did not directly relate to the exam. I feel that just the reading would have been enough to just read the book without the index. I felt the book was out of date compared to the test and the I should have just focused solely on the SEC503 workbooks.
All in all I was very pleased with the SEC503 training I received from Mr. Mike Poor, the materials provided, and the certification exam.
