Test day has arrived

I am happy to report that I passed with an 811. Back at work to finish the day, but already happy and thinking about that cold drink after! I'll drop my analysis when I get home as well.

SubnetZero

spicy ahi wrote: »

I am happy to report that I passed with an 811. Back at work to finish the day, but already happy and thinking about that cold drink after! I'll drop my analysis when I get home as well.

That's so awesome!!! Congrats my friend and enjoy that cold drink, you've earned it!

Roguetadhg

spicy ahi wrote: »

I am happy to report that I passed with an 811. Back at work to finish the day, but already happy and thinking about that cold drink after! I'll drop my analysis when I get home as well.

I knew I felt massive amount of Win! from this thread :P

slothrop

Congrats! Nice to have instant feedback certs so the beverages don't get warm waiting ISC2 style.

spicy ahi

Thanks for the congratulations and well wishes! I know I promised the analysis yesterday, but seems the party went on a little longer than I anticipated. Let's just say it's going to be a long day at work today.

Anyhow, on with the show. I used Chris Bryant's CCNA Security PDF, the OCG, and the Paquet book as my reading material and had the CCNA lab manual to play around with SDM 2.5 (downloaded from Cisco) on a 1751 and 2610 router I had. Unfortunately, I only had 12.1(T) IOS's so I wasn't able to do everything, but the Paquet book and to a lesser extent the OCG filled in the gaps of things I wasn't able to lab live. The most helpful thing had to be having a setup to play around with SDM. Having it made it easy to navigate through the multitude of SDM questions and I believe saved me some time in the test. Interestingly enough, the Paquet book was my most helpful resource. The OCG book and Bryant's PDF were very good in walking through setting up ZBF and and configuring tunnels. However, the lions share of information that I needed to answer the bulk of the questions came from Paquet's book. The CCNA Security notes on the sticky were very helpful to keep all of the information in order so my recommendation for anyone taking this test is to immediately download the notes and review them then go through the books and start putting page/chapter numbers next to each point in the notes. That way, it's very easy to use your notes to review and go back to the reference points when you need to refresh your memory.

Honestly, this test wasn't as CLI intensive as CCNA or CCNP switch (which I bombed; probably going to have a second go after CISSP) however, there was a LOT of information that you need to know and in typical Cisco fashion, they test your knowledge of the information through a scenario or CLI screenshots. So don't get me wrong, you still need to know CLI commands, read the show outputs of certain commands, etc. It's just that you're not doing as much typing. All in all, it was a tough customer and shouldn't be taken lightly if hardening cisco equipment isn't in your normal day to day taskings.

On a side note, I found it interesting that my worst area was mitigating common layer 2 attacks. I work in an environment where I only control the local network and thus have control over the switches and 1 layer 3 switch that I use to perform routing stuff (mostly maintaining Vlan zones) I guess I need to go back and review my own security instructions!

jamesp1983

spicy ahi wrote: »

I am happy to report that I passed with an 811. Back at work to finish the day, but already happy and thinking about that cold drink after! I'll drop my analysis when I get home as well.

Congrats! Hope you enjoyed the drink.

jamesp1983

I agree with you about the test not being CLI intensive. I wasn't happy with it for that exact reason. I prefer the CLI.

spicy ahi

jamesp1983 wrote: »

I agree with you about the test not being CLI intensive. I wasn't happy with it for that exact reason. I prefer the CLI.

Thanks for the congrats. And yes, I wasn't very happy either. I don't get to type in commands much in my new job.

Would've welcomed the chance to do some CLI'ing. Even if they disable all the fun commands