If you remember, I’ve had quite a time with finding a testing center that’s convenient (or open for that matter), so I took the test at yet another center to see what they offer.  The facility was great; it was very quiet and clean, and the people were wonderfully friendly, which is a new concept to me.  Usually, the people don’t care about testers, but, being a center for inmates at state prisons (yes, prisoners), they do nothing but vocational and professional testing there.  That’s a lot better than the facilities who give their own students priority or who make money on training instead of testing.  The center is just over 2 hours away, but I think this place may be the best so far.  I’ll have to see what the future holds, though.

The test itself was nothing strange; I only had two or three question I hadn’t seen, and even those were basic and easy to answer.  Each time I failed this test, I jotted down what I missed and studied up on those topics.  The first time was mainly FRTS.  The second was VOIP.  The brute force method, as mentioned by @ciscovoiceguru seemed to be the key this time – eventually, I’d get a passing score by studying what I didn’t know the last time. Of the 55 questions, I would guess that 35 of them were on both previous attempts.  Of the remaining 20, about 17 or 18 of them were on either of the previous tests, so it turned out quite well this time.

The materials I first studied were pretty disappointing.  The Cisco Press books didn’t really help.  The content in them is so outdated that they’re pretty worthless for getting the details needed for a passing score, but what can one really expect for a test that’s expiring in a few months.  A few people made suggestions of other resources to study, but I found them to be too expensive for passing a single test.  Some unnamed solutions were $800, which means I could just take the test 5 times for the same cost; instead of paying that much for a $150 test, I decided to use the test itself as a study guide and to use Cisco’s docs to fill in the details.  This seems to have worked out eventually.

The next step is a switching test of some kind.  I can’t really decide if I want to do BCMSN or SWITCH.  I’ve got to look over the material to decide, but, in the meantime, I’m starting to read through the SWITCH book on Safari.  I hope it’s not outdated already.  I’m scheduled to be in the ROUTE class with Global Knowledge mid-May, so I’d like to finish up the switching test by then.  I think I can do it since this material is a lot more familiar to me than Cisco VOIP and Wireless; neither of which we run at the office. In theory, it’s going to be filling in the details than building a new skill set as with the ONT.

Thanks to everyone for their support.  At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s hard to keep going, and the words of encouragement kept me from getting down on myself.

Any suggestion on which switching test to take would be greatly appreciated.  Has anyone actually taken the SWITCH test yet?

Send any Safari credits questions my way.

I was talking with a buddy online last night, and he made a good point.  If you keep putting off taking a test, you’ll never make any progress.  I took that to heart, went online, and scheduled another sitting of ONT for today at 3pm at the closest center.  I took the day off, too, so I could get some tax stuff done and get over to the center and back before dinner.  I got some really good rest last night for sure, too, and had some very productive study time before heading off for my day’s adventures.

I ran my errands and headed over to Statesboro, GA, for the test.  There’s a technical college over there that’s the closest testing center to the house, thought still an hour and a half drive for me.  On the way over there, I was going over 802.11e stuff in my head and generally enjoying the sunny and warm day.  I pulled into the school and noticed that they were repaving the parking lot up front where I usually park.  No biggie.  I pulled around back and noticed there were 5 cars in the whole lot.  Last week when I was there, there were at least 200 people there signing up for classes, but there was no one around today.  I didn’t think much of it, though; it was late in the afternoon on a Friday, and I figured everyone just bolted for home early.

It’s an open campus with buildings all around a few courtyards.  I walked around the building in the back (I have no idea what building that was) and walked towards the Assessment Center where the tests are given.  The long drive was taking a toll, so I stopped by the main building to heed nature’s call.  The door was locked.  So was the door to the next building.  So was the door to the Assessment Center.  It was dark.  Nobody was there.  I finally found a sign that said everyone was on furlough until next Tuesday.  Nice.

I called Pearson and told them the story.  They verified I was in the right place and there at the right time.  They even called the testing center to see if they could find anyone, but, of course, no one answered.  The support person with whom I spoke told me that their team would have to get in touch with the testing center to see what had happened and that they would contact me when it was all straightened out.  They were very apologetic for the mixup and promised to straighten everything out.

I guess we’ll see what happens on Tuesday.  Of course all of this means another half day off of work and another 150 miles on the car.  Will I ever get to pass this test?

The Director’s Commentary is here again.  Let me know if you like the audio, or if I should burn my terrible voice with fire.

If you ignore the wireless questions, the test was pretty fair.  There were questions in the usual poor wording that made you doubt things that you know are absolutely true.  Unlike last time, though, I didn’t find any questions where I was totally lost.  There were some questions that were very ambiguous, but only one was out of realm of possibility (it actually required a calculator to answer correctly).  All in all, it was a good test sans the wireless stuff.

Ah, the wireless questions.  I complained last time that there was one needlessly-obscure questions about WLC CLI, and that exact question was on the test today.  The additional CLI questions were downright sadistic, though, and the question about how to do initial configuration was really uncalled for.  Oh, I almost forgot about the question asking what model of WLCs support feature X.  Really?  Has there always been a requirement to know the features of each model in a product line?  I think I got two (maybe three) questions about the technologies like WPA and DCF.

Yes, I know it sounds like I’m making excuses, but I’m not the kind of person who shifts the blame.  If I’m the cause of the problem, I’ll fess up to it.  If I thought I could have done better, I’ll admit it.  If I chose to ignore a topic and get bitten for it, I’ll happily say it was my fault.  In this case, I did more than what I thought was appropriate and still failed.

I believe this puts me far enough behind my schedule to have to take another path to CCNP.  My first reaction would be go the ROUTE/SWITCH/TSHOOT path.  Since I’m already scheduled to take a ROUTE class, it seems the obvious choice.

Hear the Director’s Commentary on this post:

I heard from a couple people that the ONT test was the easiest of the 4 CCNP test.  I must say today’s test was a LOT harder than the ISCW test I took back in December.  Most of the questions were fair, but there were a few that were down-right evil or unanswerable.  Without giving too much away, there were some matching questions that had multiple items with multiple answers, rendering the answer to a guess.  I even ran into a CLI question about the WLC, which surely wasn’t mentioned anywhere I studied, and I don’t have a spare sitting around on which to test.  The icing, though, was the number of questions about FRTS; I know I need to understand it, but the magical question dice landed on that topic way too many times in my opinion.

At the heart of it, I think my demise stemmed from using only the Cisco Press book.  I really needed to get a wider exposure to the topics.  Though the CP books might have mentioned some topics that I missed, a lot of it is mentioned in passing but appeared in detail on the test.  I would think getting different training would fix that problem and I’ll be using some of our CLCs this week to do just that

The facility was great, though.  I was comfortable and couldn’t hear traffic or the lecture across the hall this time.  At least I know a good place to take tests now.  I hope somebody gets some value from my absolute failure.

Send any test vouchers questions my way.

• Client devices – Cisco compatible extensions on WLAN clients
• Mobility platform – allows configuration of LWAPs through WLCs
• Network unification – integration into the rest of the network with WLCs doing RF management, IPS, etc.
• World-class network management – centralized management through WCS
• Unified advanced services – supports advanced technologies and threat detection

WLAN Implementation

Autonomous and LWAP

Wireless LAN Services Engine (WLSE)

• Part of CiscoWorks
• Manages autonomous APs
• Centralized configuration, firmware, and radio management
• Autoconfig of new APs
• Misconfiguration and rogue AP alerts
• Proactive monitoring of APs, bridges, and 802.1x servers
• Supports SSH, HTTP, CDP, SNMP for up to 2500 APs
• WLSE Express supports 100 devices in either automatic or manual setups

Wireless Control System (WCS)

• Supports 50 WLCs and 1500 APs
• Three versions
  • Base – can determine with which APs a devices in associated
  • Location – Base plus RF fingerprinting
  • Location + 2700 Series Wireless Location Appliance – Tracks devices in real time and stores historical location data

• WPA
  • Features
    • Authenticated key management – auths prior to key management
    • Unicast and broadcast key management – keys are distributed and stored on the client and the AP
    • TKIP and MIC
      • Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) – per-packet keying
      • Message Integrity Checking (MIC) – integrity checking
    • Initialization vector (IV) expansion – from 24 bits to 48 bits
  • Shortcomings
    • Relies on RC4
    • Firmware support required in NICs, APs
    • Susceptible to DoS attacks
    • Dictionary attacks can discover PSKs
• WPA2
  • Features
    • 802.1x authentication or PSK
    • Key distribution and renewal
    • Proactive Key Caching (PKC) – allows roaming
    • IDS for rogue APs and attacks
  • Shortcomings
    • Supplicant must have WPA2-compliance firmware
    • AAA server must support EAP
    • WPA2 uses more CPU, so a hardware upgrade may be required
    • Older devices may not be upgradeable and must be replaced