Passed the BCMSN

I retook the BCMSN exam this morning and passed. A bunch of the questions I recognized from my previous attempt, but there were still a handful that I hadn’t seen. Nothing wrong with that. I am glad I studied wireless and voice between my attempts. There were still questions on the exam that are not covered in the book.

This time my weak area was spanning-tree. I think I second guess myself when it comes to answering questions on an exam. I will just need to go back and review the sections on spanning-tree and write up notes from the chapters when I’m finished with the remaining two tests.

Notes on protecting STP topologies

My notes from Chapter 10 of the BCMSN book.

You can download them here.

Fedora won’t update

If your Fedora installation won’t update because Packagekit is busted, run the following command as root

yum update

My Packagekit was broken after the last auto update. This should fix it this morning.

This is a scary thought if you’re a business

I just read an article that for me had one of the most disturbing things ever written

And employees are becoming more and more willing to do just that, according to a study released earlier this week by Cyber-Ark Software. According to the study, 56 percent of workers surveyed admit to being worried about losing their jobs. “Alarmingly, in preparation, more than half have already downloaded competitive corporate data and plan to use the information as a negotiating tool to secure their next post,” the study says. In Holland, 71 percent of workers confessed to having already downloaded data; 58 percent of U.S. workers say they have done so.

I can’t imagine being that hard up that I would do something like that. just think about for a minute. Close to 3 in 5 people are actively stealing data from your company. Read the full article here.

IP telephony notes from BCMSN book

Read them online now or download the pdf for later.

Notes on router redundancy

Release early, release often… my notes on router redundancy from Chapter 13 of the BCMSN book

redundancy-notes

The BCMSN exam

Yesterday I took the 642-812 and failed. Not by much, but enough to be really disappointed in myself (maybe 1 question). The three areas I did poorly in are the areas I rarely deal with: redundancy, voice, and port-security. Disappointing because as security engineer I should know a little more about redundancy and especially port-security but I don’t. I don’t really remember much being on the exam about port-sec but it must have been enough to trip me up.

The voice questions, those make me unhappy. I looked up the questions I know I probably got wrong and I can safely say, they are not covered in the BCMSN book from Cisco Press. Perhaps they were simply some of the “trial” questions they are planning on using in the future, maybe they were legit questions and actually counted. Either way, they threw me for a loop. If they were legit, you need to know much more than is stated on the topic list.

At least I know the know areas where I am weak and can spend the next week reviewing. I’ll post my notes here as I go through stuff.