OK, I had promised to update on my certification plans and what I intend to do on this blog. As I have mentioned I am going for MCSE Upgrade certification (70-292 & 70-296 exam) and than for Cisco CCNA exam (640-801 exam). I intend to post the following things on my blog.

· Will update about my study plans
· The resources I am using for studies
· All the relevant links that I could find for a given exam objective
· Daily read, interesting and relevant links from Cisco, Microsoft and the Internet
· My findings if any
· Links to the Microsoft and other labs
· Exam study tips

I am using MS Press books and Cisco Press books (exam relevant) as the core reference. I will be following them and then on the side will be doing all the extra reading as and when required. I will go chapter by chapter and will brief you of what the chapter is all about and any important exam tips if relevant. I will than post all the relevant reading from Microsoft, Cisco and any other websites. I will be also be listing any other good reference that I site during the course. My intention here is to create a list of links of recommended reading for a given certification exam. So even if students don’t have the any prescribed text book, they will be able to read the material on the pointed links and get themselves prepared for the exam.

I will point towards any important labs that are to be done in that given chapter. As I move ahead I will post my study strategies too. And I will post any other thing that I find interesting and important from the examination point of view.

As I always say, passing the exam is a different thing than knowing your stuff. One has to prepare from the vendor’s point of view and follow their recommendations on their products. They have to answer in a way that vendors like to listen. To start preparing for any certification exam, the first thing to do is to understand the objectives of the exam itself and any other details of the exam. So to get started we will look at the details of exam 70-292 & exam 70-296. Here and here are the objectives of both the exams respectively. Look carefully at the section of ‘skills being measured’. The objectives of CCNA exam are here.

As per Cramsession, 70-292 & 70-296 has a passing score of 700 and 55-56 questions are asked in the exam. The exam is Form-Based Multiple Choice; Drag and Drop; Hot Area; List, sort and order. For Cisco CCNA according to Cramsession there will be total of 55-65 questions and the passing score is 849 out of 1000.

That’s it for tonight. Those studying with me can go through the links above and check the site for updates soon tommorrow. I have already started my readings for MCSE Upgrade exam.

Lesson 2 in MS Press book ( MS Press- Upgrading your certification to Microsoft Windows Server 2003) is about new features in Windows Server 2003. This chapter describes the main new features in Windows 2003 Server compared to the old versions. It has details on Administration tools, new security enhancements, group policy tools, command line tools, new Active Directory tools and few others.

Here are some good articles to refer to relating Lesson 2 for the first Chapter of MS Press book.

–>What’s New in Windows 2003 Server–> This one covers all the new features in different technologies in Windows 2003 Server

–> What are the domain and forest function levels in a Windows Server 2003-basedActive Directory?

–> Windows 2003 Server has tools for renaming domains and domain controllers

–> There is a new type of Active Directory partition known as ‘application directory partition’.

Lesson 3

Lesson 3 deals with Planning an Actice Directory implementation. The lesson deals in brief about roles of directory services, physical (sites and domain controllers) and logical components (domains, trees, forests, OU) of Actice Directory. The lesson discusses on deploying Global catalog servers and Universal group membership caching. The following links will help to cover the topics of this lesson.

–> What are the FSMO Roles in Active Directory?

–> What are the domain and forest function levels in a Windows Server 2003-basedActive Directory?

–> Global catalog and sites

Make sure to understand the need of Global catalog servers and Universal group membership caching. It can be important from examination point of view. That’s it for chapter 1.

This is what the spammer on my system is using as agent/displaying as user agent.
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.20 [en]

Mate why don’t you update your version to Operat 8 now ;).

I just bumbed on http://www.expresscert.com/ website. What kind of busines are they running? They publicly say that they can sit exams for other people with 100% success rate! Would be interested to see what vendors and examination centres have to say about such fraudsters. Can any company take any legal actions against such companies?

Went on Yahoo Search today to check my search ranking and found a link of “My Web“. Awesome stuff Yahoo. You beat Gmail to this. Here is a list of features found in “My Web”.

1) Importing of Bookmarks – important feature
2) Search History
3) Search Pages can be saved too
4) History can be enabled and disabled at will
5) One can block sites and they won’t show up in Search results
6) One can email and IM search results
7) One can share Search results and it’s RSS enabled (very important feature) and this will work something like Del.icio.us.
8) Sharing can be enabled on Yahoo 360 at a later date
9) Add more folders and move search results to those folders
10) Search the search results 🙂

Yahoo, although a suggestion for you. Why don’t you work a bit on UI and make it something like Gmail. Their UI is definately better and more appealing. Why not include Tags in here, lately I am loving the concept of Tags.

One thing is for sure, I will have to stick to one tool. I am using Google, Yahoo and Del.cio.us and my search results are everywhere making it difficult for me to organise and search my search results when I want them. Gone are the day of bookmarks now.

For exam 70-292 I am using MS Press Training Kit. The book is called “Upgrading Your Certification to Windows Server 2003” and can be found from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735619719/qid=1114606663/sr=8-…

I just got started with studying for certification exams. I will write more detail on some of the stuff later on. But to continue the act of studying and getting started I have read the first chapter of the book today. A long one! The chapter is called ‘Introduction to Windows Server 2003’.
It is an introductory chapter to Windows 2003 Server and new things in Windows 2003 Server. Although the exam objectives that are mentioned for this chapter map to exam 70-296. This is a important base chapter for study purposes for the exams I am undertaking.

One important thing to start with is to know the different flavors of Windows 2003 Server. How are they different and what are the hardware requirements for each of the versions. Make sure you know the base minimum requirement as well as the Microsoft recommended minimum requirement for the purpose of the exam.

The links to follow for this are as below:

· Product Information Page:- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/default.mspx

· Windows 2003 Servers Home Page:- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/default.mspx

· http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/overview/technologies/d…

· Hardware requirements:- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/sysreqs/default.mspx
· Comparing different flavors of Windows 2003 Server (important):- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/features/compareedition… ‘

It is important to know the supported Upgrade paths to Windows Server 2003. More info on this can be found from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/whyupgrade/supportedpat….

More in my next post….

When will be a RSS feed for Google Search History be available? I am enjoying using Search History :).

One more interesting link for the day. Running Linux of Gmail. Find more info at http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000990039809/ .

Finally Opera 8 is out now. Looks like quite a few new features. Will do some testing soon when time permits. Superficially I can think of Voice as the new neat feature in the browser (They are shouting that they fully support Gmail now, I think it is about time now). Go and get it at http://www.opera.com. I will still stick to Firefox. I love my optimised Moox and Stipe versions of Firefox. But will still upgrade from Opera 7.52 to Opera 8.

Logged onto my system this morning and saw a new line added to my Home Page (which is www.google.com ) called ‘My Search History‘. Than I hopped on the search engine and searched for ‘Google Search History’ and found the this article from Zdnet. I agree with the article. It’s an added personal touch along with bringing all their services together. I bet this will also increase no. of people signing up for Google Accounts if they have’nt done it so far. Yahoo did a great job of pulling all their offering together under http://my.yahoo.com. Then followed My MSN at http://my.msn.com and now follows Google.

Yes, I have concerns regarding search privacy. Oh, now they can even track which user is clicking on which Google Ad and how many times ( I think)! On the funny note, employees be careful. Now your boss can walk around and just pull up your search engine history and look at what you have been looking for all day :). More about this feature as I put in more thought into this feature and also as I test this tool extensively.