Sunday, March 12, 2017

MCSE Studying - Week Ending March 12, 2017

Overview
Wow! It's been just about 4 months since I last did a blog post on any subject, in either of my blogs. Life has been busy, and as always seems to get in the way. At least that is what I have been telling myself. The truth is, I just haven't prioritized my time effectively. Well, it's about time to change that.

Over the past few months I have started studying for the 70-412 exam, but it has been going slowly. I have completed objectives 5.1 and 5.2, but that is the sum total of my success so far. To put that into perspective, I have completed a mere 10% of the objectives for this exam. It's not good enough, and I realize this, so I have finally forced myself to organize and prioritize my time, and have been happy to have studied more this week, than I have in all of 2017 so far.

I'm back on track, and I have a plan for managing time, and for the study order for the remaining 90% of the objectives. This past week has been a review of the subject matter that I had already completed so that it is fresh in my mind. For those of you who are interested, you can find the list of objectives for the 70-412 exam here. I feel it is going to go quite well, and I am optimistic that I will be able to write the exam in the next two or three months.

Cool Stuff
Cool stuff? Hmm...not really. There was some interesting topics covered, such as trust relationships and multi domain environments, but nothing that was especially cool. I think that most of the reason for this, is that I am already fairly familiar with the structure of Active Directory, and I still remember a lot of the core concepts around trusts and multi domain environments from my NT 4.0 exam days. Despite this, there is still an article I want to read titled Top Ten Issues with Active Directory Trusts and Corporate Mergers. I feel there will be some interesting information in there.

Hopefully next week, covering sites, subnets, and site links will yield something new and cool that I didn't know before. Stay tuned!

PowerShell cmdlet of the Week
This weeks cmdlet is going to be the only cmdlet available for Active Directory trusts. Unfortunately, if you want to manage trusts, you have to use either the Active Directory Domains and Trusts console, or the netdom trust command line utility. However, if you simply want a cmdlet to show you current trust relationships, you can use:

Get-ADTrust

If you want to view all trusted domains by the current domain:

Get-ADTrust -Filter *

If you want the information about a specific trusted domain:

Get-ADTrust -Identity "canada.contoso.com"

It is disappointing that there is only the one cmdlet available for managing trust relationships, but there is quite a bit of useful information reported by Get-ADTrust,

Studying Stats
Total time studying: 7 hrs. 40 mins.
  • 70-412: 7 hrs. 40 mins.
Objectives Covered
  • 70-412
    • 5.1 - Configure a forest or a domain - Complete
    • 5.2 - Configure trusts - Complete
    • 5.3.1 - Configure sites and subnets
IT News, Blogs, and Podcasts
  • Nothing this week
In Closing
The goal for the coming week is to start, and hopefully finish objectives 5.3 and 5.4. I am fairly certain I will get through 5.3 "Configure sites", but I'm not sure about anything else. I am still working on prioritizing time, and while my studying is going better than it did in January and February, there is still some more effort required. Wish me luck!

Have a great week everyone!

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