Monday, June 23, 2014

MCSE Studying - Week 4

Overview
I have completed week four of studying for my MCSE exams. I did not get as much studying done as I would have liked during the last two weeks. This is mostly due to the fact that I spent these last two weeks in Moose Jaw, SK on a business trip. Even though I did not get a lot of studying in, I did get a lot of real world, hands-on experience with Windows Server 2012 R2. With the help of my fellow sysadmins, I was able to do three in place upgrades from Windows Server 2008 R2, and three side-by-side migrations from Windows Server 2003 R2 x86. All in all, a very successful two weeks.

Cool Stuff
One critical thing I learned this week was about PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) and AD:CS (Active Directory Certificate Services). I have covered this topic before, but not with anything that I would call success. This time around the information presented has started to make sense, and I can begin to see how the pieces fit together.

This is an incredibly important topic to get right, since there are many additional services in the Windows Server world that rely on Certificate Services, such as RMS (Rights Management Services), and FS (Federation Services).

Stats
Total time studying: 6 hrs.
  • Exam 70-412: 6 hrs.

In Closing
I have ordered the three Microsoft Press Exam Ref books for exams 70-410, 70-411, and 70-412. The books for 70-410 and 70-412, along with the pre-ordered Training Guide for 70-411 should all arrive this week. Now that I'm back at home, I should be able to make a much more aggressive plunge into the training resources.

I'm still trying to get my sleep cycles back to normal after some late night work on the server  upgrades. This will likely take a couple of days, but once it's done, I should be back to my usual, chipper self.

Please don't think that I'm complaining about the late night work. I love my job very much, and I cannot imagine doing anything else at this time. As I have stated more than once, "Being a Sysadmin isn't a job, it's a lifestyle".

Have a great week everyone!
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, June 16, 2014

MCSE Studying - Week 3

Overview
I have completed week three of studying for my MCSE exams. I was able to get a little more time in this week, but still a short of the 12 hours per week that I would like to do. This week I continued the online course through KnowledgeNet, watched another module from one of the Microsoft Virtual Academy courses covering 'Identity and Access', and did some extra reading on storage technologies in Windows Server 2012.

Cool Stuff
The really exciting thing I learned about this past week was on the concept of Claims, and how it works with Dynamic Access Control. It's probably fair to say that I geeked out a little (a lot, actually) when I was introduced to the concept. This might have clouded my understanding of the details a little, but I can always go back and review the subject. Here's a quick overview, at least as I understand it. We can now use a user's attributes in their Active Directory account to set access to files and folders, instead of just using user and security group membership. Further to that, we can block/allow access to files containing specific content, all without having to manually it up on a file-by-file basis. We simply set up the criteria centrally, then allow the FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) to handle the rest.

Like I said, my understanding may be a little off, and there is also some stuff in there about FCI (File Classification Infrastructure) that I have not fully explained, but still, I was really cool!

Stats
Total time studying: 8 hrs. 5 min.
  • Exam 70-412: 7 hrs. 15 min.
  • General Windows Server 2012 R2: 50 min.

In Closing
This week, I'm going to order up the Microsoft Press Exam Ref books for exams 70-410, 70-411, and 70-412. This should give me a bit more of a solid start to the studying, as these books cover the exam objectives in more detail. The Training Guides for the same exams are good resources, but focus more on the job skills that are relevant to each exam.

I'm still a little tired, but the studying is proceeding well. The fact that I'm still geeking out over little technical details is a good sign that I'm still in the right line of work. I can't imagine doing anything else at the moment.

Have a great week everyone!
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, June 9, 2014

MCSE Studying - Week 2

Overview
I have completed week two of studying for my MCSE exams. I have still been unable to gain any significant progress towards my studies, but as I did last week, I did make some progress. This week I started an online course through KnowledgeNet, which covers the exam objectives for 70-412.

Cool Stuff
There really isn't anything from this past week that really stands out as being especially cool, amazing, or a must use piece of technology. Don't get me wrong, it was still very interesting, but there just wasn't that one thing that jumped out at me as being noteworthy.

Stats
Total time studying: 6 hrs. 30 min.
  • Exam 70-412: 6 hrs.
  • General Windows Server 2012 R2: 30 min.

In Closing
The next couple of weeks are going to be quite challenging in terms of getting any studying done. This means I will have to be extra vigilant about setting time aside to study. By the end of June I would like to be setting 12 hours a week aside to devote to enhancing my IT skills. At this rate, I feel that I should be able to finish the first 3 exams by the end of the year.

Have a great week everyone!
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, June 1, 2014

MCSE Studying - Week 1

Overview
I have completed week one of studying for my MCSE exams. It has not been an aggressive start, but I did make some progress. I started out the week by getting into PowerShell, but was quickly distracted by the arrival of "Training Guide: Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 R2 Services" by Orin Thomas. This book covers the objectives in Exam 70-412. It took nearly two evenings to get the lab environment set up as per the book's instructions. Once completed, however, I dove right in. I am happy to say that what I have seen in the first chapter is not completely foreign, but still has enough new materiel to keep me challenged. I also found some information on adprep that will be useful at work later this year.

Cool Stuff
I think the coolest thing I learned this week was from the setup of the lab environment, and that was the use of netsh and netdom to do some of the configuration of the servers. I have not used these utilities before to configure the IPv4 address settings or the computer name. I had always thought it faster to configure them through the specific connection via the network control panel. What I discovered was that by the time I had got to the fourth server, I had memorized the syntax and it was actually faster to configure the system through these command line utilities, than it was to use the GUI. Below, I have included an example of the command line syntax used to configure the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS server:

  • netsh interface ipv4 set address "Ethernet" static 192.168.2.40 255.255.255.0 192.168.2.1
  • netsh interface ipv4 set dnsservers "Ethernet" static 192.168.2.10 primary

Stats
Total time studying: 6 hrs. 20 min.
  • PowerShell: 55 min.
  • General Windows Server 2012 R2: 1 hr. 30 min.
  • Exam 70-412: 3 hrs. 55 min.
Resources used:
TechNet Article - Add User Principal Name Suffixes

In Closing
I am looking forward to getting more into the meat and potatoes of the 70-412 objectives next week and perhaps finding answers to some of my current questions regarding one of the projects at work. Also, I am also eagerly awaiting another book that shipped on Friday, but that will have to wait until I finish with 70-412 before I can dive into that one.

Have a great week everyone.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)