BlueWolf's Howl

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August 01, 2009

IPS Done

On Friday morning I completed the requirements for IPS Specialist certification. Wooohooo! Yes, that's what you get when you pass the 642-533 exam. I am happy to say that I slammed it! And I have to say that the thing that really put me over the top for that exam was the practice I did on the PEC Labs.

PEC stands for Partner E-Learning Channel > which is the "Partners Only" section of Cisco's web site. The labs are difficult to find. You won't be able to do a search on the exam number or CCSP and have all the pertinent labs at your fingertips. For the most part, you have to search by technology.

If you search for BGP, several BGP-related labs will be found. If you search for IDM or IPS, you can hit a few. Then try another search and you'll find more.

Some of the labs are more interesting than others. And some of the labs are more 'meaty' than others. And if you keep trying different labs, you can find some with a full-fledged device. Those are nice. It's like having rack time - you can actually work on your own scenarios in addition to what they have in their planned exercise.

And everything has a down side -- the down side of some of the labs is that you get a blank screen if it's full. Some of the labs don't tell you that you can't access it because it's full. But you will get a screen that just shows a blank clipboard where the 'enter lab' button should be. If you get that, just try another lab or a different time of day.

So now my next 'goal' is to work toward Wireshark Certification. I know if I work on the next exam, I'll keep getting distracted, so I might as well not try to fight it. THEN I can prepare for the SNRS exam. That's one that I really want to get 100% on - it's my stuff - routers and switches.

More later --

Posted by BlueWolf on August 1, 2009 06:05 PM