Hey,

Anyone recently take the Comptia Network + certification (2009 objectives). I'm going to have to write this as a prerequesite for my Convergence + cert. I'm working towards my Avaya Certified associate papers.

If so what study material did you use? I know a bunch of it, but I need to bone up on a few things and refresh my mind.

the testout materials are great, i used it for all my certs.

http://www.testout.com/

can find them pretty easily on your friendly neighbourhood tracker.

best of luck on the certs Keith. When I did mine it was just short of the 'exam change'. Network + done in 15 mins. A+ hardware and software done in 20 mins each. They werent hard at all. There are also material thats available similar to the test king method of doing things out there. If you want to know where to get it I can ask a network admin friend of mine who has access to all of it.

One thing he did mention - you dont want to do the exams too fast. He did say that if you do them too quickly you will be suspected of using a test king kinda deal and they can possibly deny you the cert. Take your time, you will do fine.

I'm not looking for a the easy way, I want to know the material, more or less a refresher, however I would use these as a refresher or as a testing method.

yea newf, I wrote my A+ Hardware + Software a long while ago. I just didn't have time back in the day for certifications, even tho alot were covered in my course.

It took me no time at all to nail the Hardware/Software exams (220-301,220-302) Yea I know they are now 220-601 thru 604. So it's been a while.

I have a bit of a ways to go this year for certifications, and it will cost me about $1500.00(Books + Exams) to get all the certifications I need. I'm hoping the company I work for will cover most of the cost, which I think they will as long as I keep the receipts.

I deal with many vendors and well right now I'm doing the work without the pay. The certifications will allow me to receive a nice substantial pay increase .

Here is the order I'm thinking about going.
Comptia Network+ (N10-004)
Microsoft MCP (70-271); MCDST(70-271, 70-272); MCIST (70-685 - Windows 7)
Comptia Convergence+ (CT0-101)
Avaya ACA: (CT0-101 + 1 Elective, going Voice Services)

I'm going to be starting the Network+ studying once I get back from my honeymoon the start of Sept. (actually beginning to read up on the N10-003 material that I have) I may open up and get my MCDST first, then move to Network + and Convergence+, however Convergence+ is a ton to know. I figure if I do Network+ then reread the book, then go onto read for Convergence+ the network portion will be drilled into my head.

Great thinking. Starting with Network+, its an easy pass. Once you pass that ( and you will ) it will give you confidence in the remaining. It also will help you learn some of the material that you need as a background for your other certs. Go that route, I would.

I'm just reading up on material on the below until I get my books that cover everything. I took a preassment exam with 60 questions and landed on 75%. Mind you I haven't even looked at the networking side of things other then the very basics, so I was happy that I retained a aweful lot from back in the day. The read is really just a refresher and I personally feel in about 2 weeks I could go write and pass the exam.

http://www.techexams.net/forums/network ... twork.html

I remember doing that test - if u got one wrong it would ask you more questions along those lines so be careful.

Cable questions were the easiest. Remembering the OSI model in detail was a little difficult as you have to know it in full detail.

When I did mine @ the college they asked to look at my Tim's cup as they said people have scribbled things in them to cheat lol As I said you will do great. 75% is a good mark. You probably dont even need to study to nail that one. Employers dont look at marks so its personal for you to do well. They will ask if you have it or not - if they are at all concerned.

Most places aren't worried about certifications, they typically test you themselves in area's or look at experience you have in that area. With so many question/answer guides out there for all these certifications, it's really a shame that people boost themselves up to look good on paper, yet they used "resources" that won't help them in any spot other then passing the exam.

The company I'm working for is paying for the material/certifications (that is that I pass). I want to get my ACA, and to do this I require Network+ and Convergence+. So here I am.

I figure I should have all the above certs done in a year. I figure 1 month to study for each. 1 month off to give the head a rest. then repeat.

That's what I've found as well. They want to know my degree and experience and that's it really. Any courses I've taken or certificates are just icing on the cake for them... I suppose that's what can differentiate you from the rest of the crowd though.

Yeah, this is becoming a growing trend in the IT field, thank god. I've always been plagued in the past by not having that little piece of paper that says you can do the job properly.

I myself, over the years have noticed that alot of these A+ guys aren't even computer guys, they just took a course so they could get into a growing field. So for the most part, I know more than they do through practical application and learning.

It saddens me when I visit my local computer shop to see someone whom I taught damn near everything they know about PC's and repair, who got his A+ (somehow lol), and doesn't know what a VGA cooler is (he thought it was shielding for the vga cord), working there when they wouldn't give me a job due to lack of A+ certification.

I'm pretty much 100% self taught, and produce some of the most stable code and crisp looking graphics for the web. I have a proven track history and an outstanding portfolio. This is only now starting to give me some credibility.

My current job stated certification was an asset, but after showing my portfolio and demonstrating my skills I was taken on without a second thought.

Just wish more companies would start hiring based on what people can demonstrate they know, instead of what a piece of paper says they know. This would fix alot of the problems with people getting shotty or incorrect servicing on their machines, not to mention the encyclopedia of misinformation that these 'certified' folks have been dishing out to customers over the years.

Remember, some of the smartest, most intelligent, creative IT guys are like 8 years old, with no formal training or certification, writing some of the most important code our field will ever use. I'm sure these kids know 100x more than most A+ certified individuals.

Not just A+, but all sorts of certs can be self taught. I have limited enterprise level networking experience, but my current job requires me to plan and build an entire corporate network from the ground up. Most companies hire system admins to mange a pre-existing network, I get the priveledge of building it from scratch and learning as I go.

Once again, more jobs need to be like this.

Excellent comment.

To ad to it - technicians that are A+ certified are becoming more and more like vehicle mechanics in the eye of the consumer. Hard to find a good one, one that knows what they are doing and one that's honest.

as without experience, good luck in building a pc the right way or knowing how to fix an issue, or diag'ing it correctly.

I couldn't agree more. I have been fortunate to persue virtualization over the past year where I work. I performed an audit of our IT departments DR plan and found HUGE holes in it as well as unrealistic timelines. We then had a consultant gather the true recovery timelines from the entire company and report back to us with that info (he did other things to but that is all I cared about).

Based and what he advised I put in a proposal to migrate us to a VMware Virtual Infrastructure based environment. It was approved and I am just gettind down to the point where I am ready to test a full recovery and start writing the new recovery docs in the next few weeks.

I have done all this with only a basic course in VMware and the rest has been fully hands on learning.

Matt

Thats great Matt! Virtualization can be intimidating at first, but once you grasp the key concepts, it's just a matter of pushing the right buttons.

You must have had some major problems for virtualization to be the cheaper solution, it's usually the opposite.

Not to mention some face melting specs on your servers (should your company be big enough to warrant that many vm's)

Oh, Matt, may I add one more thing:

We considered virtualization here, but decided not to in order to maintain redundancy and dedication.

Remember, when your virtualization server goes down, so does everything else. Did you factor that into your DR and backups?

Absolutely it was considered! I went with a cluster of 3 HP DL360 G5 servers, each with dual quad-core 2.83GHz procs, 32GB RAM, Fiber Channel cards, 6 GB nics, redundant fans and powersupplies. They are all running a DAS installed ESX 3.5 Enterprise (we have the Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Enterprise suite licensed for 6 processors) on a mirrored array consisting of 2 15K SAS hard drives. The 3 servers all have high availability, distributed resource scheduler, vMotion, Storage vMotion, etc.

On the back of that for running our VM's we have a HP EVA4000 fiber channel SAN (dual controllers and switches so there is a failover path in case one line dies) with 14 142GB 10K Fiber attached SCSI drives (1TB LUN for our file server and 400GB for our VM snapshot/backup LUN). The VM's are running off of another shelf consisting of 12 450GB 15K Fiber attached SCSI drives. On top of that we have redundant Cisco 3560G switches as the backbone for the servers.

Right now I am running around 25 VM's, mostly all are Server 2003 R2 Enterprise. I plan on licensing Datacenter 2008 next year and upgrading them all to that, simply for the OS licensing savings there.

Our vCenter Foundation/bacukp server is an HP DL380 G5 with 2 dual core 2.33GHz procs, 12GB RAM, 4 10K SAS drives in RAID 5, dual fiber channel cards, redundant fans and power supplies. This talks to a HP MSL2024 LTO3 fiber channel tape library and a rack mount LTO4 SCSI drive for the backups and uses Vizioncore vRanger Pro and Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 to do that actual backups.

It's a nice setup and a great spot for learning the basics of VMware.

Now is a good time for people to feel bad about their home servers LOL.

Cheers,

Matt