Subject: NetEss

OK, so I just passed NetEss. I scored a 982/1000, and it was a great feeling to come out of the testing room and have the girl say, "Wow, you really over studied." My reply was: "Actually, I'm surprised I got the one wrong."

Parts of the test were really difficult, others were almost identical to the Transcender tests.

Here's what I can remember:

Troubleshooting:

• I had 4 questions that went something like this: "You add a client to the network running IPX and it can't see some of the resources. What is wrong?"
• If IPX was in the question, the answer was wrong frame type or protocol mismatch.
• There was one rather odd one that had the above situation, but it was a Unix machine. I guessed that it was a protocol mismatch, but I'm not sure if it was right or not.
• One with a network consisting of RG-58 /U and RG-58 A/U cable... Just replace the segment with RG-58.
• One with 0 ohms showing from edge to center... Just replace the cable since there is a short.
• I think there was only one IRQ question, and it was relatively common - com2
• 1 question regarding hardware being okay, but no access to the network. Check the transceiver.
• Which allows you to look at the packet level? Protocol analyzer
• Which will let you look at packets over time? Protocol analyzer -- Performance Monitor was not a choice for this one.

T1 / 3 cities:

2 questions with the 3 cities. The wording wasn't as clear as it was in some of the brain dumps and Transcenders. One question had the 3 cities with 2 T1 lines, and they were looking for 1 Mb of data transfer. The optional was 1 Mb if one link failed. The other optional was operation as normal even if one link failed. This was a C - meets required, but none of the optionals. The wording was such that you didn't know if they meant communication between all sites or just 1 site...

NetBIOS:

2 questions on the NetBIOS naming scheme. Both had 20,000 clients over 40 sites. Again the wording was strange, so that you really didn't know if they meant will this work in the future once a WAN was implemented. They didn't give any protocol information (such as IPX with NetBIOS), so I assumed that everything would work after the WAN was in place and I refrained from choosing the D - doesn't meet required results. The second question had the well-known one that had meaningful names based on department, location, server #. This one was A - met all required.

Layers:

Only one question about where things operate. This was a gateway operating at Transport on up

Gateways:

You want to connect a client running terminal emulation software to an IBM mainframe, which connectivity device do you use? A gateway.

Routers/Brouters/Bridges/Repeaters

• One question about what to do with a broadcast storm and NetBEUI on the clients and a brouter in place. The answer is to turn off the bridging and replace NetBEUI with TCP/IP.
• One question about which device to use with a 300 m segment of 10Base2 cable. Use a repeater.
• Two scenario question where you want to cut usage by 50%. One offered changing all components to 100BaseT, which met all required & optionals (maintaing usage levels with addition of new computers) EXCEPT cost.
  Putting in a switch would have been much cheaper. The other question had the famous changing of TCP's packet size and lowering the Ethernet packet size. D - doesn't meet required results.
• One question that asked the cheapest was to get better performance for a small Ethernet network. They offered choices like: replace with Token Ring, Replace with FDDI, Replace with ATM. By far the cheapest was to replace the hubs with switches.

PPP/SLIP:

• One question where they mentioned a 5 year old computer with protocol for dial up that doesn't allow dynamic IP. Which one is it? SLIP.
• One question that asked which of the following are dial up protocols, and it gave only two choices: PPP or SLIP. Make sure to check both.

Definitions/Standards:

• One question asking what Crosstalk is.
• Which is meant to replace the standard phone service? Basic ISDN
• Which can transmit at 100 Mbps with voice, data, video? ATM

NDIS:

The famous questions about NDIS and what it does. One was to allow compliant protocols to use compatible NIC cards or something close to that. No mention about multiple protocols.

The other question asked what it did. Something like allow transport protocols to use compliant NIC cards. I almost tripped up on this one, since two of the answers are really similar. Just remember that protocol layers perform services for the layer immediately above, and you'll have no problem. The other one that I almost put was: allow transport protocols send to compliant redirectors or something close to it.

Others:

• One mesh question where they show a diagram and ask what it is.
• One scenario about changing protocols for a Mac/PC network to IPX only and disabling the bridging on routers. The goal was to kill the broadcast storm and not have to change protocols on the clients. This was a D - None of the required since the Macs were running AppleTalk.
• One question about security on a 95 network (share level)
• One question about security on an NT network. User level, but it was worded funny.
• One question about the definition of client/server. The answer was something like: client requests actions from a server, which performs on the back end.
• One about which server performs processing for clients: Application.
• Two scenarios about implementing a security system. I can't remember the answers, but if you pay attention, they are straight forward.
• Two scenarios about protecting data loss due to hardware failure. One had striping with parity, the other had mirroring. One of them also wanted to perform audit functions, but there was no mention of it in the proposed solution, so it was a B - meets required, 1 of of the optionals. The other mentioned auditing, and it met required and all optionals.