Disgusted

I have just sat the TCP/IP exam and was disgusted to find that they have changed the format to Adaptive testing without telling anyone. The first I knew was when the charming receptionist said "oh, did you know they have changed the exam?". This wasn't on the MCP site before or after I booked the exam via Sylvan Prometric in the UK. I passed with 742 (pass 570). Their were a total of 25 questions, about half were long scenarios. None of the "easy" questions came up at all, only a couple was I able to answer straight away.

Sadly, I was so furious I have forgotten the wording of the questions, but I will point out a couple I have not seen on this site. I took the MOC course, read the MOC book (bear in mind that these are absolutely identical, I wasted £75 on top of a £1250 course). Read the Sybex (excellent, right up to the point were they changed the sodding exam) and of course the braindumps. I have been working with NT IP for about 2 years, WINS, DHCP, Routing etc and still I scored a comparatively low score. I also have 3 other MCP's (Grrr!)

There was a question regarding a bottleneck on a NT router, you wanted to find out using Performance monitor (with the SNMP agent installed) how many source quench messages were being sent. What you need to know was the specific counter, I eliminated the "banana" answers (I looking at DHCP & Wins counters) and was left with either Sending Source quench counter or Destination Source quench counter. I had to guess at this one so I suggest that you look it up.

What sort of DNS server do you need to resolve internet names using the default cache.dns file? ( A forwarder I believe but check!)

What sort of Record do you need to specify the default mail server for a domain? Definitely an MX record.

There was a nice big scenario about were to place a Wins proxy and a DHCP relay agent on a network with a mixture of RFC and non-RFC compliant routers. So make sure you are sure about what to do with them.

There was a question about getting stats that you could save to a file and import into excel, this is important! The only utility that will do this is Performance monitor and you only get a handful of relevant counters until you install the SNMP service.

An annoying amount of question on Unix, the complete killer was: You have a Unix server running the RSH Daemon (what?) and you want to run a remote command, which utility do you use?

I chose telnet for two reasons, first, it's the only one that is included with NT (without installing the resource kit) and RSH seemed far to easy. REXEC will only execute one command (I think), the question implied that you wanted to run more than that and needed an interactive session.

There were only two questions on subnetting, both relating to the maximum and minimum number values for specific subnets (i.e. what is the total range for IP address X with SubNet mask Y). This were the only two occasions that need to draw out my 128/64/32 etc tables...