Test name: Internet Information Server 4

Test # 70-087

Hi Current and Future MCSEs,

First, kudos to anyone who has helped this site in any capacity: that's all the contributors and especially the sitemeister, Brainmaster. Many, many thanks to you.   Second, shame on Microsoft. I began studying for this exam with two books:

1. MCSE Exam Notes: Internet Information Server 4 by Matthew Strebe and 2. MCSE TestPrep Microsoft Internet Information Server 4 by Emmett Dulaney, and I initially thought they were both pretty good: they had good definitions and excellent hands-on exercises; that is until I visited this site. I saw here questions regarding metabase vs. registry, ODBC errors (special thanks to Happy Guy,) Windows Scripting Host (WSH,) Web Application Manager (WAM) and masquerade domains, that I had not even been exposed to. I realized that I was horribly unprepared to take the exam even though the books lead me to believe that I was ready. Yet, even with their gross omissions, both books carry the "Microsoft Certified Professional Approved Study Guide" seal of approval. If I had stayed as unprepared as these books would have left me, I would have had to retake this test several additional times. I fault Microsoft for that. If a book has their approval, it should cover the breath of material in at lease a cursory manner.

Third, ok, now my turn to share some of my study tips. I think most, if not all, of the questions are covered on this site, I won't repeat them unless I have a different take on them. Please, remember to question the answers though as some of them are quite wrong. What I did was to buy a stack of index cards. I wrote the essense of each braindump question on one side (combining several contributors where possible) and the possible answers on the back side. After a while, reading through each person's reasoning, a lot of the material became much clearer. I then crossed off any answers that I decided were wrong. This produced a stack of flash cards that I could flip through and study almost anytime and anywhere.

My other tip reminds you to use the available resources. Microsoft recommends four of its free, on-line, Internet seminars for IIS4. You can go to these sites and listen to the seminars (I guess they average about an hour each), or if you don't have sound access, you can still view and print the bulleted slides. The security seminar (2nd hypertext address below) was especially good in explaining the use of SSL with basic authentication when NT challenge response is not an option.

Use the free Microsoft sample (Personal Exam Prep) PEP test and the Demo Simulator. Even though the PEP test is far easier than the real thing, it does give you at least two answers for the real test. It says that the default MIME mappings are established in the Internet Information Server 4.0 "metabase," and that free disk space must equal "40%" of the size of the corpus for storing Index Server data. The IIS4 demo simulator is buggy and as such, a fine representation of the one you can expect on the real exam.

E.G. When using the demo, if I right-clicked on a site or used the ACTION button, I could make the required changes and everything seemed ok, but the answer would always be wrong. I found that I had to get back to the root of the site in the left hand tree-view window, then click on the icon in the right hand window, in order to get the simulator to accept my answer. Of course, that took all day to figure out!

Other tips:

1. Remember that some browsers get errors if you try to access a site that has a space in the URL. Change "good <space> house" to "goodhouse" without a space.

2. Use https: (note that the "s" is not a typo) to indicate SSL encryption in a URL.

In any case, that's all I have. Good luck to you all.

- Snixxy