Monday, December 15, 2014

Network+ Done

Took and passed network+ with an 865. Woo, missed 4 questions. I think I whiffed a scenario, but I'm not sure. Funny.

Anyhow, regarding the material and test. Sorry, this wont be much help for a lot of folks.

Material: I quick glanced the material from WGU (Testout?). I took 4 notecards of notes. normally, I take a pile of them (50-150 cards depending). I had to beat into my head the 568A & 568B and 110 blocks. Ended up using WAG, BOW and BLOG for the scheme, A-GW (WAG), B-OW, Bl-O-G. The other cards had stuff on them. Don't even recall what. I took the practice tests, and did the scenarios in about 2/3rds of the sections. The ones testing ping, nslookup, dig, etc, I skipped. I've done these way too often in real life.
ping yourself
ping the gateway
ping your destination...

Took the full practice test, made a 96.

The test vs material: since I only quick-glanced it, I can't say how much it mapped up.  I simply used my experience (CWNA, CCNA, CCNA-Sec) to ferret out most of the answers technical answers. I think the study material gave me 3-4 questions I would have missed or 50/50'd. I still love "choose the BEST" solution questions. Basic things to know
  • IP networking (subnetting, broadcast, Classes, etc. One of the questions was on a CCNA level I thought. Good question, had to think and know your rules).
  • OSI model and service at each level and device relationships to said model (Physical - cables,hubs; datalink - bridge/switch; etc;)
  • devices to service provided (Firewall vs router vs switch vs packet filter vs content filter)
  • Ports and protocols (FTP, SMTP, SNMP, etc)
  • Cabling standards
  • troubleshooting steps
  • WiFi (a,b,g,n; security options/flavors; radio freqs; antenna basics; )
Test itself. 80ish questions, and like most of the CompTIA lead with scenarios. I think I had 6-8 out of the gate. One was a good question, but I'm guessing a lot of people get it wrong. Actually had to use the notepad to do the math. The rest of the non-scenario questions are straight forward. I thought most had the right answer well defined and the other choices weren't really an option, but that might be experience. Felt there were 10 questions where it was down to 2 answers, and it was pick the best. (IE, asking a layer 2 OSI model question, 2 answers were router and hub, other was switch and bridge -- pick the best).

Anyhow, there is a lot on this one. experience helped a ton and made it relatively easy for me. knowing the OSI to services helps a lot for this test. Probably need to know it very well.