70-290 passed

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My first MS Exam in 8 years so I was fairly nervous, but very chuffed when I clicked the final button and had passed with 928. I need 70-291 next to complete the MCSA and am thinking i might book it for the end of July. Doesn't give me long to revise but I'll only knuckle down to the revision if I've got a looming deadline.

One thing that surprised me on the exam was to have been asked a couple of questions on a topic that doesn't even appear on the MS "Skills Measured" page for 70-290. Luckily they were mostly the sort where you could discount two answers immeidiately so I was down to a 50:50 guess between the other two.

I'd echo other people that have said if you can put together a lab that allows you to mess around with various roles including domain controllers, web server, WSUS etc you'll find it very useful. The HP ML115 servers are going for £200 at the moment, with an extra 4GB of RAM and a free download of VMWare ESXi you're looking at a very capable lab for helping with revision for less than £250 delivered.

I ended up with

server01 W2K3 Server, DC + DNS + DHCP
server02 W2K3 Server, DC + DNS + WSUS
server03 W2K3 Server, member server + set to receive windows updates from server 03
server04 W2K3 standalone server ISA 2006 and 2 x virtual network adaptors for managing the other servers connection to the Internet.

One thing that saves some time is taking a copy of a virtual machine after installing W2K3, VMWare tools, Group Policy management Console and newsid.exe from the MS web site. That way to bring a new W2K3 server online you just need to deploy your copy, run newsid to rename the server and generate a new SID and then you're free to run dcpromo. The MS advice appears to be don't try taking snapshots or duplicating a server that you've already joined to the domain.

One thing that'll be obvious to any VMWare expert but wasn't necessarily to me is that ESXi (the free version of ESX) doesn't come with a management console built in. You may be thinking well this is a home server I don't need a management console, but what it essentially means is that your ESXi server is a console screen only. Any managment, including viewing the GUI on any of the virtual machines you install, needs to be done from a separate PC.

 

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Congrats and well done !

... and some useful info to boot ! (rep given)

 

Congrats on the pass!!

 

Well done mate!

 

congrats

 

Congrats!

 

Nice job!

 

Well done!

Got my exam on the 13th, I'm quietly confident, but saying that, i always think i'm gonna fail before i finish the exam.