MCITP @ Firebrand Training Blog

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I just thought I would blog my experiences with Firebrand Training.

I am booked on the MCITP:EA course, this is a 13 day intensive course, that's 13 consecutive days, no time off, working weekends etc.

I have dealt with Firebrand Training since the days when they were called The Training Camp, I have dealt with the same salesman in all that time and at no point have I ever been pestered or bothered with unwanted sales calls, it's always been on my terms and my timescales. If I said at the time that I couldn't do anything for 6 months then I wouldn't hear anything for 6 months, Duncan would then phone up and ask how things were going, 2 months ago I called up Duncan and enquired about the MCITP:EA course, I was originally due to come on the course at the beginning of March but my contract was extended for another month hence me starting the course yesterday. Was there an issue with me postponing a month?? not at all, I was booked onto this course instead.

On my previous excursions to Firebrand I had trained at their Oxford location, this has since closed and a new location was acquired and built up, this is a dedicated site for Firebrand, unlike their Oxford location.

Wyboston Lakes is located on the Bedfordshire\Cambridgeshire borders, the training facility is purely there for Firebrands use and is very modern and well equipped, security is very important to them and each classroom can only be entered by use of the students security card. Inside the classroom it's well lit, well equipped and well monitored (cctv in all of the rooms, it's stressed that only senior management has access to the taped content).

Firebrand generally hire in their trainers for each course, infact they only have three full time instructors, luckily for us our instructor is one of those three.

Upon arrival last night we were introduced to Mike, he has been an MCT for over 10 years, working here for the last 3 and knows not only the MCITP course ware but also various Cisco and Microsoft courses as well.

Course materials are various MOC and MS Press books, as well as the online use of Preplogic tests (30 days use), it was stressed at this point that only Preplogic and SelfTestSoftware prep exams could be used on site, it was also stressed that use of any other testing software was strictly prohibited and anyone found using said software onsite would immediately be asked to stop. No mention of other testing software companies was mentioned but when I spoke to the instructor later and said I was impressed with this he said that as Testing is their bread and butter, any use of unauthorised testing software would cause them to lose their accreditation and testing abilities and would basically cause the company to fail, hence it was stressed that it not be used (also they are scared of any secret shoppers from the likes of MS and Prometric).

Accomodation and food wise, the accomodation is good, the food last night was ok, unfortunately the kitchen in the block we are living in is being refurbished, that means that the evening meal has to be eaten in a different building, however breakfast and lunch is in the same block that we live in.

Finally a quick word on the course material, included with the MOC and MS Press books were NFR copies of Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 2008 R2, these are full blown products for our own use

Logging off now as I am about to start my first days training (Windows 7 for the next two days, exam at 10am on Wednesday morning). Expect updates throughout the next 2 weeks.

 

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End of Day 1, it's been a very busy day, loads of Windows 7 stuff, loads of labs and loads of people not quite understanding whats going on.

Overall it's been a good day.

 

What's the money like for them?

 

OK it's the end of Day 2, the Windows 7 MOC content has been covered and all labs completed.

Overall the Windows 7 training has been informative and well done, there have been a few issues with various VHD's when reverting back after finishing a module but this certainly hasn't been down to the instructor.

It was good to get to grips with some of the technology that I haven't managed to play with yet (BranchCache, IP6, BTG) and it's been good to get a refresher on other technologies that I am familiar with (imagex, USMT, general Windows 7 tech).

The reviews sessions have been good, ensuring that we understood everything we had covered up to then, one of the nice things was receiving free 30 days use of Preplogic Testing software (online only), we apparently get copies of this for all of the other exams we are sitting as well (a bit of a pain considering I purchased the SelfTest Software for the entire course minus the 70-680 exam, as I already have all the Vista exams). Luckily enough the registration number is valid until June so I may well see about selling that later on.

I would hazard a guess and say that the 70-680 exam is not going to be too difficult for me (client exams I have always found easy), there has been a lot of note taking, MOC highlighting and memory refreshing with regards to certain functions within the OS but I actually feel fairly confident about the exam.

I have a couple more hours of revision planned for tonight (just to recap), we are back in the classroom tomorrow at 8am (it started yesterday at 9am, today at 8.30, I am dreading what time we will be starting by Friday) before the I sit the exam at 10am tomorrow. Once the exam is out of the way (pass or fail) we are starting on the material for the AD exam (70-640 or 83-640 as it is now known as) tomorrow afternoon. No rest for the wicked.

As far as food goes, the last couple of meals I have had have been really good (however I did miss this evenings meal due to some issues I had to deal with), and there are plenty of drinks and fruit on hand to make sure that we don't go hungry during the day (one change since I last went to Firebrand is that the crisps and small chocolate bars are no longer free, oh well).

My only complaint so far has had nothing to do with the TP but actually the accommodation, for the last couple of nights I haven't managed to get a decent nights sleep due to the worst bed in history, I would have been more comfortable in the bathroom (and no, it only has a shower). A quick word with Bob (great bloke btw, have dealt with him on all three occasions now) and that was sorted out for me with a quick room change. Feedback tomorrow but as I have been on the bed for the last two hours already and it's not been an issue I think I am going to get a (semi) decent nights sleep.

More tomorrow (and hopefully a message to say I passed 70-680)

The only thing I can say is that I checked around with GK and QA and this was the best deal.

 

Well after a somewhat sleepless night (was in bed by 1am and up by 6.30) we were back in the class room for 8am. After 2 hours of revision and q & a it was off to the exam (via the gents ). Booking in was very straight forward, ID's checked, pockets emptied, pen and plastic covered paper received and it was off into the exam room.

There were a lot of people testing today, not only my group (MCITP:EA) but also the MCSE 2003 guys (who were also taking the 70-680 exam), so as you can imagine that was a lot of people (approx 25). The MCSE guys were booked in first so they went in first and had approx 10 minutes lead over the MCITP guys. We were all taken in as a group and off we went.

I have to say that the exam was pretty much what I expected, no major surprises and not anything we hadn't covered in the classroom over the previous couple of days.

20 minutes after I started the exams I had finished... surprisingly I passed... with a score of 900/1000

Now it's on to 83-640 for the next few days (exam booked for Saturday)

 

good luck 83-640 is pretty straight forward the labs are nothing too taxing. you ll get this one in the books aswell

 

please keep us informed on how its going!

Good luck!

 

Slight change of plan, we did the 83-640 course work yesterday but during the day I decided to have a look at 70-686 just to see what it's like. As I have spent my career doing deployments and understand the concepts of licensing and imaging etc I found that as thats what the exam is predominantely about that I would hope to find that the subject matter was fairly straight forward. So last night I did a spot of testing on the laptop (MeasureUP ftw and I got to bed at gone 1am ) and felt more than confident to sit the exam (was getting 70 - 85%), after some more reading courtesy of this thread I came into the training center this morning with the thoughts of booking up the 60-686 exam.

Normally I would speak to Paul (the exam manager I think his title is), however today he wasn't in, not a problem however as Ash managed to get me sorted out and booked the exam for me (I also wanted to use a discount code to reduce the cost of the exam, not a problem because we booked it online, entered the code and I then paid for the exam, jobs a goodun).

Back into class for a few more hours to carry on discussing about AD-DS and the various subjects that pertain to it. Come 12am we had reached a point in the class where we were supposed to be and we broke for lunch (actually it was a spare time break being that lunch is booked for 12:30, so the others in the class did some more reading and carried on with their labs), I took the opportunity to take the 70-686 exam.

Out to reception with my ID (even though I sat an exam yesterday I still had to provide the relevant id (PP and CC)) and I was booked in for the test. Into the testing room and off I went.... 65 questions on subjects I was comfortable with (licensing, deployment (SCCM, MDT,WDS), imaging, gpo's etc) and in what seemed like no time I was finished, unlike yesterday where I had been nervous going in todays exam was definitely more relaxing and I wasn't worried about this too much, as I said this was my bread and butter.

I finish the exam and somehow get into a review screen (I only realised this afterwards because initially it looked like I had restarted the exam.. only I couldn't click on any answers), anyway I managed to end the review\comments part of the test and get a message telling me ..... I had passed

So on the spur of the moment I have managed to add an additional certification that I hadn't considered before coming to site (actually I had but was going to wait until August when the MS Press book comes out), however having looked on the MS Learning Portal to see what was being tested I considered my chances on it were going to be good.

Anyway, end of exam and back to class, luckily because it was carried out during lunch I hadn't missed any of the lesson and so it was back to Sites and Services, GPO's, DSR, Groups etc. Alot of which is just refreshing my memory (what was good to learn about was Fine Grained Password Policies, such a cool feature).

Anyway, nose back to the grindstone and studying.

 

Excellent blog mate, congrats on the two passes!

 

Well I am reporting from home atm (no, I wasn't thrown off the course, no I didn't quit ).

After a stressful couple of days studying for the AD exam we sat the 83-640 exam this afternoon. For those of you who have done it you will know that the emulations can have a tendancy to not work correctly, now this isn't down to the exam centre but actually the people responsible for the Terminal Server session in the US. I can't really speak for the others except to say that I saw a lot of people being moved positions, me being the first (before the emulation even loaded, as it actually didn't load). Needless to say the centre staff were on hand and had more than enough machines to cope with people having to change seats if required.

For those of you who don't know, the 83-640 exam comprises of two lab sections, this is to weed out those people who have studied but don't actually have any hands on, it's a good idea and something that testers other than MS are also catching on to.

Not going into too much detail, my two labs had 6 tasks and 8 tasks between them, nothing I hadn't seen or done before but let me tell you, trying to remember where a particular GPO setting is can be awfully frustrating, especially if you have already completed the rest of the tasks required. Having gone through both of my labs (and not having missed out any steps because in the end I remembered where the required setting was found) I moved onto the set of questions. For the last few days I have been testing based on previous MS exams and answering 65 questions for this exam, boy was I surprised when I was give 30 to answer, thankfully not too many on subjects I wasn't strong on.

The good thing about the course so far is that we covered the more important subjects such as CA's, DNS, NTDSUTIL, Backups etc, Group Policies, RODC's etc we didn't do too much on Rights Management or Federated Services although obviously we did touch on them, added to that the books obviously do contain plenty of information on those subjects.

One of the differences with this exam over the two previous exams is that they don't give you a break down on your score, so whilst I passed I don't actually know the areas that needed improving, not a major issue however because if I do need to touch up on something whilst working I have plenty of access to Technet\Google\PDF's etc.

Anyway, back to the reason I am home. I live 80 miles away from the training center, I finished my exam an hour and 5 minutes after starting it and we had finished for the day, back in the classroom tomorrow for the 70-642 lessons (2 days worth), having spent last night revising and back up at 6.30 this morning on the laptop going over things again I decided that I was coming home today to spend a little time with the wife and son, back over to Wyboston Lakes tomorrow for a 9am start.

 

Congrats on the passes!

 

Great blog mate, please keep it up as long as it doesn't cut into your study time! Congrats for passing the exams

 

Early on Sunday morning (I actually woke up at 4.30am) I made my way back to Wyboston, class started at 9am so I left my house at 07.15.

70-642 according to various sites is one of the harder exams (apart from it Pro exam), having sat both 70-291 and 70-642 I can tell you that currently 70-642 is not that bad.

On to the lessons; as previously mentioned we started back in the classroom on Sunday morning to cover subjects such as IP Addressing (inc VLSM), IPSEC, DHCP, DNS, RRAS (inc NAP), File and Printing and Network Monitoring. I have to admit that a lot of this was just a refresh for me, the new element really was NAP and the changes to RRAS. The fundementals of the subject however are exactly the same as that of 70-291 for the 2003 course. I don't suggest however that those of you who have done the 291 exam could simply pass this exam with no exposure to 2008 server. Over the course of the two days (Tuesday was prep and test day) we managed to cram a lot of information in and it starts to take a noticiable effect on people, by the end of Monday people were getting to breaking point, information was going in but for silly reasons they were forgetting it. It was at this stage that Mike simply told us to walk away, to take a break from it, it's also one of the reasons why in the break-out room they have a couple of X-Boxes and a TV in there. A few games of Fifa 2010 later and we were a tad refreshed and ready to go again.

Having already crammed a lot of information in it's also at times like this that you realise that you need to take a break from everything rather than knuckling down and carrying on, which was why on Tuesday morning we went over the essentials from the previous two days and had our exams (kick off time 2pm), we had already been told that after the exams had finished the rest of the day would be ours. So it was time to get the required information sorted out in our heads and to pass the exam. After breaking for lunch at 12 I decided that I was going to take the exam slightly earlier so at 12:55 I signed in for my 70-642 exam, as on previous occasions I still had to provide proof of ID to Ash (he knows who I am but the rules state to check ID for every exam). I had gotten pretty much everything down, although my knowledge of IP6 subnetting still isn't that great my VLSM maths were spot on.

Sitting the 70-642 exam means answering a total of 40 questions, the breakdown of the questions should follow the MS website so as long as you are ok with the subject matter the exam should be easy.

My exam covered pretty much everything that was expected, however for me there was no VLSM (shame but good none the less ), there were a couple of IP6 subnetting questions (bad for me but oh well) and loads on DNS, DHCP, Print and File and backups, as well as RRAS and Network Monitoring. Over all no surprises and I am happy to say I walked away with another pass

Now it's Day 10, 3 (4 really) exams down, 2 (3 really) to go. Originally the course aims for the students to pass the 5 exams required for the MCITP:EA certification, as already mentioned I have already sat the 70-686 exam after reviewing the MS learning website and reading various papers on the subject. In addition to sitting the MCITP:EA and EDA exams I am also considering the MCITP:SA exam, we have all been advised that we are pretty much there where knowledge is required (perhaps just a little more on storage apparently) and I have a feeling that a number of us will be sitting this exam as well as the EA exam.

More on 70-643 which is what we are currently doing (WSS, IIS, WDS and WMS to name a few subjects) later.

 

Wow. Fantastic blog. Great to hear your experiences and insights - keep them coming!

Best of luck with the remainder of your course.

 

70-643.................. what an absolute a** of an exam. Actually let me rephrase that... it's the hardest exam that I have taken over the last couple of weeks, mainly because I don't use IIS or Sharepoint too much (ie IIS only when I have to, Sharepoint never). As far as KMS, WDS, TS and Hyper-V goes, KMS is something I have used along with MAK in various projects in the past, it basically just works, as long as you remember the 5\25 rule you are ok, WDS is something I install to further my installations of SCCM, so rather than using WDS I would be using either SCCM or MDT to provide deployment services, TS is completely new to me, loved what I saw and I think it's definitely something I will get into more, as far as Hyper-V goes I actually think that will be the next exam\course I will be booking myself on (luckily it's something Firebrand do so I may have a chat with my sales man to see what we can sort out).

The 70-643 exam is based on 40 questions covering 4 main areas of knowledge, there is a lot of reliance on remembering command line switches for the likes of IIS and TS and if you haven't used them in anger then it's very hard to ensure that you know the subject well enough to pass. Of all the exams that I have sat over the last 10 days this is the only exam that I didn't feel confident going into, infact it's the only exam where I reviewed my answers (and changed 2, something I never EVER do) completely. There were certain parts of the exam that I didn't have a clue on (predominantly Sharepoint Services) but other parts of it that I found to be generally easy (the Hyper-V but only because I have used virtualisation products in various guises for a number of years now). If I am brutally honest the exam wasn't my favourite and I am glad it's over (just to let you know, I did pass it )

Luckily enough the course content did provide everything needed to pass the exam and Mike gave us a Q&A session today that bullet pointed what we had covered during this phase of the course.

From a personal perspective I would say that whilst the 70-643 course is interesting it's not likely to be something that I use too much in real life, so far in my career I haven't done anything with WSS, my IIS exposure has generally been SCCM or WSUS related and the Hyper-V is covered in more detail in other courses (70-652 for Hyper-V and 70-403 for VMM and I am more likely going to study those in greater detail anyway. The TS and Media services were good, again something I am likely to look at from a personal perspective more than a professional one. As far as WDS goes, not something I am ever likely to touch simply because I deal with the MDT\SCCM side of things already.

As far as course content goes, this has been the main one for me, it was the one with the technology that I hadn't played with previously and the one that I was looking forward to, it didn't disappoint and it has been a good couple of days.

I am pretty sure that tomorrow will be my final day on the course tomorrow, originally we should have been sitting the 70-643 exam tomorrow and the 70-647 exam on Saturday, as it currently stands I am pretty sure that I will be sitting 70-646 tomorrow morning (about 10:30) and the 70-647 exam tomorrow afternoon, bearing in mind that we have now covered everything required for the SA exam it seems a shame to not bother attempting that now (also as I have a discount voucher why not?), add to the fact that 2nd Shot is on still 'if' I don't pass it tomorrow I could always try again on Saturday. As far as the EA exam goes, I think a couple more hours tomorrow of going over material should be enough to give me a chance at that as well (and again if I fail it I do have Saturday to give it another try). I am not telling the wife that I may be home tomorrow just in case I can't make it but if I am it will be nice to surprise her and the boy

 

Woot

More later, packing up ready to go home. Needless to say I can change my WIP and Sig

 

Congratulations m8 and from the sounds of the hard work you've put in - well deserved !

An excellent blog too - repp'd !