Second despondent thread of the day: Cuck Fisco

[Ben Kenobi]

You still don't know yours. You're far more limited that you believe.

Perhaps you should start a thread discussing this.

[Sava]

BK is shit

[Elok]

Bk, suppose you're Leonidas, waiting around at Thermopylae for the Persians to come the next day. You're feeling a bit bummed, natch, when a helot porter (who has no combat experience) pipes up and says, "Come on, what kind of attitude is that? The way I see it, your only problem is, you don't have enough people. If you get just a few thousand more guys you could totally plug up that gaping hole that leads to your unprotected rear*. But that will only just barely let you win. To really be sure of it, you want to keep the Persians from knowing about that pass at all. And you've still got time to practice your stabbing. Sure, you've had a whole lifetime training, but you still have time to get in more practice. If each of your men can just kill two more Persians before being overwhelmed tomorrow, do you know how big a pile of corpses that would make? Why, it would be huge! They'll be tripping up on their own dead. Now, get up, get ready, and send those Eastern nancies packing! You can do it!"

How far into that speech would you let him get before having your men hunt him down like a rabbit for sport? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you mean well, but you do not actually understand the difficulties here, and the gaps in your understanding are leading you to assume, in places, that I am an idiot. I could explain, but seriously, please stop. It's not helping.

*Inevitable Spartan/buggery joke goes here

[giblets]

I may not know much, but I have tutored people for years. Tests and studying are two things I DO know. How do you think a stupid deaf person who's a complete idiot managed to earn a degree? Good looks? Money?

As for the drill sargeant bs, it's the sandpapery crap that nobody likes doing that's tripping you up. I'm confident your next post will be, "I kicked Cisco's ass and now I'm taking my wife to Europe!"

Good luck, Elok. Hopefully there's some more sys admins folks here. Someone should be able to help you on the content rather than the process.

Oh wow, you got a college degree, like most of the people on this forum. Whoopdy do

[Ben Kenobi]

Bk, suppose you're Leonidas, waiting around at Thermopylae for the Persians to come the next day. You're feeling a bit bummed, natch, when a helot porter (who has no combat experience) pipes up and says, "Come on, what kind of attitude is that?

Elok, what battle experience do you have? You're an English major. There is a significant disconnect between your experience and what you are being called to do here. You've already failed twice.

I do have combat experience, both with myself and other students. I have tutored students successfully in Physics, math, chemistry, biology. While not 100 percent in line, the examinations are much closer in these subjects to your experience. I would consider all of those students that I tutored are less bright than you and all of them managed to overcome their hurdles. That's not so much a comment on them, but of you. You're not a stupid person. You are very smart. You are making very smart people mistakes.

I called out attitudes that I feel are unhelpful to you and your future success. Labelling something you don't understand as 'arbitrary', simply shows that you have insufficient understanding of the material. When you've been in the battlefield, been out there doing sys admin work, and get that experience, THEN you get to say what is and what is not needed. Not before, and certainly not after you just fail a test.

Two, I've been there. I've gotten stuck myself. I used to be a physics major. I was the last person cut from my program, everyone else who stayed on passed. Everyone. I wasn't sure where I would go and what I should do - to someone who'd dedicated his life since 12 wanting to be an astrophysicist, getting there, and then being the last man cut was hard. Is there regret now when I'm subbing for folks in other fields and doing just fine? Absolutely. But I made the decision then to cut my losses and go into history.

I know what it's like to be faced with the choice of my primary field, and being shown that you are probably not good enough to make it, not just now but ever. You have your primary field. You are a success in your primary field. Now you are picking up a secondary field in order to make some money. This is a prudent decision.

Had you failed harder, I would have been the first to suggest, cut your losses. Try something else. But you almost passed. I suspected it was errors in your preparation which would explain high performance in assignments and low performance in tests. And I was correct in this. You just have to fix those mistakes in preparation and you will get there.

How far into that speech would you let him get before having your men hunt him down like a rabbit for sport? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you mean well, but you do not actually understand the difficulties here, and the gaps in your understanding are leading you to assume, in places, that I am an idiot. I could explain, but seriously, please stop. It's not helping.

I think you are qualified to work in systems administration and I think you will overcome this temporary hurdle. I think it's worth it to you and your family to take another shot at the exam, after some downtime and destress for yourself. I would not think this if I thought you were an idiot. You asked these questions in your first post and I am saying, from a professional evaluation, that I think you can do this.

I'll say what I said before. This is 100 percent all on prep and delivery. You know the lines, you just have to put the package together under time pressure and deliver a performance.

[Ben Kenobi]

you got a college degree, like most of the people on this forum.

I believe the average would grade out to around 6 years of education on the forum. Maybe more. What standard deviation from the education norm would that be? Easily 10th percentile.

[Sava]

and he's not even deaf

[Ben Kenobi]

It's like I have a chorass

[regexcellent]

MrFun has not only a bachelor's degree but also a master's degree so I'm not setting much store by that.

[Ben Kenobi]

MrFun has not only a bachelor's degree but also a master's degree so I'm not setting much store by that.

It's a history degree so it obviously doesn't count. I meant people with an actual education.

[Sava]

and he doesn't fake a disability

[Ben Kenobi]

You mean he's actually gay? I had NO idea.

[Sava]

what scumbag?

[Elok]

Okay, after some thinking: I'd been proceeding on the assumption that they would be using all-new simlets for each test, and the five-day waiting period was just to give them time to cycle in a new set of questions. Since it seems they're much lazier than that when it comes to milking this cash cow they've got--and since, supposedly, the simlets are much more heavily weighted than the rest of the test--I may have a shot here. Two simlets in particular gave me trouble; one of them appeared to be the same both times, while the second seemed to have the exact same configuration and just asked me to extract (slightly) different information from it.

The first one had five routers arranged in a star topology. I had console access to, and IP addressing info about, all but one of the routers. Supposedly the whole thing worked fine, except that the bottom router couldn't talk to the one on top (which I had no access to). The problem was, it didn't give me any IP information about that router, and the routing table from the central router was no help. It had the connection listed as a /24, even though it was just a point-to-point. Now, I'd have thought it was just a bad subnet mask, except then nobody would've been able to access that top router, and the simlet said everything else was hunky-dory. I could not verify this, because I had no information on what the dang router's IP address was in order to ping it and verify connectivity. I was actually reduced (the first time around) to trying to guess what the address was, but with a /24 that leaves 253 possibilities; I gave up on that pretty quickly.

The rest of the problem involved EIGRP, and I tried various commands to spread the network around, but nothing took and after a while I ran out of ideas to try. Honestly, if I'd been able to calm down, think and be systematic, maybe I'd have been able to figure it out, but I was always terrified of running out of time; I finished the first time with less than two minutes to spare. I'm not sure why they gave me console access to the other two routers, when the problem involved connectivity issues between the middle three alone. I remember the bottom router couldn't ping even the interface leading to the third one, so that wasn't getting spread. I suppose the first thing I should do, if I do this again, is just show running-config or something to mine every last drop of info out of both accessible routers. I don't think it was a bad AS number, because IIRC the bottom router had DUAL entries in its table. Oh, and I tried the redistribute-static command, since the middle router was using a static 0.0.0.0 route to point crap towards the last one, but the simlet said that was disabled. Because that would just be too easy, I guess.

The second one I couldn't get involved four switches and a couple of routers on their periphery. Console access to one switch, nothing else. No info to Telnet with (and I tried "Telnet [hostname]" a couple of times in desperation). It didn't ask for any configuration, just five questions about various bits of info. I was able to answer three each time (of the "what VLAN is this interface on" sort), but the remaining two asked for info which, AFAIK, was only available from the other switches. The exact nature of the questions was different--Cisco's not quite that lazy--but today they were "which switch is the root bridge for VLAN 1?" and "if this switch gets a packet from [MAC address not in table] to [MAC address also not in table], which three ports will it send them out of?" I tried to logic my way out of it, but that led me weird places--as in, for the second question, no three of their choices were even on the same VLAN. WTF?

Anyway, there you have it. It's not much to go on, I know, but anybody know how I could have solved these?

[Ben Kenobi]

C'mon folks! This is poly! Nerd heaven. Someone's got to know this.