Putting the “Ass” in “Assessment”
Posted By Russ Emerson on December 21, 2004 at 12:28 pm
Being humiliated by a computer may be a common experience for some people, but it’s pretty rare for me. Today, though, I had to take an online “skill & knowledge assessment” test of my network engineering abilities.
Now, I will grant, written tests of practical, hands-on skills are usually unable to fully capture the essence of the skill being tested. But to make up for that, the test writers seem to have gone off the deep end as far as the difficulty level goes. I haven’t sweated so much over a test since I took the CCIE lab test back in ’98.
I blew some really easy questions:
The access list command
access-list 100 deny ip 172.16.0.0 0.0.255.255 192.168.0.0 0.0.255.255blocks traffic from which source addresses?
and scored on some of the more difficult ones:
What is the default metric of an EIGRP route redistributed into OSPF without a defined metric?
OK, that wasn’t really difficult, but I’m pretty rusty on my Routing Protocols kung-fu — I had to guess. I wish they’d asked me at least one question about ISDN or T1s or 802.11b.
After it was done, the online proctor told me I did OK, but I still feel like an idiot.
Well, I figured out the second and fourth dotted quads in the first question were masks, and I haven’t looked at any of this stuff since I gave up pursuing an NT4 cert. All of that one thing getting redistributed in the other would, I would think, have the same default metric, which would be overridden if a different one were defined. I know nothing about T1s much beyond that the OC192 into work divides into more than 192 of them.