Talon’s (Micah) Blog

Sigh, I’ve spent the last 2 days studying for 70-291, the last test I need for MCSA. I’m so burned out studying for this test but I’m ready for it this time. I have 4 hours to do the test, last time I did it in 45 minutes and failed it. I’ma spend more time taking it and I’m gonna increase the screen resolution on the test computer, its 800×600, hardly enough space to even fit the question, let alone the answers or diagrams. I’ma throughly use the scratch piece of paper they give us and work through the stuff as I was during the last 2 days. Tomorrow at 1PM I’ll be at the testing center, strait from school to take it. I just hope all this studying and time isnt for nothing.

I finally have a good grasp on (D)DNS, WINS, DHCP, NAT, VPN, RRAS, IPSec and RADIUS. I finally figured out what RADIUS and IAS is, simply multiple NAT servers centralized to 1 gateway to provide a single gateway as a fault tolerant cluster.

IPSec is exactly like IPTables firewall for linux of which I have a lot of experience with (such as restricting DNS queries to only come into the server on UDP 53 from a specific IP or IP range, which locks out anyone trying to hack the DNS service). Using IPSec to restrict access to a website or application per IP address or subnet and what to do with the packet, accept it, reject it, drop it without reply, respond with a ICMP host-unreachable or host-rejected packet. Fun fun stuff. I knew my 2.5 years of linux experience would pay off somehow, its just realizing what and how microsoft does the same thing, then its easy to relate from linux to microsoft and learn it. I always avoided IPSec last quarter and this quarter, till I figured out it was nothing but a more complicated gloried IPTables interface.