Subj : Windows 2000 MCSE Upgrade Exam
To   : Lawrence Garvin
From : Steve Quarrella
Date : Sun Apr 08 2001 06:26 am

 lg> Hey.. the only other alternative that was available to me
 lg> already screwed me over... there's not much risk. :-)

Let me know how things go.  I'm gearing up to sit down and work with 2000 
myself, although my resources here at home are rather limited, and I may take 
the Exchange 5.5 exam with VUE before the summer's out.  I don't like spending 
the money on an exam that's probably going to die soon, but it could help me 
with job hunting.

 lg> Absolutely. One of the challenges I'm having to overcome in
 lg> my job search right now is not having 'documentation' (read:
 lg> Certification) in the myriad of job skills I've actually
 lg> performed at sometime in the past 10 years.

I don't have that problem:  I get a lot of "You don't have a whole lot of help 
desk experience."  The hell you say:  I just don't document that I have it, 
lest you think I'm some journeyman with a phone stuck to his ear. :-)

 lg> For sure... nothin' turms me off faster than an applicant
 lg> with an MCP or MCSE looking for an advanced position and
 lg> their only job experience is at the local car wash.

It's not Microsoft, but Novell, and I'm fond of telling a tale about what a 
piece of paper means to me.  Don't get me wrong, as most people who can get a 
piece of paper are above-average and have demonstrated that they have a brain 
and can use it.  I don't let the brain-dump-certified people define the rule.  
When I was doing ARCserve support some years ago, I had a couple of guys get 
online with me, and announce in no unclear terms up front that THEY were CNEs.  
The implication was that they were going to eat my Wheaties.  Well, being 
gangbanged like that by two people is always a PITA, and you do what you can to 
defend yourself from attacks.  Long and short is that they were restoring their 
server but not getting the trustees reassigned properly.  So, I asked if they 
did what was "the routine" for a restore, and which was documented in their 
manual:  Did they restore just the bindery first, and then restore everything 
else, excluding the bindery, on the second pass?  I heard a distinct click -- 
one of my CNE friends had bailed -- and the other guy asked "Uh...what's a 
bindery?"

Well, I'm at about the CNA level with Novell, maybe a bit higher, but I 
responded "You began this call by announcing that you were both CNEs, and you 
don't know what a bindery is?  Come on, let me help you with your problem, and 
giving out misinformation to me isn't going to help."  I could hear some crow 
being eaten at the other end of the line, but we got the guy's server restored 
and he was happy.  He really was a CNE, but he was paper alright.  "Would you 
like some grated parmesan CNE to go with that, sir?"

This incident alone has kept me from saying "I'm an MCSE!  Here I coooome to 
save the daaaaay!" on the job, despite long ago having put the "paper" aspect 
of things behind me.

 lg> No doubt about that. My only real experience outside of my
 lg> personal 5.0 server was from 4/98 - 10/99, and in that time I
 lg> think I only installed one, the rest were maintenance
 lg> environments.

Believe me, you already have made more ground on this exam than you think. :-)

 SQ>> Doesn't WINS go away in a full AD scenario?
 lg> I believe, from what I've studied in 70-222, that in a pure
 lg> TCP/IP implementation with a functional DNS environment, WINS
 lg> becomes wholly redundant. However, in an environment that may
 lg> continue to use NetBIOS for networking, WINS is still needed.
 lg> In fact, it says that WINS is "enhanced" in Windows 2000.

You're approximating what I've read.  Man, is it annoying to not have working 
machines around for testing and observation.

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 * Origin: Il Vaticano * Argyle, TX  (1:393/9005.13)

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