All set

Well my workout room/office is not 100% straightened out, but it is good enough to begin working out. I'll be starting tomorrow.

That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more

I'm 40 years old.

I have 5 children, ranging in age from 23 to 2.

I have 2 grandchildren and one on the way.

My body hurts constantly. It takes me 30 minutes and two cups of coffee before I can even move in the morning without feeling achy.

I need to get in shape. I can't put this off any longer, my desperate hour has arrived. Over the long weekend I'll be cleaning out my exercise room, removing the clothes hangers that have grown over my home gym and stationary bike, and starting the process of getting my body back to good health. I'm fortunate in that I don't have extra weight to get rid of, but being thin and being in good health are two totally different things. I want first to *feel good* and lastly to look a little better. The difficulty is that there are no easy metrics to measure progress. How I feel is somewhat subjective, so I'll keep a running tally here with reports. The things I would like to see are:

1) Decrease aches and pains
2) Increase stamina
3) Physical strength (which will be easy to measure with weight-training)
4) Flexibility

I'll be combining weight training, bicycling (either stationary or fixed-gear), and yoga. I have no plan currently, but will come up with one by this weekend's end.

I wonder if eating me spinichk will make me strong to the finishk...

Windows Server 2008 Telnet Client

Windows Server 2008 does not install a telnet client by default. Apparently, Microsoft has considered this a "feature" and to enable it you must install the client by:

1. Open Server Manager

2. Click on Features > Add new features

3. Scroll down to Telnet Client, check the box

4. Install and voila!

A lot of work to telnet to a switch...

GSEC Gold - 3 More Years

Passed with a 95%.

Global Incident Analysis Center Securit Essentials.

GSEC Practice Exam 1

I completed the first of two practice exams tonight. They are a little daunting if for no other reason than SANS allows 300 minutes (that's 5 hours!) to complete 180 questions. That alone makes you think they are going to be exceptionally rough.

I completed it in about 90 minutes, and passed with an 88.89%.

It was a good exercise. It is a web-based exam, and I used a tool called Screengrab! for Firefox. That allowed me to take images of the entire browser window simply by right-clicking on the web page and saving it to a jpg. For all questions I was not 100% sure of, I would enter my guessed answer, take a screen image, and then if I got the answer wrong I would take another image of the explanation. In a few instances I answered without fully reading the question - a continual battle for me.

Without actually reviewing my captured list of errors and unsurities, I think I can say that I'm feeling a bit weak in cryptography and some Windows memorization facts. For instance, how many of you seasoned Windows sysadmins would know that S-1-5-32-544 is the well-known SID of the Local Administrators group? I'm not completely sure how knowing that makes me a better security administrator, but what the heck. Sometimes knowing those little tidbits makes all the difference. I just hope I don't push out some information that is actually useful by memorizing well-known SIDs.

I'll continue on my review tomorrow. At least I'm feeling more confident that I truly understand this material and will be well prepared for the exam.

Now, to bed...

GSEC update

Time is still of the essence. I scheduled the test for November 16th, and thought I might bump that up. At this point, I'm thinking my review will go at least that long. I'm in the process of creating "cram sheets" for each book as a review of all the material. The first couple took a long time because I think I put too much info into each. Starting with section 3 I'm focussing more on points to jog my memory and leaving the details for the book. The exam is actually open book, open note, so I intend to use my cram sheets as indexes more than anything else.

I also have yet to take the practice exam, but will do so tonight. The problem is that they mimic the actual exam in that they are 180 questions and are allocated 300 minutes (5 hours) to complete, with one 15-minute break allowed. By the time my family is down to sleep for the night and I can focus on taking a test it is usually 9:00 at night, and I'd hate to waste the attempt by being unable to finish. Regardless, I'll try one tonight by buzzing through it, making note of areas of weakness and focussing my study on those areas moving forward.

Side note:

I am really looking forward to being done with this. I really love information security. I'm really tired of trying to pass tests. It will be nice to take a few minutes during the day to listen to music, call my brothers and sisters, maybe even get to know the woman I live with...I think that at one point I recognised her as my wife but it's been so long since we've actually spoken that it will be like dating a new person! (I'm only half-kidding. Sandra, if you read this I really love you and thank you for putting up with me)

I'll report on the sample exam after taking it.