4th Mock Lab - 82%

That was a strange one.

Last Saturday i had my 4th Mock Lab; level 7 this time.

This is how i lost my points:

1) I lost 1 task (2 points), because i didn't read it well enough. When the task says "do NOT configure this on that router" it doesn't mean "you should configure it on that router". A task, that costed me 15-20 mins to solve, was actually lost because i configured a single command on the wrong router; the router that i was asked to not configure.

2) I lost 2 tasks (3+2 points), because i didn't understand what exactly was asked for. As it seems, "area 0 adjacencies" means "area 0 interfaces", so regardless of whether an interface has any peer, it's still an adjacency (by itself?). Also, "forbid transit services between 2 AS" means "forbid prefixes learned from a specific AS move to another AS" and not "forbid prefixes originated from a specific AS move to another AS". In other words, "allow only local traffic". I believe an actual proctor would actually clarify such things.

3) I lost 1 task (3 points) , because the IOS on a specific router had a bug where it didn't allow you to enter spaces into a rmon event description, although the description was put inside quotes. Probably the proctor didn't even test it on the same router, neither he read the banner i had enabled after logging in, informing him of this "bug".

4) I lost 1 task (3 points), because of an RPF failure, which while i was testing didn't seem to exist. This time i tried not to use static mroutes, so i could experiment with the unicast routing table. Although i'm sure i configured unicast routing in such a way, that there was no mroute needed in the multicast path (all pings were working), the proctor had another opinion.

5) I lost 1 task (2 points), because the question was written wrong. When someone asks to allow a user to shut/not shut only a specific interface, it doesn't mean that the user should be allowed to shut/no shut all interfaces. In order to do the first, you have to use Role-Based CLI Access (which i used, without success as it seems), while in order to do the second you can just use privilege levels (something that the solution used).

6) I lost 1 task (3 points), because i though that "ip dhcp-server x.x.x.x" works the same as "ip helper-address x.x.x.x" for dhcp requests. As it seems, "ip dhcp-server x.x.x.x" doesn't forward the dhcp requests to the dhcp server, unless it's coming from an IPCP negotiation (i.e. if "peer default ip address dhcp" is configured under a PPP interface).

Finally, i guess that the IE's proctors who grade the mock labs, do not necessarily load the configs into the same equipment, neither they do try to configure the provided solution into it. Otherwise they would have noticed that some of the solution's commands couldn't be applied (possibly due to a bug), while some other wouldn't work as expected.

Of course, the support through their forums is still gone. Nobody is actually looking the mock lab sections in there. I still wonder about their reason of existence...

Next Mock Lab coming tomorrow... Difficulty Level 10!!! One more till the actual lab.