The testing center wasn’t very good at all.  It’s in an old building on the busiest road in town, and the noise from the street was barely dampened by the 1960s building materials.  I can tell you that there are three different pipes in the walls since their vibrations resonated through the room every time somebody flushed or brewed some coffee.  There was also a little foot traffic, which can be expected anywhere; they were working through some software problems on another testing station and were very respectful, so it wasn’t too bad.  The worst part of the whole ordeal, though, was the Microsoft class I sat through while taking the test.  They were across the hall, but it sounded like they were in the room with me.  Usually, you hear the instructor yelling at the top of his lungs so the whole class can hear, but I could hear questions being asked and papers being moved.  I think I can go pass a test of AD replication, though.  I certainly won’t be using that facility for any more tests.

The test itself was fair and pretty close to where it should be.  The questions were well rounded and covered the book from front to back.  I missed a few due to my ADD kicking in and not letting me finish reading all the answers.  At least twice, I saw a more appropriate answer just as I released the mouse from the Next button.  :(

There were lots of interactive items- a lot more than I thought there would be or that there should be.  I can understand a few do-this-do-that things, but there were at least ten interactive questions, whether they be “put these in order”, “match the definition”, or “tell me what’s going on”.  Some of these had multiple parts that I had to click back and forth to get all the answers.  One of them in particular could have been more easily presented as an exhibit at the top of a question than a question that really zaps your time.  There were a few SDM questions, but I made it through those by clicking around until I found the info.

There were two simulations that were very straightforward and very easy.  The sim would present the scenario and tell you what the end result should be along with any details.  I found that some details had to be configured in the order the details were presented to finish the lab.  Not all of them, mind you, but enough of them to get annoying; I really expected something a little more robust.  The contextual help and autocomplete worked, though, so that’s a plus.

I had a big issue with time, and, if that happens to me, it can happen to anyone.  The test started with a multi-part interactive question that took me a long time to figure out through the nerves and discord.  I would guess that I got a simulation or interactive question in 8 of the first 11 questions, and, at one point, I looked at the clock to see I had 40 minutes and 38 questions left, so I started picking up the pace.  Luckily, after question 41, the testing gods showed mercy and ended the suffering.

Overall, I give the test an 8 out of 10.  It was very honest and frank with none of the nonesense of trying to trick me.  All of the problems I had were either from my lack of knowledge or my being so easily distracted this morning.  As Cisco goes, it’s not a bad test at all.

Send any ear plugs questions my way.

Aaron Conaway

I like to lean my head to the left, hit it with the palm of my right hand, and document what knowledge falls out.

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An admin in another business unit was trying to set up command access for some of his techs.  He was going through a couple of routers and assigning commands to privilege levels so that his techs could access them.  He was having a boat load of problems, though, and couldn’t get it to work

He was trying to allow his guys to run a show ip route, but they also wanted to run show ip route x.x.x.x.  He was assigning commands to privilege level 7 then giving his tech’s user accounts the same privilege.

Router(config)#privilege exec all level 7 show ip route
Router(config)#username user1 privilege 7 secret his.password

For some reason, this wasn’t working, though.  The user could log into the router, but they couldn’t get authorized to run the subcommands as expected.  I blamed it on his non-standard 7600 running a non-standard IOS version (sorry, I can’t give any more detail without revealing too much about the company), but I came across a much easier way to do it today in class with role-based views.

A view is a set of commands that can be assigned to users, and, to give a user access to those commands, you make them a member of that view.  You’ll see that in a second.  You also have a superview, which is a set of views, so a user can be a member of multiple views.

There are some prerequisites to using views.  First of all, you have to have the enable secret set.  You should already have that on a production router, but, if you’re working in a lab or something, you may have issues.  You also need to have AAA enabled.  That’s beyond the scope here, but I’m sure you can figure it out.

To configure a view, you must first be in the root view.  How do you do that?  Just enable to it.

Router#enable view

You’ll enter the enable secret, and nothing special will happen, but now you can use the parser view command to create a new view.  This takes you into the view submode which is where you list what commands you want to let users run.  You also set a secret (password) so you can call up the view later.

Let’s create a view called “TechView” for my guy.  We’ll give members of that view access to the “show ip route” commands to include all the subcommands.  We’ll put the user “tech1″ in that view, too.

Router(config)#parser view TechView
Router(config-view)#secret view.pass
Router(config-view)#command exec include all show ip route
Router(config)#username tech1 view TechView secret tech.pass

Every time that “tech1″ logs in, that user will have access to all the show ip route commands.  If you have a user who is not in that view but wants access to it, they can run the enable view TechView command and enter the secret.  On the console, you’ll see a message saying that user has switched to the view.  If the user does a show parser view, they can see what view they’re in.

Router#enable view TechView
Password:
Router#
*Mar  1 00:09:04.047: %PARSER-6-VIEW_SWITCH: successfully set to view 'TechView'.
Router#sh parser view
Current view is 'TechView'

Send any test vouchers questions my way.

Aaron Conaway

I like to lean my head to the left, hit it with the palm of my right hand, and document what knowledge falls out.

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