Good point!

Don't be nervous. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Just relax. Make sure you know your ICMP types and the major NMAP switches. Don't forget about HPING as well. No real practice tests. If you have any from version 6 just look over those as I was told they are fairly similar from some people that have taken both.

Relax and you'll do fine. Let me know how it goes.

I'm probably going to have to go the MCITP:EA route next for work reasons. After that I think I'm going to start focusing on SANS. More than likely I'll start with 504. I may do 505 since it will be easier to sell to HR, but we'll see.

As for the exam. I didn't have any sims, but I did have some thorough questions. Think of things like, if I run this command with these parameters what output will it show, for both OS functions and tools like nmap, hping, etc. This is where having a lab is beneficial. During my week long course there was a lab open that we messed around with the tools on. Once I got home I recreated that lab on my computer to go a little slower on the stuff I was slower to understand. I work next to some people who use these things daily, so it helped to bounce scenarios off of them if I got stuck.

Like any good infosec person when I asked for direction they just pointed somewhere and say keep going until you see something that sticks out.

Thanks! I had a little experience with some of the tools already from following different scenarios (Heorot.net, etc). I was able to convince the company that I work for to send me to training at Global Knowledge in June. I'm surprised that worked because I'm a systems admin and not a infosec guy. It's amazing what you can get when you ask the right way.
After the week-long training I did independent study with a home lab off and on for a couple of months. I read through the course material slowly one more time before scheduling.

Security is what made me interested in IT in the first place (the movie Hackers, yeah... I know...); so I've read about different topics here and there. I didn't really get more serious into it until I worked under a GSE and began talking to him and his security admin.

Sorry; just realized I gave two sentences of info and a whole bunch of other stuff. Just excited I'm finally learning to crawl in this exciting new world.

Now I'm going to go and hack the gibson.

Not as bad as I had thought it would be. Any questions? Fire away.

*Puts dunce cap on head*
Dang. Thanks... missed that one.

I’m curious about something. What is everyone’s view on the groups Anonymous/Lulzsec and their activities?

Personally I do not agree with what they ‘do’. I can share a common ideal with them that information should be free, but I like to throw in a small caveat. I do not believe in sharing information with the public that could be detrimental to human life. Leaking information about the questionable practices of a large corporation is one thing, but messing with DoD and local law enforcement is crossing the line. I understand that ‘they’ argue that corrupt officials need to be ousted but what exactly did [insert random patrol cop’s name here] do to you? Some of them may be jerks or even scumbags I know; however not all of them are. Couldn’t punishing everyone and not just those responsible for wrong doings be compared to sending innocent people to jail?

I dunno… that’s just my take on it. What’s yours?

Okay. An RTP question for you VOIP guys out there...

Let's say I am an attacker.

Caller 1 sends a Timestamp of 111111 and a sequence of 5000 and I pick up on that 'somehow'. If I were to send a message as 'Caller 1' from my attacking platform to 'Caller 2' with a higher timestamp/sequence number, would Caller 2 hear 'empty' data until my configured timestamp of my injected RTP? or would the injection audio be heard by Caller 2 immediately?

I'm in the process of building a VM lab to see the answer to this, but it's tough to do with kids .

Let me know if I've been too vague and I'll try to rephrase. Thanks!

We've been talking about this at work and I thought I'd ask the forum...

How 'Over-Engineered' is your home network?

Mine isn't as bad (or as good IMO) as some of my co-workers:

2 Networks (1 for wife, 1 for me) split with 2 routers (DD-WRT on Linksys). VM box on my network (for good times). Modded Xbox for a media center on wife's network. Hoping to add more soon. 

Update::

Had decided to do an anonymous email, but didn't need to...
Guess this person had discovered the problem, or someone else was nice enough to fill them in. To answer the questions above
I am 25
I am working as a SysEng (& IRT Member of the org)
Added certs to my signature.
I was hoping for the former. Don't really care about the cred, but I did want them to ask for some help so that I could get some real world experience. The only experience I am getting now is from the IRT. Want to do as much as I can in the security spectrum so that I can decide where I would like to specialize.

Thanks for all of the responses!

Chrisj and Ketchup bring up some very good points. I don't have a lot of experience outside of a Sonicwall/Procurv/Linksys products because the company that I worked for was STUCK in that business model. I didn't like the Procurv series much either, but I was just excited to get to touch a managed switch as our sales guy usually undersold our customers to unmanaged. I knew that managed switches could do more, but I just don't have the experience with their other features to say much 
The packet trace is a really good idea because I have had a customer that had a Dell GX270 with a bad MB (blown caps) that was crippling the network... (is that light supposed to STAY solid???)

Real hackers don't read books. They just parse what interests them...

Unless you are going to carve some VLANs I don't believe a managed switch would help speed up your network. It (sounds) like you are already running GB NICs and switches if I read your post correctly. The only advantage you are going to have from an unmanaged to a managed switch is the ability to VLAN. If you are looking to do that you may be able to pickup an HP Procurve for a lower cost than some of the other vendors out there.
When I've been tossed into Network App hell before it's usually been fixed by upgrading NICs to GB and implementing an unmanaged GB switch (most of our customers were CHEAP). Beyond that it has usually been on the software's end. If the program runs on hostnames rather than IP addresses you could try testing a custom HOSTS file mapped to the correct IPs per application server.

I've had good experiences with Sonicwall.

 
I love Clerks