Congrats on all the great answers, everyone!  Again thanks to the team at EH for the challenge as well!

It's always fun seeing how there are so many ways to get the same results from so many different tools! 

That is so awesome I'm going to print it and keep it in my cube.

For those of you with CEHs that submitted for this, it wouldn't hurt to turn your documentation in to EC-Council for credits.  Heck, you might even try if you didn't make the deadline.  I turned mine in last year as a "case study."  It was accepted and I managed to eek a few points out of them

Just started working on it this morning.  I've also been waiting on this all year and I'm going to put a bit more effort into my answer this year as well.

For those new to the challenge it's just as the more experienced have said, it's a great opportunity to learn and unlike some places where you're never given then answer or how the answer was derived you can guarantee Ed's gonna give us both.  If nothing else you'll learn what your strengths and weaknesses are and then once you're hooked on these you'll be better prepared by the time this rolls around next year.

Happy Hacking!

@former33t - Glad to help!

@Grendel - Glad to hear they've got the space issues taken care of and that socializing is going well into the early morning. I think that's one aspect of 14 I missed was the "after party." I remember the darts now that you mention it too.  I was there mostly for the lockpicking at first but didn't do nearly as well as I did at 11. but yeah, it was horrible trying to get in and out.  I may bring my pick set again but unless I practice between now and then I probably won't even enter the competition since I need to stay involved with some of the other events.  I'm still wondering how much of this I can apply to my CEH

I've been to 11 and 14 and can say that the evening stuff typically revolves around things like hacker jeopardy, pool parties, the black/white ball and social lingering.  Not to say that there aren't still "things happening" but much of the scheduled presentations and classes are over by 20:00.

I think 14 might have been the first year at their new venue and I have to admit I was a little turned off by some of the logistics issues (extremely crowded rooms for certain events) and the understandable paranoia by the staff of being "kind" to the new venue.  I'm on the verge of planning to go this year so, hopefully, they've worked out the kinks with the Riviera and have booked plenty of space

As far as departure, I've wrestled with that on both occasions.  The first time I believe we left early on Sunday and missed all the awards presentations and most of the other content on Sunday.  The second time we stayed for the awards but I can't say I just went "wow, I'm glad we stayed."  Sunday, for folks that "have to be at work on Monday" just feels too rushed to make it enjoyable as it could be.

If you take a look at the archived schedule for Defcon 17 you'll see that they had speaking events right up to the 1700 closing ceremony on Sunday and I think that answers your question as to when, exactly, the carpet gets rolled up.  I'd expect the schedule this year to look very similar

Not to hi-jack the topic, but has TOR improved a bit?  Last time I tried it was horrendously slow.

Hacksaw blades and street sweeper bristles work well for making your own set.  There are plenty of instructions on the net for doing so as well.  Back at Defcon in '03 one of the competitors I was up against actually hand made his set and had only been practising for about 6 months.  He took top honors that year.  I've attached an image of the final challenge that year.  IIRC he opened his door in just over a minute...

For what it's worth, here is a video on making your own set.

awesec,

For me it had more to do with experience, logic and some common sense than the books.  That made it more difficult as I've been doing systems management instead of infosec the past three years.   The books helped some with terminology and process but the V6 tests have a lot of new stuff even compared to what was in those books. 

Everyone will have a different experience with the test, I'm sure.  I expected a lot more questions based on tools like nmap and snort with which I'm familiar and I found more questions on the test based around windows group policies to which I know very little.  As a matter of fact I don't remember a single snort or nmap question.

If I had to do it all over I'd do a better job of looking at what each module expected me to know and studying more on the modules I felt weak at.

I think I know which one you mean about the terrorists.   Same as you, the gps and bluetooth questions were some of the first I saw on the test.  I wasn't exactly sure what the gps question I had even had to do with hacking.  I just sat there and had to compose myself for a few minutes while I dug back in my head about practical stuff I'd read about.  I didn't figure I had passed but I was more than pleased with my score afterward.

I used;

The CEH Prep Guide by Ronald L. Krutz and Russell Dean (ISBN 9780470135921)

and the

CEH Official Certified Ethical Hacker Review Guide by Kimberly Graves (ISBN 9780782144376)

The first book was a lot more in-depth but both of them lacked the detail necessary to pass the test.

I poked around in some forums they day after I THOUGHT I was supposed to take my test and read a comment that described the test questions as essay type questions.  I postponed my test for what ended up being a few more months as I read the guides over and worked with some of the tools mentioned in the guides.  The questions are very scenario based and the books I've seen don't represent that well.  I don't think I can really say much more than that about the test other than good luck!! 

** Edited for more useful info **

You might look at the following products...

Nagios
Freecool
zabbix
OpenNMS

I just got my CEH a couple weeks ago and I was in much the same situation as you...  My experience came from a small municipal government agency which I haven't worked at for a couple of years.  While I was there (8 years) I became primarily responsible for all aspects of security.  That included firewalls, IDS, antivirus, countermeasures and a small bit of forensic work, etc.   I just detailed this in brief and prefilled the form for my old supervisor.  She signed it and I faxed it to EC-Council.  If I remember correctly they responded in less than 8 hours with the code I needed to register for my exam.

With that said, the content of the test was NOT what I expected.  I used resources I had here at work to read a couple of the study guides available via books24x7.  It seems the books more or less skimmed over the content enough to say..  "This is what you need to know..." but it was apparent from the depth of the questions that you really HAD to know more than what the book taught.  I even googled one of the apps mentioned in the test because I was sure I hadn't read about it in either guide and still to this day don't know what the right answer is.  Granted, I didn't spend a lot of time looking for the answer because I'm sure it exists but I didn't feel like it was relevant enough to pursue at this point in time.

Good luck!