Hi,

I started the course on Sunday and now I'm 3 days in :-)

Maybe I can talk a little about how this deal goes for me and hope it's a fun read with my ups and down with this journey!!

Feel fee to post anything you like in here. Good or bad. Things I do wrong or something else you wanna say.

When I read about Offsec I said: THIS IS IT! Don't give me that CEH theoretical bull, I wanna have hands on challenge me that it hurts and I wanna cry stuff !! I ran to get my wallet and ordered my slot right at the spot.

After following their procedure I received a mail that I was booked for Saterday evening at 19.00h GMT-5.. What? Are you kidding me, that's like... waiting a small week !!!!!! NO !!

I was just like a little kid, waiting for that email to arrive on Saturday evening. I think I googled 10 times to know what 19.00h GMT-5 exactly was in my timezone :-) It has been a long time since I felt this way! I guess that's a good sign no?

There I was ready at my PC...19.00h passed.. nothing came in ? WHAT ? 19.01 still nothing! .. 19.02..19.03..19.04....19.05 !! THERE IT IS !!!

The cronjob script that sends out these mails is set to run not at 19.00 but at 19.05 !! I'm telling ya !! NASTY !!!!!!! :-)

I have been putting all the time I can into it so far, but have other stuff to do during the day, so after 3 days I already learned a lot. The text is extremely well written and the videos are very very good and never boring. The good thing about this text is that it leaves you googling for a lot of things, and I guess that's how it should be. Not everything is int he text, but everything is in the text to get you going search for more...

I'm doing the extra miles questions after each chapter who aren't needed but advised, but hey, that's easy said, I'm only 3 days in, I just started with 3.2.

I do feel myself jumping to the exercise immediately after finishing a chapter looking for solutions on their questions and by doing so forgetting to watch the splendid video's... now here's an exciting boy!

What I learned from this course is that you need to document your steps. I understand it's the only way. The nice tool to take notes (notetaker) under linux that I had no idea it existed helps me a lot. Done something in the shell that's cool  ? No problem, press ctrl-insert and that program just takes a screenshot and puts it in your text. Screenshot to big ? No biggie, just right click and resize it on the spot. Easy.. very easy...

Can't wait to try to attack all those boxes smiling at me after I found all their cool names.....but I'm holding off.. first I need to finish the guide and make sure I understand everything !!!

Great job Offsec and Thanks for your product !!

Sternone, I'm 3 weeks into the OSCP course and still having a blast, I spend most of my time in the labs (need to do the exercises) and the learning never stops. Make sure you join the IRC channel (#offsec) I didn't to start with but it really helps having other people to talk to.

Just remember the course isn't supposed to be easy, but it's not impossible, have fun and enjoy what you learn.

When you get stuck on a machine in the lab, try not to stress over it, just take a break and move onto another machine (there are plenty) what you might find is that as you learn new tricks and techniques you will find something that can help you with those "tricky" machines.

I will just share some tips that I've found useful since I've started.

1. You are not trying anything that other people haven't already done, so remember google is your friend.
2. ENJOY IT
3. If in doubt "Try Harder" (course motto).

Adam

So obviously it's down to the individual but I spend 3+ hours in the lab at least 5 days a week (have a full time job, so study is all in my own time).

I use the course videos and material for reference or to cover off areas I don't know about. If I get the chance at work I will research tools/techniques etc that I need to "pop" a box in the lab.

The majority of my lab time so far has been enumeration tasks and collecting information. It is really important to enumerate every box as much as possible,

I've found no end of useful bits of information from scans that have helped a lot.

Again it's all down to the individual and how they learn best.

Adam

No worries BillV.. 

I've got 16 year experience working in IT mostly operations/sys admin roles. Just started to get more focused on infosec since the beginning of the year. Done my Security+ exam and got a couple of other certs (not security related).

Done bits and bobs over the years that touch security (firewall configs, wireless networks etc) but never really focused on it.

Doing the OSCP to give me some more "hands on" experience and give me a good base to build on.

My background,

Well started using computer when they first come out my first computer was a Time that came with Doom and Theme Park. Since I got that I was kinder hocked on computers. I was more into software really lvoed learning shortcup and showing off when asked to do somthing at school.

At school started messing with new things leanring new stuff found some cool bugs in the system and thought hacking was really cool wanted to get into it so much but it was prettty hard back them with not course like there are today.

I left school and was not sure what I wanted to do as a job so tried my hand at a few things before deciding to go uni all this time I was hoooked on security reading about it in the news watching movies trying break things so on

I finally went uni and spent most of my time moaning that security was really skipped over.

Left uni and jsut wanted to get more involved in security so started doing course going to events meeting people and kinder took off from that.

Sounds like you're really enjoying yourself.  Keep it up!

there are also lots free video on security tube that cover Intel assembly and stuff like that.

Hmm, I really wanna do this course but lack the time right now. I can recommend Smashthestack.org IO challenges for anybody that wants to improve their exploitation skills before opting for OSCP. I found it beneficial as it improved my gdb knowledge and general Linux exploitation skills.

Currently contemplating if I should do eCPPT in the mean time (since they have flexible labtime) but a bit scared I know most of it already.

If you need custom shellcode and have no access to metasploit, this is a good resource: http://www.shell-storm.org/