I was brand-new to Active Directory, Microsoft’s directory service architecture. I was comfortable on Windows NT, but Windows 2000 was much different. Active Directory (known as AD) was mysterious at the time, and scary.
I took the test during my time at a certification boot camp. Boot camps put a lot of extra strain on you. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a great idea to learn AD and Windows 2000 that way.
Not the Machine!
But at the time, that’s what I was doing. It’s hard enough to design directory services when you’re experienced with it. When you’re a newbie, it’s like being on “The Machine” in the movie “The Princess Bride”: it feels like it sucks years of your life away. So much to remember, so many principles to apply to real-world situations. The problem is that Windows 2000 and AD wasn’t in much usage at that time, so there wasn’t a great deal of information available on it.Given the perfect storm of those factors, I was not feeling very prepared for 70-219. Passing score for the test was 613. After spending hours deciphering various case studies and providing answers on how to set up AD to solve them, I was as drained as a public pool in mid-winter. I was almost certain I’d bombed the test.
I finally hit the “End” button when I was finished, dreading the “Failure” message I was sure I was about to see. Instead, the pop-up showed “Pass”, with a skin-of-the-teeth score of 638. Woohoo! Yeah, I’d barely scraped by, but I wouldn’t have been happier with a perfect sore. I’d gotten through, and never again would I have to face the dragon of 70-219.
Well, that’s my story. What’s yours? Tell me, and your fellow cert-seekers and -holders, about your toughest, most dangerous certification dragon. How did you slay it?