I spent the last of my Juniper exam vouchers on the JNCIS-SEC exam and passed by the skin of my teeth today.  Since I took a new job last month that’s 100% Cisco, this is the last Juniper exam I’ll take for the foreseeable future.  Too bad, too.  I really like the Juniper exams.

At my previous job, we were 90% Juniper with a whole mess of SRX firewalls around the world.  Since this exam is really about that platform, it was pretty logical that I should do alright on it.  Of course, a large part of the blueprint was on IDS and UTM, and I have no experience there.  For my entire career, those type of devices have been handled by other groups, so I had some studying to do.  That’s where I ran into problems.  I have absolutely no interest in IDS.  I have no interest in UTM.  There’s nothing about content scanning and analysis that interests me at all.  I promise you all that I tried my best to read up on these topics, but I was asleep after 10 words every time I tried.  After rescheduling the exam twice to try and study a bit more, I finally decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and just took the exam…and passed.

I quit my job…by design.  I start a new gig on Tuesday and am getting back to the world of Cisco.  As a last nod to Juniper, I decided to use an exam voucher I had and take the JNCIS-ENT exam.  Easy pass.

The content was right along with the exam objectives, so there were no surprises.  Most of the topics are things I’ve done a thousand times on the job.  There were some things, though, that were beyond my experience.  IS-IS was the big one.  The very first question I got was about IS-IS metrics, and I had absolutely no clue what the answer was.  Nor did I have any clue about the other IS-IS questions.  I went 0-for-3 on those guys.  The only other problematic topic was HA, which didn’t really surprised me.  I was able to answer the VRRP questions, but  I’ve never done any GRES, ISSUe, RTG, etc., at any point in my career.  It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t do too well on those.  Everything else was cake, and I only missed 6 questions in my comfort zone.