CISM test passed

January 16th, 2020

Yes, I did it again. New year, new test, same result (apart from the unfortunate CKAD exam but it’s not quite over there yet because I have a free re-take)

Apparently I will receive an email confirmation with the definite result in about 10 days but I don’t think they will change the result *fingerscrossedthough*

The hurdle work experience in order to get actually certified is a different story though….

Anyway, next up are take 2 on the CKAD exam followed by CISA….

Update:
In case you are wondering: I used to CISM All-in-one guide by Peter H. Gregory and an app called ISACA CISM by pocket prep to crunch practice questions.

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Number of the year 2019: 6118

January 15th, 2020

The year 2019 is over, 2020 is the new 2019.

The number 6118 is quite a representation of 2019. What does it stand for? Of course, it’s an approximation but here goes:

Number of weeks: 46 (52 minus some weeks public holidays, business trips, end/beginning of year, etc.)

Number of kilometers per day: 26.6

Number of workdays per week: 5

Multiplied together: 6118 kilometers spent commuting on the bicycle in 2019. No wonder my legs feel tired…

Update: Fixed two typos. Shame on me for making them, kudos to me for fixing them.

Update II: Together with 6118, there’s also 1 (replacing both tires 1 time) and 2 (replacing the brake pads 2 times)

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CISM exam soon…

December 14th, 2019

Soon after getting certified as CISSP, I started stuying for the CISM exam. I’m done with the textbook (All-In-One CISM by Peter H. Gregory, 2018 – which I can recommend) and I am making good progress on the pracice questions on Kaplan (former Transcender),

The original plan was to take the exam around February but maybe I can speed things up and take the exam in January already.

Still on my list…. CKAD (needs review) and CISA (book ordered).

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Memrise – good news and bad news

December 14th, 2019

Memrise…. I’ve posted several times about it already.

The good news is, I crossed the 60 million points line. It’s just a number but still… quite a high number and I’ve been adding at least 1 million points per month for at least the last 24 months. Sometimes something as simple as perseverance can result in progress.

The bad news is on December 7th 2019 I lost *all* my streaks, probably due to a bug. I did the daily points required to keep the streaks alive on all 14 or 15 courses I’m doing at the moment, so imagine my shock when I wake up and my precious 1394 days streak is gone. Since the streaks of all course were reset that cannot possibly have been my mistake. Contacting support was useless (there was a reply but it was not helpful).

To add insult to injury, in the latest version Memrise I get stupid notifications like “Keep your awesome streak alive” but the highest streaks I have since the incident is 8. Go figure if I’m happy or not. Since I believe in voting with my money, I will not pay for the full subscription anymore.

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Finally finally done…

October 25th, 2019
block puzzle screenshot

In case you don’t know, this is the app called Block Puzzle (on Android). After 7 years of puzzling, I managed to finally solve the last remaining puzzle (#491) on 24. 10. 2019 at around 14:49 – in an airplane flying from Dublin to Paris. Perhaps as decadent as it gets.

I already asked the person who introduced me to Block Puzzles not to show me any more puzzles, thank you very much.

Anyway, done and happy with it.

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The series continues…. CompTIA CASP+

October 11th, 2019

I started work extra early, left early and gave it all.

It was worth it: I passed the CompTIA CASP+ (003) exam today. First try, like all the other IT exams so far.

Again, CompTIA exam. Vague on purpose so I felt terrible during the exam. Out of 80 questions I had almost half marked for review but after two out of three hours and two review rounds I handed the exam in… et foilà.

This particular exam does not give you a score, just a pass / fail result.

The beloved (dreaded) Red Hat 5 server simulation was there as well as the download simulation.

The range of difficulty of the questions is so wide…. some questions are really simple (or at least seem to be as I don’t know if I got them right or not), other questions… no clue at all about the correct answer.

Tonight it’s time to celebrate… next week Thursday I’ll take on the CKAD exam, the last one for this year. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

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minikube, macOS and virtualbox

October 11th, 2019

minikube is an awesome tool to play around with Kubernetes and it’s easy to install on macOS if you already have brew installed (not much harder if you just follow the instructions on kubernetes.io though)

But sometimes, just sometimes…. spinning up a Kubernetes cluster with minikube does not work… it gets stuck somewhere. You can crank up the debug level which will fill your screen your message and you can searchengine whatever error message it spits out and try to fix it. I’ve tried it but it takes and usually does not bear frut. In the end doing the following always fixed the issues:

shutdown any minikube clusters that are running (on purpose or not)
make sure virtualbox is turned off (when in doubt, check with ps aux | grep -i virtualb )
rm -rf .minikube
rm -rf .kube
brew cask reinstall virtualbox
if you’re feeling adventerous, you can upgrade minikube and kubectl at the same time.
then spin up minikube again: minikube start -p <yourclusternamehere> (I like not using the default cluster)

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An awesome series continues…. CISSP exam passed

September 13th, 2019

On 20190912, I took and passed the CISSP exam after several months of preparation. Yay for me!

What about that series I mentioned? It’s becoming scary but I haven’t failed any IT exam / certification so far… MCP, LPIC, federal tests, CompTIA and now the CISSP exam. Of course I’m glad about this, but it’s getting spooky.

What was the test experience like? The checks until the actual exam starts is the most annoying part… identification, NDA, vene scan, everything twice. To some degree I can understand that, but the vene scan in top of passport checks? Hm…

One thing on the actual exam I was quite worried about is that you cannot go back to previous questions… click Next, no way to go back. So many times I did not feel particularly confident about the selected reply… but you can’t go back, so worrying about it is useless.

The other thing I was not prepared for was the questions that asked for best something / most appropriate something… practice questions were more fact-based and if anything they asked “what is the first thing to do when…” or “the last thing to do when…” – which is a different dimension from “what is the best thing to do when…” as that implies the listed possibilites could all be correct but one is ‘more’ correct and the deciding factor is not necessarily a technical factor.

Anyway, I felt quite burned out after 80 questions and was hoping that I would not have go higher than a 100 questions. Which is exactly what happened… the result is not even shown on the screen, only on the printout. I did not feel confident regarding the result so imagine my surprise.

Here’s what I used for preparation:
Linux Academy CISSP preparation course
Official CISSP Guide 3rd edition 2016
Some lectures on pluralsight.com and many practice questions on kaplan.com (linked to pluralsight)
Some lectures provided by thorteaches.com
An app called CISSP Professional with practice questions

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Find your wifi adapter mac address without ifconfig

June 11th, 2019

In the latest version of Ubuntu (19.04), ifconfig is not installed by default anymore.

If you need to find your wifi mac address while you have no network connection, you cannot install ifconfig so you need a different way to find your wifi mac address:

Do `cat /sys/class/net/<network_connection_name>/address` to display the wifi’s mac address.

On a default installation, <network_connection_name> is most likely wlo1. If it’s not, use tab completion, in all likeliness there are only three files in the net folder: the wired network adapter, the wifi adapter and the loopback address.

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Books I’m reading at the moment (May and June 2019)

June 1st, 2019

After a long time, I finally finished Fatal Revenant of the series “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”. That was actually in May.

Needless to say, I started with the next book in that series called Against All Things Ending. That’s the June part.

Apart from that, I’m also almost done with a exam preparation book for the exam called Certified Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP), an exam by CompTIA.

I will need to re-read it and take notes. Realistically I should be ready for the test in a couple of weeks…. keeping fingers crossed.

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