I wanted to expand a bit on my last post where I mentioned that Microsoft asks questions about the exceptions. I don’t just mean errors or things crashing. While they do want you to be able to handle those issues, there are other concerns. There are known problems (more commonly called “features”) that crop up in day to day operations that can cause endless frustration when trying to support a network UNLESS you already know them. That is the topic for today.
If you take a class and get one of the Microsoft Official Curriculum books, the best way for you to know what I mean is to read EVERYTHING that is marked off with the words, Note, Important, Tip or anything else of that nature. I can’t guarantee that you will be asked about all of them but I would bet money that you are asked about several of them.
A good example of a subject that has several of these “gotchas” is RAS. Remote Access Services are discussed in a few classes, most notably 2277 which attempts to prepare you for the 70 – 291 exam. A very important subject is Remote Access Policies. The reason they are so important is that there are so many places for them to go wrong. When a person attempts a RAS connection, the RAS server needs to find a policy whose conditions meet the “at the time state” of the connection attempt. If there is no match, the connection is not made. Think about that. What if you don’t have any policies configured? You always have the default on that Microsoft supplies but that denies connections. What if you deleted that…would users be able to get in? No because there is no policy. No policy, no match, no match, no connection. What if more than one policy matches? It uses the first one it finds EVEN IF it isn’t the “best” (meaning most specific or having the most pieces in common). If that policy says no connection, then there is no connection granted.
In the courseware, many of these things are given one sentence Note mentions. That is something that is easily skipped if you are just reading and not LOOKING for them. If you have an instructor, they would probably make specific mention of it but there are no guarantees (well, unless you are in my class).
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