I have a question for those who have taken the lab with the open ended questions. If you can answer it without breaking NDA that would be great. I was running through the IPExpert Core Knowledge quizzer and was noticing many of the questions where based on default timers, ip addresses ranges and other default settings. On Cisco's ask the expert they had a reply that you did not need to memorize things like RFC, and a few other types of information. Then at Cisco Live a few weeks ago, I talked with some Cisco reps in the certification lounge and they have some examples of the open ended questions like "Where in a OSPF network can you do summarization" More along the lines of knowing how things worked then having a bunch of numbers memorized. I know many of the timer value for example can easily be found by knowing the proper show commands so I have not been putting as much time into learning what all of the defaults are on things like different timers. In your option, is there is a huge need to have the many default settings and what multicast address are used by the different features be burned into my brain for both the open ended questions and the lab in general? I understand you can not say if they ask any questions like that, but what I am looking for is more of the line of how useful is it to know those items. Do you feel you needed to know the many different defaults and things that you can not change like what multicast address is used by EIGRP? Right now I am more focused on understand what I can do where, what options I have with the different technologies and the many different ways I can do the same thing in case they tell me I can not do it a certain way that I may have normally used. I am learning what timers there are and the purpose so I may adjust them to meet a requirement, but not memorizing the default settings. Mainly do to the fact if they want the default settings in the lab then I would need to do anything. Even if I change a default and later decide that it was not required and it now is messing something else up, then I can always use the default command or quickly look it up in the command reference on the Doc CD which I am getting pretty good with. Rob
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