I finally passed the damned thing! 
I sat the ISCW exam today and walked away with the CCNP – woohoo! I’m more happy that I can get back to doing what I enjoy now without having to do any more routing/switching stuff for a while. The ISCW course focused mainly on VPN technology, ADSL, Cable and secure configuration management. It was a bit more enjoyable than the other exams but because it’s locked into Cisco products I sometimes feel like the certification track is more like an ongoing advertisement for the vendor.
I’m not sure what I’ll focus on now, I’ve got to keep my skills sharp and my certifications current because I’m self employed and the industry can be a bit fickle I suppose – make no mistake, hands on experience is what counts. Whatever it is I intend to do something fun alongside it. I really fancy doing Remote Exploits Offensive Security course although I may warm up with the BackTrack WiFu course first – the Remote Exploit team are superb -> http://www.remote-exploit.org/
It’s been a few months since I’ve done any meaty Checkpoint stuff so I may just recertify my CCSA in NGX at the same time. Decisions decisions! For now I’m just happy that this ones out of the way!
Ian
