Professor Messer's 220-1102 A+ Study Group - May 2023

and we are live with today's 220 11 0-2 Core 2 A Plus study group I'm just settling in looks like I'm trying to get things together today let's see I got uh headphones are in this looks good you know what we're not doing is recording so let's record I've not even done my podcast audio yet but we'll do that later that's uh or we'll do it now do I have time I think I have time all right that's that we can cool this down a little bit that looks better uh what else we got here that looks good close this out hey chat room hey everybody let's pop out the chat pop out the chat pop out the chat there we go works great hey everybody hope everybody's doing well we are uh just a few minutes away from getting started stream help needs to go here that looks good um where is my podcast audio because I do need to say that like real quick on here uh I can find that find it here um it's podcast right if you were a podcast where would you be you'd be right there and then I have to do the hard part of figuring out what day it is because I have to write everything down or else I'm in big trouble um that's why you'll sometimes see me in fact you see this on news all the time where somebody puts the wrong thing on a teleprompter but you're just talking and you don't know what you're saying at that point because other people are talking in your ear and there's a thing going on over here and you don't realize you said something wrong so so let's see if I can say this properly and that will at least be synced up for the podcast let's pause this because that's in my light I'm James Messer and you're listening to The Professor Messer 220 1102 core 2A plus study group the study group was recorded on May 11 2023. if you'd like to watch a video replay visit my website at professormesser.com I'm James Messer and you're listening to The Professor Messer 220 1102 core 2A plus study group after show this after show was recorded on May 11 2023. if you'd like to watch a video replay visit my website at professormesser.com yes I know I could easily cut and paste some of that but uh what fun would that be right turn that down a little bit gosh people already already checking in like Matthew thanks Matthew with the no message there but a ten dollar a five dollar Super Chat thank you so much for the Super Chat and for saying hello and for checking in and for being here there's some other folks that are here as well we got folks that are checked in from Brazil we've got folks checking in from Fort Worth the Tacoma Washington is that a is that a place I say it right did I say it wrong we'll figure it out we'll get started at the top of the hour got about five minutes let's check other things we got recordings going on here South Florida's checking in on 305 what's up 305. down at uh the coyoto down on in on the big curve of the 826. we've got Scotland is here in Ghana and North Texas and Denver and Utah and the UK uh let's check and make sure those are here those are here you know what I haven't checked yet is to make sure that this was communicating and it is look at that that's it yeah the that's uh 826 never got any better has it it's just it's the same every time what are you gonna do um there's not much you can do it's only so much room they can't make it bigger I guess they could but that would be super expensive because you'd have to take away things from both sides it would just be a mess LA's here South Africa Germany Indianapolis Denver is here Collegeville PA welcome I don't know if the drivers are getting worse is because I'm not sure that's possible there's a whole physics problem there and I don't I don't I guess it could potentially be worse if everything was just on fire that that's how it could be worse uh that's it Matthew again with the uh Matthew with this five dollar Super Chat thank you also uh Matthew Matthew says in all caps and I agree by the course notes and exams that's why I passed the 1101 well congratulations on your 1101 thank you for saying nice things about the course notes and exams I've worked very hard on those to make sure they were just right and it does take time to put those together and literally months of that Matthew says it was caps lock I I tend to feel Matthew and said it was enthusiasm it was not a cafe caps lock you really did want to put it in all caps that's how I feel anyway uh we got a couple of minutes left uh what these are good questions also we can talk about these in the after show stick around for that because uh Titan says how how do I overcome the anxiety of taking the 1101 um and a valid question because taking exams is it can it can really play with your mind uh I'm one of those people that I just don't do well during an exam so that's that's why um I I I'm with you when it comes to anxiety and I have a few tips about anxiety so someone remind me in the after show because I just don't have anything here to write on uh to talk about taking exams anxiety and some of the things that I do to kind of get me in a better place when I get into the exam room uh the deep breathing I don't know if I do I don't do deep breathing exercises although it might not be a bad idea but there are some things you can do in the exam room that are sanctioned by CompTIA that will give you some opportunities to help with that anxiety and and I will tell you what I do when I go to these exams it's nothing exciting it's not it's not like a a remarkable thing but I can at least give you my perspective of what I do and it starts the day before so so stick stick around for the after show I'll tell you what I do the day before the day of and in the exam room that helps me with anxiety because I think that's something we all go through to some degree everybody's a little nervous about their exams I am I I hate I'm anxiety can really wrap you up a little bit so I am all about talking about some of my ideas around that and they might help help you as well all right we got a minute to go before we get started you know I did not check the questions this time so who knows if they're right or wrong let me quickly let me quickly I do I know if they're right or wrong uh is that the first question that's the correct question let's see if it is uh yes it is so I think I might be synced up we might be okay we might be all right with this all right uh there is there's a lot of mod I read the chat room's telling me there's a lot of stuff on this desk there is uh I partially apologize and partially uh I'm extremely proud of it so this is the system I use 24 7. this is these are my two main screens the two over here that are sort of the live streaming piece those are never on they just sit there so in the normal day it's not quite this battle stationy uh but in the it does I really should bring up a third monitor I talked about that in the last live stream having a third monitor would be pretty great uh for the things I'm doing and one of these days I'm just going to plug it in and get it worrying working and and work through that with that it's the top of the hour it's time for a live stream uh slides are up recordings are going streaming is up and running it's time to make this thing happen let's get this in and get it started hello everyone welcome to the May 2023 Professor Messer core 2A plus study group this is the study group where I ask you questions that come directly from the CompTIA a plus exam and we'll see if you are here if you are here live we'll see if you're able to answer those questions see how well you do if you're watching this on the replay stick around as well because you can follow along with us to see how you might do I've got a lot of information to go through in this study group we'll start first with telling you how you can participate if you are here live what you want to do is pop open a new browser window and go to professormesser.com QA that uh that QA that's there is for questions and answers obviously and as I put questions up on the screen you simply need to just stay on that page you don't have to touch anything once you browse to professormesser.com QA I also have an app you can use for this it's not really my app it's an app from the service we use use called Socrative the Socrative app is one that will require you to put in a name of a room and so you'll see a prompt there the room name is professormesser all one word p-r-o-f-e-s-s-o-r m-e-s-s-e-r if you do that all one word I think you will find there is a question waiting for you on the screen and if this question looks familiar that's because it should it's a question I pulled from last month this is the only time you'll see some old questions on here but I like to do my first question as a rewind question to see not only are you able to remember what we did last month but let's see if the Q a process is working well for you you can get in there and have a look at what happens to be available this is the question you should see on your screen it says during startup a Windows computer shows the message one or more services failed to start which of the following would be the most likely reason for this message would it be an invalid startup device was selected an invalid VLAN assignment a bootloader replaced or changed incorrect service permissions or outdated UEFI bios the question again during startup a Windows computer shows the message one or more services failed to start which of the following would be the most likely reason for this message is it invalid startup device selected invalid VLAN assignment bootloader replaced or changed incorrect service permissions or outdated ue5 bios if you think you know the answer follow the link on your screen professormesser.com QA as always in our live streams please know answers in the chat room please no hints in the chat room we'll try to answer this online and we'll see how we did with this question in just a moment thanks for being here we of course are going through all of the topics from the 220 1102 exam today and when we're not here live there's all kinds of content that we've created and brings everything back to the uh the the live stream itself you can have a look at our YouTube page YouTube of course has all of our training videos you just simply go to the page and watch there's no registration there's nothing extra you have to do they're all there and ready for you I also have daily a plus Pop Quiz questions you can find them on Twitter you can find them on Instagram you can find them on LinkedIn to get to all of these sites you simply type in professormesser.com the name of that particular location so that is where you want to be go to professormesser.com YouTube or slash Twitter or slash Instagram or slash LinkedIn etc etc so we've got plenty to step through but that is something that can really really be helpful if you're trying to find additional information additional content or maybe some extra study materials those are great links to try today we're going to talk specifically about topics that are in the 220 1102 exam that is the second exam you have to take out of two and although maybe the first exam you take you can take these in either order so this is one that was released on April the 20th of 2022 which means it's probably going to be around some somewhere around until November of 2025. that's probably a good guess anyway as we get closer to the retirement time frame comptile will begin to give us official dates on all of those the 220 1102 exam is a 90-minute exam you might get a maximum of 90 questions and you need to get a score of 700 on a scale from 100 to 900 so that's our goal is to walk into the room and know everything we need to know about operating systems security software troubleshooting or operational procedures so all of that can really be helpful if you're someone who's trying to find what what do I need to study for this exam it's those four different domains and all the questions on your exam will come from those particular domains I also have a replay available to us for this study group and it's all on my website there's an audio only Replay that I publish in podcast format and that podcast can be found at professormesser.com podcast you'll find find on that page podcast links for my a plus my network plus and my Security Plus study groups and they're separated out by the main first hour q a and the after show in our second hour because we have a lot of great information in our not only our primary first hour but the secondary after show is always quite good if you check out back about a day later on our YouTube you'll notice that the YouTube video description has been updated with a bunch of time stamps and that's thanks to my marketing manager Lori who's watching this on the replay hey Lori she's going through and probably at 2x speed watching the replay and putting in all of these time stamps for you so you can go back years and find information that you may be looking for all of this is broken down and available on the YouTube video description for each of our live study group sessions when we're not here on the live stream we're hanging out in Discord come join us you can find the Discord invite on my site or simply type in to your browser professor messer.com Discord exactly what you were expecting wasn't it that Discord link is on my site on the uh the social media icons on the upper right of my site you can click there if you don't have a Discord account make sure you create one and this Discord account will be one that has uh complete access to everything that we do on our 24 7 chat we've also got eventually uh we've got vouchers the vouchers that are already but you will eventually need to buy some uh and you could of course go to the CompTIA website and you could pay full price for your vouchers but if you're in North America or Canada or a number of of U.S territories along with the US you get them at a discounted price go to professormesser.com vouchers and you can purchase your vouchers directly on our website not only is the voucher discounted which is already a great bonus I throw in for free a copy of my exam hacks ebook can give you a few tips and tricks for getting a couple of extra points perhaps on your exam maybe even more than that during your study process and some tips on how to make more points on the exam when you're in the exam room the exam hacks book is not available for sale you can only get it if you purchase a voucher or it comes also included as a free bonus with my success bundles so this is a great way to not only get a voucher for a discounted price but also get some extra tips that I've accumulated throughout my career of taking the 25 or 30 different certification exams I've taken on and off throughout the years that's it professormesser.com vouchers let's go back to that question I asked earlier the question asked during startup a Windows computer shows the message one or more services failed to start which of the following would be the most likely reason for this message is it an invalid startup device was selected an invalid VLAN assignment a bootloader was replaced or changed incorrect service permissions or an outdated UEFI bios let's see how you answered this one we'll look at the results and we can see that 46 percent of you say it's incorrect service permissions 25 percent of you say that it is an invalid startup device selected then we've got 17 percent said the bootloader was replaced or changed and then single digits for outdated ue5 bios or invalid VLAN assignment this is a question or this this question is asking you about something that occurs once the Windows screen comes up you've already turned on your system you've gone through the boot process and now you get a message on your screen that says something about this one or more services failing to start and in that particular case it could be something associated with the driver bad Hardware or with a service that is trying to run on your system it even mentions there's a service it's not starting why is it not starting and that's the real question that has to be solved and then now we have to go down our troubleshooting steps to determine why this particular service is having a problem or in this case what service is it we don't even know that yet this is a bit of a challenge now fortunately in this question only one of the answers had anything to do with the Windows operating system once it started up because that's where this message appears is inside of Windows once Windows has started so this is one where if you're looking at this if you're someone who answered an invalid startup device was selected well if that's the case it wouldn't have started the operating system at all so we know it can't be a an invalid VLAN assignment is a problem communicating across the network we're having a problem starting a service on our local machines so our network doesn't appear to be the problem we've got bootloader replaced or changed that would certainly affect your ability to start the operating system from the beginning but the error message that we're seeing is one that is shown once the operating system is already started therefore the bootloader is probably not our issue an outdated ue5 bios the BIOS configuration or the version of the BIOS that is running if it was having a problem probably would not start up your system so in that particular case that would not be our issue that only leaves one option available that was option D incorrect service permissions and if you do have a service that needs some enhanced permissions then you probably need to add a username and password to the service itself you have to go into the service to be able to do that once Windows has started so those of you that are are working towards this in fact somebody in the chat room has already mentioned it if you look at the bottom of the screen on my X explanation slides this tells you exactly the section that this comes from it's from the 220 1102 section 3.1 and that is not only the the section for my videos it's also the section for the exam objectives I keep those numbers perfectly synchronized and the video that this is from is the troubleshooting Windows video so if you did an incorrect service permission if you selected D 46 percent of you did that is the right answer you got that one absolutely correct well done with all of those well of course that is something that we looked at last month we went through the process of understanding more about how to handle troubleshooting service permissions and other things as well but there's a lot more that we could go through and in fact I've created brand new questions for the rest of this study group starting with one that is not a multiple choice based question I want to be able to provide you with information about a broader type of question that's used on your exam and in fact the first handful of questions you get on the exam will be questions that are not multiple choice questions they are really dealing with a problem around uh matching questions maybe a fill in the blank question it might be a question where we drag and drop onto a display maybe it's a question where we put things in a particular order the performance-based questions don't ask topics that you don't know about because all of the topics on the exam come from the exam objective it's just a different way to ask you questions about things that you've already learned so I have for you today a performance based question and let's see how you do with this one the performance based question asks put these malware removal best practices in order and I'm assuming in this case the order is from the beginning to the end in a timed order you know which one do you do first which one do you do second which one is third so I have for you these seven different malware removal steps and now I want you to rearrange these so that they are in the proper order for those of you listening on the podcast side those seven steps are educate the end user disable system restore schedule scans and run updates quarantine infected systems enable system restore remediate and identify malware symptoms now if you think you know the answer follow the link on your screen that's the link at the bottom this is professormesser.com QA that link allows you to answer this one and in this case all you have to do is put the letters in the proper order if you think they are already in the proper order you can simply type in ABCDEFG and you're done now of course they're not in that order you will need to find the proper order for the malware removal best practices as documented in your CompTIA exam objectives so hopefully that can that can help you as you're going through this get a familiarity with this some folks in the chat room are saying that earlier question we had about the the error message and permissions that doesn't seem right but indeed that's exactly the way it works I've I uh in a previous life worked with an organization where I had to install many windows services but the windows Services did not need and could not run as the user writes on that machine that service could only run as an administrator or in this case a domain administrator on that Network and so you had to use a username and password for the service that was enough rights and permissions to be able to perform the functions that service needed to perform so that's why that particular error I sort of pulled right out of the list of things that I've run into in my career and whatever that popped up on the screen I knew that the user had not gone and put in an extra set of permissions with better accounts with higher higher permission accounts so that they could be able to use those so it becomes really really useful if you're ever in the in the place where you're working through those I think that helps quite a bit uh and and that's one where you'll start to see these in your careers you step through these problems and you'll put that one on in the back of your mind and think if that comes up again I know exactly where this particular problem happens to be that's one that instantly when I see that error I think immediately yeah that's a permissions problem somebody did not put in the domain admin or the admin rights or user with those rights for that service to properly work pro on that system that's just it happens but that's an easy fix you simply go into the services go into the properties of the service and say instead of using the user's account to run the service use a different account let me put in the username and password for that account and it works great uh skipping over to domain three section three we have this question that asks about malware removal uh and I'll I'll give you my my definition of of how this fits into the world of troubleshooting in just a moment but let's see if we can put together what the proper order is for the malware removal so let's clear the slate and let's take of these seven different options which are educate the end user disable system restore schedule scans and run updates quarantine infected systems enable system restore remediate and identify malware symptoms which ones are first which are second which are third and so on so let's let's clear it out let's start with the one at the top of our list before we start the malware removal process we have to first recognize that we are infected with malware that perhaps is the easiest of all of these seven different steps there's no reason to go through the malware removal process if a system doesn't have malware so if you're noticing that pop-ups are on the screen it's running slower than usual you're seeing strange icons running in the system tray you're noticing that there's odd applications running on the desktop that should certainly give you an idea that perhaps something unusual is happening on this system and that will be our clue to begin the process of removing malware from that particular system now at this point what I've told you in my videos and in fact what is the true best practice in the industry is to delete everything on the system and install or reinstall from a known good backup or a known good installation media maybe re-image the whole system and and get it going from there that's really the only way you can 100 percent know that you have indeed removed the malware from your system whenever but this particular set of steps why if that's the best practices why are we having to go through the rest of these steps well that's because sometimes you can't simply delete everything on that system because there might be a data file that has some important information that's not on the backup or maybe there's a directory of information someone's been working on for a week nobody has a backup of it and we need to recover that data now before we delete everything on this system and because the malware has corrupted the operating system it may not even be able to boot properly so we need to follow a series of steps that would allow us to get into the system remove enough of the malware to give us access to the file system and then be able to retrieve that data that's that's one of the many reasons you would step through these seven steps so the next thing you would do once you identify there's malware is to prevent the system from communicating to anything else on the network if this malware was smart enough like many worms are to hop onto the network find another system and in fact that system we need to stop it right now so we will unplug the network connection we'll disconnect any external drives we'll make sure that we don't take those drives anywhere we'll make sure that nobody else is able to communicate to the system and this system is not able to communicate to anyone else it is completely quarantined from the rest of everything uh having that nice air gap on the network will prevent that malware from getting outside of that system now we can really start the removal process and the first thing we may want to do is to disable system restore if you've used system restore you know it's a fantastic utility for rewinding your computer back to a previous configuration this could be really helpful if you install a program or you install a driver and suddenly that program or driver is not working properly and you would like to go back to Monday when everything was working fine you can use system restore to rewind everything back to Monday well it seems like you would absolutely want to use that for being able to rewind the malware right off of your system the problem however is that the malware knows that the system restore or points exist on your system and not only has it infected your system it is almost certainly also infected your restore points so although the restore point would restore the configuration of your system back to a previous config it would also reinfect your system with malware that's pointless so the first thing we do is nuke system restore and when you do when you disable system restore it deletes all of your previously saved restore points so there you go you've now got no restore points to pull from and therefore you can't accidentally reinfect your machine later now that we have that covered we can go to the next step which is remediate that is the process of removing or cleaning the malware that's on your system normally you would do this by using either a malware removal program specific to that malware or perhaps it's a broader anti-virus anti-malware software that is designed to clean practically anything so that's a couple of different choices many different choices you can pull from to remove the malware that all happens in the remediate step after you have remediated the malware what else could we do well we could now schedule some scans and perform updates of the existing antivirus to make sure that once we leave we know that at least every day every hour every week however we set it up that it's going to go through the process of really making sure that it scans and and continues to be as secure as possible even once we've left once we've cleaned this malware we can do everything we possibly can to make sure that we can limit any future attempts or infections themselves onto the system after we have scheduled scans and run updates we can re-enable system restore of course we disabled system restore in that third step so now it's time to turn it back on again obviously there won't be any system restore points available so we can't rewind back to anything but at least from this point forward now that we have something available we can very easily go through the process of re-enabling that and now we will create new restore points going forward and then lastly we need to talk to the end user about how to prevent this from happening how to recognize when these problems occur and how to get the problem solved hopefully before they happen and this is a very important step in the process and once we are very clear on what we're dealing with we've removed it from the system we've set up some additional scans so we can keep the system clean we can talk to the end user about different ways that you might want to go through the process of preventing this don't click things that are in your email look for things happening on your desktop at the first instance of that call the help desk open a ticket all of those things you it's never bad to get a ticket from someone who says I think there might be something bad on my system even if it is a false positive they were at least looking for these things and they were giving you a heads up up that this may be something we should be absolutely aware of so those are our steps for those of you following along we want to First identify malware symptoms then we want to quarantine the infected system we want to then disable system restore we want to remediate the virus afterwards we want to schedule scans and run updates we want to enable system restore again and then finally educate the end user those are the steps that we are working on so those are the real important parts of this and why we would go through this process folks in the chat room are just there a lot of people are talking about the process and going through the process and thinking that's a lot of work wouldn't you just delete everything and restore from a good backup as I mentioned originally yes you would but you don't always have that luxury occasionally you will need to recover enough of the system to restore data that you don't have backed up already and that could save someone a lot of time so these steps can be very important another question this is an important one to think about is this process and understanding the process you could have gotten some of these in the right place and some of these could be switched what if you switch the last two where instead you educate the end user just before the end and then the last step would be to enable system restore so you got five of them right but the last two were wrong do you get extra credit or partial credit or some credit for this particular question uh CompTIA has documented this and says well indeed this could be an issue whenever you start getting into the problems associated with this it becomes pretty important to know that that is uh that is really going to be the most um I I guess uh important part of this process is going through and understanding from the very beginning to the very end the different things that we should do so hopefully that gives you some perspective CompTIA said we sometimes get partial credit we sometimes don't so you can't rely on that and in fact when you get your results you don't even know if partial credit has been assigned to it or not so that's the real key is uh you just never know so uh do you get partial credit perhaps will you ever know it you will not that's that's unfortunately the way it works so hopefully that's that's something familiar if you're not familiar with these steps make sure you have a look at section 3.3 of your exam objectives I have a whole video on this called removing malware so you can get an idea of how that works so hopefully this this is something you will not have to do a lot but if you ever run into the situation where you do need to recover a little bit of data from that system instead of completely deleting everything you have some steps to go through that can help you retrieve all of that data let's now shift gears a little bit and go back to our our multiple choice based questions I have some new questions for you today let's start with a question that we have here and it asks a Mac OS administrator would like to protect all data stored on company laptops which of the following would provide this data protection would it be file Vault EFS wpa3 BitLocker or iCloud so this is one where you will need to choose from those five options the link you want to use is professormesser.com QA so there's where we want to go to the process of locking in our answer please no answers in the chat room please no hints in the chat room we want to go through the process of figuring out what this might be the question again a Mac OS administrator would like to protect all data stored on company laptops which of the following would provide this data protection is it file Vault or as we say in the South file Vault we got EFS wpa3 BitLocker or iCloud and hopefully one of these should look familiar all five of these should look familiar because they all come directly from the compete exam objectives but hopefully you're able to go through this list and discern which one would apply to this particular situation this should be the steps you go through have a have a look at that question and see if it's one that that looks familiar sometimes you you can go through the different answers and maybe discard one that you know it possibly could not be and that's a great situation because now you've got fewer to choose from I I tend to make my my live streams a little bit harder than the actual exam Because the actual exam will in most cases only give you four possible choices and in this case you can see there are five possible choices so I I try to make it a little bit harder whether it's harder or not we'll find out but this is one where you have to go through all five of these to determine which of the following would provide this data protection hopefully that can get you familiar with uh kind of the processes that you'll start to see on an actual CompTIA exam it's a great way to step through these hopefully this is one you know I saw a lot of people answering it quickly so maybe we did really really well with this particular question we'll have to see if that's the case let's see how you did with this one one again the question asked a Mac OS administrator would like to would like to protect all data stored on company laptops which of the following would provide this data protection would it be file Vault EFS wpa3 BitLocker or iCloud and what did you answer let's have a look 55 percent say it's file Vault we have 22 percent say it's iCloud 14 say it's BitLocker six percent say EFS and three percent say wpa3 only 3 percent no two percent now said wpa3 not a lot of people jumping on the wpa3 bandwagon the real key to this question was about the operating system so unlike a Windows environment or unlike Mac OS or or unlike Linux for example this question asked specifically about Mac OS this is someone who's working as an administrator for Mac OS systems these laptops are going out the door and the last thing you want is for those storage drives in those devices to have important company data that is not encrypted that's what we mean when we say that data is protected we have encrypted data on that system and all of the different options here file Vault EFS wpa3 BitLocker and in some ways iCloud are all secure environments they all deal with encrypted data but only one of them matches the requirement for being able to encrypt information on the laptop drive of a Mac OS system and in that particular case it would be full disk encryption fde we call it in Mac OS and it is a utility called file Vault it's built into the Mac OS system it is something that's free and available free to use if you're running Mac OS and it's one that can protect your data because it encrypts every everything automatically if you're already familiar with BitLocker on the Windows side then this is effectively the same type of functionality except it's running in the Mac OS operating system that's one that requires you to log in when you log into the operating system with your username and your password that is the key that unlocks all of the encryption so if you are trying to get to that drive without performing the proper authentication none of the data will be available to you you must know the proper username and password to be able to get into that system and un and decrypt and use the data that's on that computer this is a function that's available in your system preferences simply look under security and privacy and you'll see the option there just like we see it in this tab for filevault and you can simply turn it on and turn it off by clicking the button that's it that is that's very simple and very easy to do and you can turn it on and turn it off at any time inside of your system preferences that was the answer we were looking for 57 percent of you chose file Vault that is the answer we were looking for we could have chosen BitLocker which 14 percent of you chose but obviously BitLocker is a Windows utility it's not one that runs in Mac OS so BitLocker would not be the right answer along those same lines EFS is also a Windows function that is the encrypting file system that's built into NTFS and that is a functionality that uh in this particular case does not fit the scenario we have that's something you would find in Windows and in this case we're running Mac OS we did have 21 percent of you say iCloud at least that is a Mac OS or or at least an apple Centric technology but iCloud itself is used to store information uh securely in a cloud-based environment if you have a mobile phone a laptop you can store files there you can have backups stored there things will happen automatically but iCloud itself does not protect data stored on a company laptop it doesn't encrypt anything on a company laptop it instead can synchronize the data to the cloud but it doesn't protect the data that's currently on the laptop itself and as we've already mentioned wpa3 only two percent of you chose that one wpa3 is the uh the encryption methodology used or encryption technology used on wireless networks if you're communicating over a wireless network WPA2 or wpa3 would be great to use to protect the data as it's in transit across the network but that wasn't the situation we had here we had data stored on a company laptop that's data at rest and that data is one that would have to be encrypted using a Mac OS utility in this case the only option that makes any sense is option a filevault 57 of you chose the right answer there let's do some more I've got another question available for you this is a multiple choice based question this question speaking of protecting data we're going to ask a similar question except we're going to have a little bit of a broader perspective which asks which of the following would be the best way to protect data on a USB flash drive and the way that uh the different options that you would have available to you are through explicit permissions BitLocker to go Access Control lists user account control or single sign-on got a few options to choose from if you think you know the answer please don't answer in the chat room you want to answer using the link that's on your screen go to professormesser.com QA please no hints in the chat room either this question again asks which of the following would be the best way to protect data on a USB flash drive would that be explicit permissions BitLocker to go Access Control lists user account control and single sign-on you have a number of options there hopefully some of these can help you find what you're looking for whenever I start getting into the specifics of of these it really does help if you're able to break down where these particular issues or what these different options might provide you or what they might not provide you you so make sure you step through each one of them a lot of the questions especially as you're going through the the CompTIA exam they have a lot of questions like this that ask which one of these would be the best option and one of the things you'll notice is that to answer the question you have to read every single answer you don't get a lot of questions on the CompTIA exams that have a a single question and you immediately know what the answer is and you're looking for the answer in the list like for example I'll give you one that you'll never find on the company exam what port number is used by https there you go and and immediately you should know in your mind oh it's 443 you simply look for 443 and the answer is click it and you go the next thing they're never going to ask you a question like this so that's that's unfortunately the way it turns out is that you will never be able to get a question that is so trivial on an exam instead you'll get a question like this one that really requires you to step through every single one of these answers to determine what the answer is so in fact the chat room is like oh it's 443. we already know it yep you're never going to get a question like that on your exam uh instead you might get a question along the lines of in which of these cases would be the best situation to use Port 443 then you have to know oh what four four three oh it's https okay and what situation would you use it one of these so they really do have you step through a couple of extra steps to be able to answer those let's see if you went through the couple of extra steps for this one and see what answer you got the question asked which of the following would be the best way to protect data on a USB flash drive would that be explicit permissions BitLocker to go Access Control lists user account control or single sign-on and what did you choose you chose 69 if you say BitLocker to go 13 now 14 say explicit permissions 10 say single sign-on so three of these we at least got a uh got some double digits on it drops off to five and four percent for Access Control lists and user account control Access Control lists that's easy to say on a live stream so that's the real key so I think that if you're you're someone who was really trying to work through the details of these questions you would want to kind of break down where people are focusing on for all of these so having this question really focused on security on these mobile mobile devices as we've already mentioned BitLocker is built into windows but BitLocker is designed for a drive that is inside your system that is not removable the the vast the vast majority of use cases for BitLocker really take that into account so your drive is always going to be there it's not a drive you can unplug it's something that's inside of your system and it encrypts everything but in this answer this question we were asking for an answer associated with USB drives a USB drive is more of a problem because the USB drive we can pull out of our system we can take it with us and unfortunately it's so small that it's very easy to lose so where did I put that USB drive now I can't find it Well what if somebody else found it what if you dropped it somebody else found the drive they plugged it into their system and they can see all of your data that's something we don't want to happen so we want to use something that can encrypt USB flash drives and they have created an extension to BitLocker called oddly enough BitLocker to go I'm I didn't come up with the names people they all can't be winners bidlocker to go encrypts all of the data on these USB drives you unplug the drive and all of the data is is completely encrypted nobody can view it unless they have the correct credentials to be able to view that information so BitLocker to go is what we were looking for that is specifically designed to encrypt removable USB drives and it it is a Nifty little utility that can really help you there's all kinds of interesting software packages and Hardware distributions in fact you could buy a USB flash drive that Hardware encrypts the data on the USB flash drive that is that is how we get uh even more Security on some of these so you don't even have to worry about an operating system BitLocker to go or anything else but if you just simply want to take a normal flash drive encrypt all the data on there BitLocker to go is a great solution 65 percent of you think so as well you answered B BitLocker to go we also have single sign-on and single sign-on is a great function it's certainly built into Windows when you log into windows with your username and password you can connect to all of the resources on the network that you have rights to connect to without having to put in your username and password every time so single single sign-on is a great function for that but it doesn't do anything for protecting data on a USB flash drive explicit permission are permissions that we assign to different objects in the operating system so we would tell a particular file that's on our system that file is read only by and only one or two different groups in the company are able to write to that file so those would be a good example of explicit permissions but assigning permissions to data does nothing to protect the data itself it only protects people's access to the data from elsewhere in the operating system so in this case a USB flash drive once you unplug it having those explicit permissions doesn't help very much so that's that's unfortunately not the right answer either Access Control lists are commonly used in operating systems firewalls and other types of computing devices to assign and allow different rights and permissions on a big list almost like walking up and they say okay is your name on the list let's see if it is yes it is you may pass that's an access control list that is not going to help you protect data on a USB flash drive because there's no list to choose from once somebody gets their hands on that and then lastly a user account control certainly a Windows function user account control is designed to protect your system from third-party software accessing parts of the operating system that it should not be and so it prompts you on the screen do you really want this application to perform this particular function on your system this could be dangerous if so you need to authenticate properly that is user account control in this case the answer that makes the most sense is answer B BitLocker to go we're still fighting in the chat room about if we really won't like the name or not we'll have to figure that out later on time will tell as we go through this BitLocker to go those what we call it and that's what you need to know it is in the exam objectives make sure you're familiar with that technology and you'll be fine you'll notice already we've gone through a lot of different topics we've gone through security and networking operating systems and of course the 1102 exam along with the 1101 are extensive in the number of topics you need to know I made the video course myself and it's a 137 videos long 19 hours of content and you know my content I make efficient it is it is paired down to only give you the information you need to pass the exam and it does it in a way that gives you exactly what you're looking for and then we're off to the next topic so even 19 hours although it seems like a long time I could have done another 19 hours on this course you're welcome that I did not uh and and my course of course covers every single topic from the exam objectives everything from networking to security to mobile devices to Hardware to operating systems it's all in these videos but not everybody has a chance to go through all of the videos so one of the things I highly recommend is you take some notes but of course if you don't have time to watch every video you may not have time to take note oats either so I've taken some for you I have the course notes they're available on my website these course notes are available in a PDF form like you see here there's also a physical form look they're identical to the digital form but I print them out for you on a nice color uh perfect bound they call it a paperback book and you've got now all of the information available and If you get the physical version you get the digital thrown in there for free so you get both of those available these uh these course notes let's just go through a few pages of them here the just for Core 2 they are like 56 or 57 pages long because I put everything in here everything that is in this list is available you've got all the text from the videos you've got the important Graphics from the videos and if there are any tables associated with the content in the videos I put the tables in here too so you never have to go looking at your list wondering did I copy that that properly it's already in my set of course notes they are all there and if you're someone who's really looking for a way to have everything Consolidated into one view you've already gone through your book you've already watched the videos maybe you have some Hands-On and you're doing that final push for your studies this might help you as well have a look at those you'll find them on my website at professormesser.com 1102 notes and you of course have the option for both the digital and the physical edition of the notes if you already have the digital Edition and you're thinking maybe I should have gotten the physical version let me know and I can give you an upgrade coupon where you could pay the difference and get the physical Edition along with that so there's always an option for upgrading on my site something that might be useful whenever you're working through those those are the course notes and it's another great way to support what we do here at the Professor Messer website so thanks so much for your ongoing support let's go back to more questions I'm going to try to fit in some more before we run out of time this next question asks a Windows system shows the message USB controller resources exceeded which of the following would be the best way to resolve this issue would we reboot the system install the latest Windows updates delete any duplicate files or move a USB device to a different interface a Windows system shows the message USB controller resources exceeded which of the following would be the best way to resolve this issue would it be reboot the system install the latest Windows updates delete any duplicate files or move the USB device to a different interface there it is so if you think you know the answer go to professormesser.com QA and lock in your answer yes it's a rare for answer question you don't get those very much on the study group so enjoy that it's one that makes it a little bit easier if you're guessing you got a 25 chance now instead of 20 percent so that's uh those five percent those can be big let's see how well you do between all of these this is a a question about a topic that is specifically mentioned in the core 2 exam so that's another great place to go is to the exam objectives it can tell you a lot about what you might need to know about these particular topics so hopefully that can help you as always of course no answers in the chat room please no hints in the chat room we'll be able to figure out what the answer might be for these so folks in the chat room asking where you can get discounts for both a plus exams well I'm glad you asked you could visit the professor vessel website at www.professormesser.com vouchers we have discounted vouchers on our site so we mentioned that earlier be a good way to get some a discount if you happen to be in the U.S or Canada it's a great way to get a discount on your exams I also have links there to the student discounts too because if you're in college there's a student discount available it's even better than the ones you get from comptio or from my site I've also got a link on the same page go to professormesser.com vouchers there's a link at the top of the page that says don't waste your time with this go over to the student side and you can get even a better breakdown so let's see how we do with this question number of you have locked in your answers already let's see how you did with this question it asked a Windows system shows the message USB controller resources exceeded I don't even know what that means it says with which of the following would be the best way to resolve this issue would it be reboot the system install the latest Windows updates delete any duplicate files or move a USB device to a different interface so which one did you choose let's look at the results out of these four answers 65 percent of you say move the USB device to a different interface 16 say delete any duplicate files we also have nine percent each that said reboot the system or install the latest Windows updates so we're sort of mixed as to what this can be although we did get a clear majority at 65 percent that said you simply move a USB device to a different interface but is that really going to help you with this particular problem well the problem itself is a very specific kind of issue and that specific kind end of issue is one that is a USB controller resource warning this is one that is really wrapped around the hardware of your system inside of each USB controller on your system there are a series of buffers the actual term for them is end points and depending on the USB controller that you have there are a different number of buffers available and as you plug in USB devices you start using up those buffers different USB devices can use more or fewer buffers depending on the device if it's an audio controller it might use a lot of buffers if it's a simple USB flash drive and it might only use a few of those buffers but you can eventually exceed the number that is available and you'll get a message like this one that says the controller does not have enough resources for this device now fortunately on the screen itself it even tells you try connecting your device to a different port on your PC or disconnect the device you're not using that will obviously be moved to a different USB interface we're hoping that that different interface is connected to a different USB controller because often there are multiple USB controllers on your system and if it's a different controller you might have more of those endpoints available more of that buffer available and it won't give you that message but we've also got a situation where we might want to unplug something we're not using that would also free up some of those buffers so those are a great place to go if you're trying to resolve problems on your system because those buffers those resources that are available are very limited so you've got a few extra options here make sure maybe you should just move the device to another one or maybe you can match the device to the type of USB interface that you're using if it's a USB 3 device plug it into a USB 3 interface or vice versa the gsb2 plug it into a USB 2 interface so a number of different ways you could go with this one but only one of these answers was available to you and that indeed was answer d movie USB device to a different interface 64 percent of you chose that you're absolutely correct deleting duplicate files we don't even I don't even know what files we would be referring to here um the maybe if it's a USB drive maybe there are USB file their files on the USB drive maybe we're deleting files on our system board in on our our system controller or system storage well in any case neither of those will help you create more endpoints on your USB because those endpoints are built into the hardware of your USB controller so deleting files moving files around doing other things not going to help you installing the latest Windows updates that because this particular series of resources is available in Hardware you can install some new software but that doesn't change the capabilities of your Hardware that would be great if we could just simply run some new software and I've got a new video controller well it doesn't quite work that way we would need to replace Hardware to make that happen so updating Windows files updating the operating system running the monthly updates are not going to increase the number of endpoints available in USB and then lastly the question that I frankly thought more people would choose would be reboot the system because that is kind of our standard response to anything is have you rebooted the system well because this problem is related to resources available in the hardware of your system and it's based on what you currently have plugged into your USB interfaces rebooting the system doesn't change anything you've still got the same number of devices plugged into your USB interfaces you've still got exactly the same USB controllers in your system with exactly the same number of endpoints available therefore rebooting your system does absolutely zero to help this particular problem of USB controller resources exceeded so the answer here the only one that makes any sense the only one that's really going to help you is answer D move a USB device to a different interface and 64 percent of you got that one absolutely correct if you're watching this video for continuing education unit credit or CEUs this first means that you've passed your A Plus network plus Security Plus exam or something similar and you are trying to renew that certification if you are or maybe you might be using these CEUs to renew a different certification as well people use them for different reasons so if you do need a webinar category ceu for watching this one hour event then you want to follow these instructions go to the top or the bottom of the Professor Messer website there is a link that says contact us when you click that link a form will show up and then that form put your name put your email address in the subject line please put May 2023 Core 2 so that I know where this came from and in the body of the message on a line by itself at the very top please put the super secret code word of the month USB controller USB controller is the super secret code words of the month I guess a couple of words so uh put those in the message if you'd like to put anything else you're welcome to do that or read through every single one of these and submit that and I will be glad to send you an email certifying that you were here for a one hour of a webinar category ceu for this event uh it doesn't matter if you got the questions right it doesn't matter if you got the questions wrong you simply send that message and I will send you back an email that has been digitally signed by me so you know it really came from me and now nobody can change that now that I've sent it which is of course the real benefit to having that there so that's our process make sure you follow that process again the top or bottom of the Professor Messer website click the contact us link put your name your email address in the subject line put May 2023 Core 2 and in the body of the message on a line by itself put the super secret code words of the month USB controller and we'll we'll have a good way to make sure that you are able to uh to wait on me now because now I have to go through the process of going through all of these and sending you back those emails so it usually takes about a week or so sometimes faster maybe I can get them done today I don't know so get those in as quickly as you can so that you're assured you're going to be get one of getting one of those back let's do some more questions we've got more uh on the questions this next question is a multiple choice question that asks which of the following would provide data Integrity for a drive image taken after a security incident would it be securely delete the original Drive would it be to store the original drive and the drive image in different locations would it be to take a picture of the breached systems display would it be to Hash the drive image file or would it be to create a new working drive from the image trying to get everything on the screen so we can make sure you see that the question again asked which of the following would provide data Integrity for a drive image taken after a security incident is it securely delete the original Drive store the original drive and the drive image in different locations take a picture of the breached systems display hash the drive image file or create a new working drive from the image if you think you know the answer follow the link on your screen go to professormesser.com QA to lock in your answer some folks in the chat room are asking about the CEUs and the subject line uh I say in the subject line put May 2023 Core 2 but you could put anything that kind of Associates Associates this and quite honestly if I see the line the words in the body of the message most of the time I can figure it out if it's something that's happened recently if it hasn't happened recently and it's a little more difficult for me to cross-reference so just something there so I know at least what type of video this came from so that I can I can cross reference it and make sure that I'm giving you the the ceu for something you were requesting that's because occasionally this does happen I will use super secret code words that are duplicated from a year and a half ago because I I don't remember what I did a year and a half ago and so someone will submit that ceu with that word and they'll think do they mean the one from last month or do they mean the one from a year and a half ago so that's just my way to sync those up in my chaotic world and as long as I can figure it out we're in good shape otherwise I'll just guess and I'll send you one back and and I don't know if that's really what you need either it's probably not the best to have that there oh sure you can you can submit CEUs from well way back as long as you'd like so that's another great way to do that hopefully that that's uh that's one is you're stepping through all of these it can be really simple to send those in so I think that would be a good one um let's see um what else we may be doing here let's see if we can uh get and we have a number of you putting in your answers notice the numbers are not incrementing as fast as I normally expect so if I know you know the answer those tend to go a little bit faster but maybe you take your time on this one and maybe you're even more correct so maybe I'm wrong in my assumption let's find out the question again asked which of the following would provide data Integrity for a drive image taken after a security incident is it securely delete the original Drive store the original drive and the drive image in different locations take a picture of the breached systems display hash the drive image file or create a new working drive from the image let's show the results and we can see 53 percent so just over half say that the answer is Hash the drive image file but nearly a quarter of you say you store the original Drive in one place and you store the drive image in a completely different place that's the best way to provide data integrity and then we have 17 that say create a new working draw live from the image lastly seven percent say to securely delete the original drive and one percent say take a picture of the breached systems display well if we go with the majority here 51 percent is indeed a majority then we would say to Hash the drive image file this is this is really related to grabbing the data and being able to uh effectively freeze it so that that data that we have acquired will never change throughout the entire process of discovering what happened on that system that is effectively the definition of data Integrity where if you collect some data you have some data that you can really assure that that data never changes as from day to day from week to week from month to month you could look that data a year later and you know the data has not changed because you've implemented some type of data Integrity so let's step through this process if we were an attacker and we wanted to hide information that may have been collected we want to somehow get around these data Integrity features let's see if we're able to do that so first we're going to start with the very common process Whenever there is an incident and you have some data on a drive let's collect that data and there's lots of great utilities to do that if you've ever seen the the any type of utility that does a backup of data sector by sector these are great tools to use to image the systems that are there and I think if you ever get into a scenario where you're really working through finding data and collecting it this is the first thing you do when you're collecting data from a drive is you copy everything that's on the drive because the drive might fail you might have that drive and it works fine today but when you come back and turn on the system suddenly the drive doesn't work anymore so while the drive is here while it's available to you while it is active and while it is accessible we need to perform an image there's lots of utilities you can use to do that on a sector by sector a bit by bit basis on that drive so now we've effectively created a complete duplicate of that drive and we have it in a file we have it on another storage medium maybe we make some backups of it and we've got it that at that point we we might want to go through the process of analyzing or looking at the drive and what happens to be there but how do we know that the data we collected a year ago on this drive is the same data that we're looking at today one of the most common ways is you would create a hash of that drive a year ago and a year later you can perform the same hash on that data and if those two hashes match then nothing has changed with that drive it's a relatively simple process it it's a way to use cryptography in a in a way to confirm that the Integrity of this data is still valid and so it's very very useful to be able to do that um I I don't necessarily agree that we're adding more strength to the data because we're not really adding any strength to adding anything to the data we're simply taking a fingerprint it's sort of like the fingerprint that's you have on your fingers where we're able to put that fingerprint down and if you looked at my fingerprint a year from now it's the same thing so that's the process we're going through to have that there doesn't change the data doesn't make the data more powerful doesn't make the data safer in fact someone can still go into the the drive and change the data the real difference is can I confirm that the data has been changed or not we do that with those hashes and being able to have that uh some folks in the chat were saying how do you save that hash calculation lots of ways to do it you can write it down you can store it on a separate medium you can take a picture of the hash you can send the hash to somebody in an email there's lots of ways to take that hash data so that you have it there the the real key for this is that you take the hash if you don't take the hash and create a hash at the very beginning there's no way to check the Integrity of the data later so that's a really important part of this uh that is what we were hoping to find is the only way to confirm Integrity is if we're able to somehow do a huge comparison otherwise you would have to go through the drive bit by bit and compare it to the old one that would take you forever it would take you years to go through a drive and be able to do that the hash is something I have happens very very quickly hashing the drive image file is one of the best ways to do that indeed 52 percent of you were spot on with hashing the drive image file now 24 of you said we're going to store the original Drive in one place and we're going to be sneaky we're going to take the image of our drive and store it in a different place okay so I I'm assuming you're going to be working from that image what if somebody goes in and changes the image would you know you would not you didn't take a hash what if somebody goes in and changes the original Drive so you're working on the image and you found some incriminating data and during the trial they say well let's look at the original Drive where this data happens to be and you look at the drive and the data's not there because somebody is has changed the original drive but you have no way to confirm that someone changed the original drive because you didn't take a hash that's what we're that's the real problem that's what we're trying to to resolve and get around to somebody modifying some of that data either on the original drive or the image that you took you have to have something there to be able to work from the next one on our list is 15 that said create a new working drive from the image which you may end up having to do you may have to create an image and then from the image create a drive again for a number of different technical reasons but none of those are providing any Integrity once we create the new working Drive how do we know that it has exactly the same information as the original drive you don't and there's no way to know so that's a real problem for people working in data is you have to be able to maintain the Integrity of that and creating a new working Drive doesn't provide any additional Integrity seven percent of you say securely delete the original Drive probably not a good idea either uh you don't want to delete anything on that original drive that that'd be like deleting the evidence that's a bad idea never delete anything when you're working in an environment like this and deleting the data indeed provides and it provides the opposite of data Integrity it creates a situation where there is no data Integrity if you delete the original drive and then lastly we've got two percent of you that say take a picture of the breached systems display in fact I mentioned in my course this is a very common way to capture what's on the screen because when you first get into these systems you'll you'll sit down in front of a breach system and there may be information on the screen that's very valuable but in the instant you start touching the keyboard or modifying anything with that system you might lose all of that information that was on the screen so grabbing your phone taking a quick snapshot can confirm that you've at least captured everything that was on the screen when you first are arrived at that system but it doesn't provide any integrity and that's what our question was about was having data Integrity for a drive image so only one answer really provided Integrity it was indeed answer D hash the drive image file that's the one we were searching for that's the one we were looking for to determine where we can work with Integrity on this system and that's the one you should have chosen as well hopefully that's the one you came up with answer D hash the drive image file I know that we're we're sort of in in overtime here we're after the first of the hour but I do have one more question for you so this question though is not one that I wrote just for the study group it's one that I wrote so that you would be more prepared for your exams uh these study groups are there just to update you or at least get you familiar with some of the terms or topics that come from my videos but ultimately you're going to need to study for your exams and one of the things that I found that is an enormous problem on the Internet is there's some really bad questions out there you'll run into question banks that ask questions from versions of exams that are two versions ago the the answers don't seem to have anything to do with the questions themselves and then the answers don't tell you anything about why an answer was right or why an answer was wrong and after seeing this I thought there's a better way to do these questions how can we create a series of questions that are designed with the same style the same feel the same voice as the actual exam questions and are written by somebody who really understands the technology and gives you Common Sense questions Common Sense answers and they all make sense whenever you you put them all together and the way that I've done this is through my practice exams book this is a 380 question book just for core two has three separate 90 question exams on it they have questions five of the questions in each exam are performance-based questions different types of performance-based questions and there's a lot that's in this book let me give you just an overview of this I have a question that's here from the book that's here in my PDF reader and the question here asks again no answers in the chat room no hints in the chat room we're gonna we're gonna try to do this ourselves just lock it lock away your answer in your brain the question asks a user is connecting their laptop to an external monitoring keyboard but the laptop goes into sleep mode if the laptop screen is shut which of the following would modify this figuration to keep the laptop running when the lid is closed and we have a number of options to choose from the first option is power options then we have device manager or is it personalization or it could be user accounts now as we go through these and try to determine what these are you should be able to lock these down now because this is a PDF I can go into my annotation tools on the PDF and I can break down this if I think the answer is c i can select that option or maybe I want to highlight part of the question so I can really understand what's happening there this is really a useful thing to have available whoop There we go is these these questions that are here but notice that I've also set these questions up where I could if I just want to know if it's A B C or D I could go over to page 33 and have a look at that because I'm on page 30 right now there's page 29 now I'm on page 30. uh we could also fast forward up to page 123 where I go through a large explanation of the details of this question now of course this is a book and if you have the physical book like I have here you simply flip over to page 123 and you look at the answer and then you can easily flip back now because this is a PDF I do that more electronically I've created links for you all you have to do is click on the thing that says the details and it will fast forward to page 100 and whatever this was 123 and give you the question again and then it tells you the answer is a power options and it tells you what all of the explanation of why that is the right answer now of course if you get the answer right giving you an explanation of why the answer is right is sort of pointless you already knew why the answer was right I guess unless you guessed maybe it helps you in those rare occasions where you just happen to select the right one but most of the time an explanation of the right answer doesn't help us the only time we learn anything is when we get the question wrong so hopefully I don't mean this in the wrong way but you understand what I'm saying hopefully you get some questions wrong and when that happens you can look at the incorrect answers and for every incorrect answer in my book I explain to you why it's incorrect so that if you do get it wrong you can of course see why you got it wrong and now you've learned something that you can apply to other questions as you go along it is kind of the circular process where we're looking at a question we're looking at the answers in fact I highly recommend if you have my book and you get the question right don't just skip to the next question read through the incorrect answers as well because you might see something in the incorrect answers that you didn't know about but could in fact show up on your exam so that's another important thing to do and then lastly if you scroll down a little bit you'll see that we have a link to the video that was used to create the question to begin with so if you don't even understand the question I've been there uh I have at least a way that you could go back and see why did this question appear how did this question appear and in what particular exam objective is associated with this question you'll find that at the bottom of every question and of course this is just a multiple choice based question but I've also got Performance Based questions in these books as well and now once you're done with this I can click the back button in my PDF reader and I'm back to where I started and I can go to the next question that's in the book so this makes it very easy to be able to step through some people will have a separate notepad up on their screen and they'll document their answers and they are some people will write in the PDF itself the PDF is one that allows you to annotate and write in there without any problem whatsoever so it's another great way to also support what we do here and if you buy this along with my course notes there's also a little bit of a discount associated with it so you can save a few bucks there too find out more about my practice exams at professormesser.com core 2pe well this was a lot in one single hour but everything we talked about is listed in the exam objectives the Coptic exam objectives are a valuable tool this is a set of the exam objectives here they tell you everything you need to know to pass this exam quite literally if you know every bullet that is in this set of exam objectives you will pass your exam there's there's no question that everything that's in here lists out details of everything you need to know take for example this section 1.10 identify common features and tools of the Mac OS desktop OS I need to install an installation and uninstallation of applications of file types DMG PKG app I need to understand app store and I need to understand the uninstallation process I also need to understand Apple ID and corporate restrictions I also need to understand backups antivirus updates patches displays networks printers scanners privacy accessibility uh time machine multiple desktops Mission Control etc etc look at all these bullets it is extensive there's and and by the way all of this is available for you to download for free so make sure you get your copy of these it should be the first thing you download and read through before you start your studies this should be the last thing you read through before you go into the exam just to confirm that you've really understood everything that could be asked of you and you can get your free copy of this on the CompTIA website there's also a link to that at professormesser.com objectives or simply use your favorite search engine and search for CompTIA exam objectives that will help you as well I do one of these study groups for each of my courses every month so this week was our Core 1 and core 2. next week we have Network plus the week after that we have Security Plus we've got a little bit going on uh and you'll find them also we've got them scheduled for June already uh June the 6th and 8th is for a plus the 14th for Network plus and the 21st for Security Plus these times and dates can sometimes change however so make sure you have a look at professormesser.com calendar I also have an events calendar on my Discord both of those are always updated so make sure you have a look at those and you'll be able to find exactly when our next live event is going to be although the process of me asking you the questions is over we're still going through a lot of questions we have a lot to go through and uh so stick around for our after show we'll start with a question that was asked originally before we got started about when you walk into your exam how do you keep everything at an even Keel how do you deal with anxiety when you walk into these exams I have some tips for you coming up in just a moment stick around for that don't forget about my course notes and practice exams on my website go to professormesser.com 1102 success we've also got my discounted vouchers on my site along with my free exam hacks ebook if you buy one of those vouchers it's at professormesser.com vouchers and don't forget about following us and if you like this video I would love it and appreciate it if you would give it a thumbs up really does help a lot when I'm talking with my Representatives over on YouTube they can see which things you'd like to see they can give us more feedback about things that can help us with the channel they've been in extreme help to us so I'd like to let them know that you like this content as well and the only way to do that is if you give a thumbs up and maybe if you're feeling especially nice you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel that would be a huge help as well well stick around we've got more coming we've got a lot more because I'm sure you have plenty of questions stick around for the after show we'll see you on the other side this and thank you for also being here we will see you next time on the a plus study group okay let's uh let's take a sip and let's bring up the camera and let's click a thing there we go it's time for the after show everybody in the after show there really is no script I don't have any slides there's nothing set up this is really more of an opportunity where instead of me asking the questions of you this is a chance for you to ask the questions of me there's a couple of different ways to do this but I am watching the chat on YouTube uh that chat is the one that I've been referencing this whole time so I can see the messages that you're putting into the chat I also have a chat that's on my website at professormesser.com live if you're on that page it's the same chat I just embedded the YouTube chat onto my website so you don't have to go anywhere you can stay on that page if you see a chat that's the one I'm looking at it's the one on YouTube so before I get into the question about anxiety on the exam uh there was a question from Matthew in the chat room says uh hey I bought the pdf version can I get a signed physical copy for a prorated fee well I can give you almost that I can give you a physical copy for a prorated fee but as as the internet works I don't have a stack of books behind me in fact there aren't any here in the studio I partner with a third party that creates these books on demand so when you purchase a book from me I tell them send that person a book uh and it it leaves out of the the many different printing houses we have around the the world so if you're in Australia it's local to Australia if you're in in Europe there are local printers in Europe if you're in the US in Canada it's usually printed somewhere out of the U.S so unfortunately I don't have any I can sign they they are magically sent out to you uh without my physical touching of them so unfortunately I do not have a signed physical copy available to you uh but I do prorate them so if you're someone who has bought the pdf version and you're thinking I would love the physical Edition I can provide you with links and instructions for upgrading to that physical that physical Edition uh without having to repurchase the digital version so it's a simple upgrade fee for the difference in cost between those which that makes sense whenever you're trying to work through those there was a question earlier really before we got started today about anxiety in an exam and this is this is a interestingly enough a relatively popular question and I think it's because sort of overall as as humans we tend to get kind of excited about exams we get concerned and nervous when it's time to go in an exam it's it's an unknown situation and as humans we we effectively have a fear of the unknown and and it's interesting that fear of the unknown is it's sort of an ongoing um theme in it it's one of these things that we do all the time is Fear of the unknown in fact most of what you will find in technology is unknown you will be walking into situations all the time as a technologists where people are asking you questions they're expecting you to be knowledgeable they're looking for some advice but they're asking about things you've never used before so how do you deal with these very stressful situations where people want you to know something but you may not know in fact you don't know if you know because you haven't been asked the question yet in your exam now fortunately there are a number of different tasks that I go through prior to taking an exam some of them are a little extreme but I only mention them because a number of you are also in this case where the anxiety on exam is a little bit more than most people maybe you feel like walking into the exam you're a lot more nervous than what other people tell you you should be and if that's your case I have some tips for you so the first thing that I do is I become very familiar with the exam Center for me some of the stress of the exam is getting there now this of course only applies if you're someone who is going to take the exam at a testing center you're not taking the exam at home which by the way has its own set of of anxiety ridden situations associated with it we'll talk about in just a moment but let's say you're taking the exam in a testing center I like to be familiar with the path how I get there and am I driving there am I taking an Uber am I taking the bus am I having someone else take me I like to know how to get there and I like to know once I get there that there's plenty of parking where am I going to put the car do I need to get there 10 minutes early because I have to park across the street or in a parking garage you don't know sometimes until you get there I will often do some Recon prior to my test date hopefully more than a day before but if you're in the area and you're driving around you may want to swing by and say let's see where that building happens to be let's go see what's going on there oh there's plenty of parking here it's in a nice parking lot they have their own building or maybe they're in a a strip mall maybe they've got a separate separate office building it's in the middle of a city so I will need to find parking nearby oh look there's a parking garage I wonder if that parking garage is usually busy during the day let's go in and see what's it gonna cost you might be free for the first 15 minutes or it might be a dollar to park for 15 minutes let's go in the parking garage let's go up oh there's plenty of parking here this is a great place to park now I know where I'm going to take my exam I know how to get here I know there's not going to be a problem with parking first stressful thing off my list no problem so checking out the testing center is always a good idea if they allow you to go in and see the testing center that's even better so you can really tell that oh okay they have new monitors they have systems inside it's a nice clean environment it's comfortable the air conditioning works uh that's always good now on the test day itself I tend to get there early and sometimes when I get there early maybe I get there 15 minutes early or 30 minutes early uh sometimes they'll say well we're ready to go we got an opening if you want to go right in and sometimes I have depending on how I felt yeah let's go right now let's start early I'll start 30 30 minutes early but sometimes I'll say no tell you what I'm going to sit here for a little bit and I'll flip through my notes read through my book sort of oh I'm off the road I've stopped driving let's now calm it down a little bit and I'll take about 10 to 15 minutes to hang out in the waiting room go over some things check my emails and just sort of relax into the environment and I think that's sometimes useful too um once I get into the exam room and they click the start button you would think that would be very stressful to jump into the exam and for me it certainly is uh this is me on my first question of the exam we're gonna I'm gonna pull up my the question we just went through uh in my practice exams okay we get to the first question on our exam they hit go okay here's the first question uh a user is connecting their laptop to an external monitoring keyboard the laptop goes to sleep mode of the laptop screen is shut which the following modify this configures keep laptop running when the lid is closed so power options to display what was the question again okay let me read again hold on a user is connecting their laptop to an external monitoring keyboard but the laptop goes into sleep mode if the laptop screen is shut I'm done is this in English I'm not really I'm not here I'm reading it and I recognize the words but it's not registering in my brain so I'm I'm in such a a nervous state that I now can't read that's that's the problem when you get to that point where English is my first language and yet I can't read it that that's a problem uh when you're on an exam the clock is ticking and now I can't read anything so here's my tip for this one when you first sit down in front of the exam they don't start it up right away the first thing that happens is that it requires you to read through and improve something called the candidate agreement this is the contract between you and CompTIA that says you will not repeat any of this information you're not using anything to cheat on this exam you're not taking something into the exam room that is not appropriate it's the rules and regulations that you are referring to so most of us do this we click the top we go scroll the bottom and we click approve like we were installing software and not reading through the end user license agreement scroll go let's start the exam what you may not realize is they give you about 15 to 20 minutes to read that and to finally click the Go Button and I would highly recommend that you read it or not but you sit there for 15 to 20 minutes until the adrenaline wears off until you're okay I think in fact maybe reading the document you can start reading at the top and then as you get into it you're actually reading and going well that's interesting finally you're recognizing words again finally your brain is able to synchronize what you see on a screen with things that you can think about in your head so this would be a time okay now I'm really looking through and understanding what's in front of me and it really just gives your body time to work the adrenaline out of your blood system now you're settled down you're sitting in a chair you can see there's other people in the room how you doing how's it going you can't talk to them actually but yeah how's it going do that okay let them know good luck hopefully it goes well for you give them a little head a little head nod and then now now you're fine now things have settled down a little bit the stress level's gone down you know how to use the mouse now you're comfortable with the screen you can kind of get comfortable in your chair temperature is good and now we're are going to say yes I agree to the terms of the candidate agreement and yes I'm ready to start the exam so it's interesting how just a few minutes spending some time at the beginning relaxing looking at the data on the screen can settle you down enough so in that first question hits you now can read the entire question and understand exactly what's in the question this is is probably something I really did not get uh I didn't understand really what was happening until my third or fourth exam because every exam I would take I wasn't reading the first two or three questions it took me a while to settle in and then I on some exams you can go back and and look at those questions again on Cisco exams you can't which makes it even worse what if you didn't read the questions you don't know let me just pick one and go the next but then you realize wait I can't go back once you answer you're done some other folks in the chat room were saying that um that the data centers are the the testing centers will sometimes give you ear protection they'll either give you something you put in your ear to let all the noise that's in the room go away sometimes they have headphones uh but that is one where the the that may help you too especially if you're hearing things things and you can hear people out in the hallway and they're having a class in the other room you just put those in your ear and everything disappears that may be another useful thing to have with you and if you they don't provide you with hearing protection maybe bring some foam plugs with you just check them at the front desk and say I'd like to use these phone plugs is that okay and like oh we have some for you or yes you can use those and that's what you can do so that works out very well too now if you're taking your exam at home it's a little bit different at home you have to take care of all of the room yourself you have to make sure the desk is clean you have to really break it down obviously I would not be able to take the test here they would see this and say hold on you can't take a test here you can have one monitor when you're taking the exam so all of these screens have to be not only powered down they have to be unplugged and you have to take pictures and send them pictures of them all unplugged so obviously I would never take an exam in here then you have to also worry that somebody's going to walk in the room somebody walks into the room into the camera view they will tell you that your test is over that's it you've now hopefully you answered enough questions to pass because now the test is over if they hear noises the test is over if you um if you look up let me think about that well test is over what are you looking at you're looking at something you have to look at the screen the whole time if you put your hand right here in front of your mouth your test is over potentially most of the time they're going to give you a warning like move your hand from in front of your your face it'll pop up in a chat move your hand from here oh oh sorry that's it and so if you do it again they will they will your exam will be over so you can't talk in the exam you can't do this you can't do a user is connecting their laptop to an external monitoring keyboard nope can't do that if you do that your exam's over so there's certain rules that are also you can't do those at the exam Center either but because the Proctor is in the other room and they're not quite as particular with those rules as they are online you tend to get away with a little bit more to testing center it's not supposed to be that way but functionally that's the way it turns out so they're they're a little bit uh less strict now some people will tell you I took my exam at home I didn't have to deal with any of that nobody said anything about it and I was fine well good for them but there are not just a few stories there are many many many many stories like this on the CompTIA subreddit and elsewhere where people have documented situations where they're sitting at their desk their roommate accidentally walked into the room said oh sorry close the door and they walked out test was over failed them boom done they were on they were in question number two done and they had to pay to take the exam again because they knew the rules they didn't lock the door and they broke the rules so did were they cheating probably not they just walked in the room accidentally but did it break the rules yes it did and it's difficult to fight on that one when they can clearly have the video of the person walking in and here's the rule that says nobody can interrupt okay well there's nothing you can do so hopefully if you're taking the exam at home you already know about these things I'm giving you the heads up this will automatically make the situation less stressful there'll be less anxiety at home because you're ready for those particular situations you know not to put the hand in front of the mouth you know not to say anything on your exam therefore it will be a lot easier for you you just have to be prepared for those types of situations so they don't throw you some people have even said in the middle of the exam it popped up this chat saying don't talk but I don't recall talking and it sort of threw them like were they did I did I talk and I don't remember talking are they hearing me talk were they hearing someone else talk and they think it's me so it really threw them off for a number of questions on the exam just know that it happens and if that pops up just just got it just sort of put it aside you already know that that was possibility and now it's not going to stress you out that much so that's what I would recommend is sort of follow some of those steps and I think that your exam experience will be as good as it could possibly be especially if you can kind of let a lot of that stress work its way out and then finally jump into the exam I think that's a good way to do it too hopefully that's that will help you as you step through those maybe you've got some other ideas about how you can help with some of the stress of these exams exams are stressful you can't get rid of all the stress but find try to find a good way to to work around those problems and be able to work through them uh can you take bathroom breaks not at home once you start the exam you can't leave you are in front of the camera it is recording you you cannot leave if you leave the exam is over that's it really it should be that way at testing centers too and the clock does not stop when you walk out of the room so a testing center I've I there have been times in testing center where people have left they've gone to the restroom and come in because the testing center knows that they don't have anything in the restroom it's a it is a controlled environment but they do not they do not um stop the clock the clock still goes so it doesn't help you very much when you're working through those hopefully that can that can help you with those too it's only 90 minutes so I think you'll do okay in that um that should be pretty good uh let's go through some other questions that have come in uh we'll have a look at at Art that's an interesting last name our Art's last name is Enthusiast that's an interesting last name art uh Arthur writes uh when going for cyber SEC internship how can I prep for it show I'm a good candidate despite not having any search yet and very little experience all around this is probably describes every single internship ever uh which is you're walking in you're not supposed to know anything you're an intern you're the person we've we're putting into this place to see how well they can learn this content and see if it's something that might interest them as a career so first they're not expecting you to be completely knowledgeable in everything that you're running into in these internships usually that's the case the the thing that I highly recommend for a number of people is to find out more about the company in the position and what they do there you mentioned here that this is a uh here it is a cyber security internship I don't even know what that is nobody knows what that is because there's no such thing as cyber security that's not a thing it's such a broad term it sort of is turned out in this term that encompasses all things a technologically that are associated with security well that that could be looking at code to stop buffer overflows that's and that could that could also be you're configuring rules in a firewall that's two completely types of Technologies one on the computer science side one on the I.T side and of course as we already know those two sides don't meet each other those are two completely different jobs so I guess the first thing would be is to figure out what is this cyber security you speak of um and maybe from there you could start getting some more information oh it's a company and the security is the I.T security folks that handle security for the users okay we already know then that we'll be dealing with um permissions rights and permissions we'll be dealing with vpns we'll be dealing with encryption we'll be talking about authentication on our systems maybe multiple authentication servers firewalls are probably in there IPS functionality in these firewalls ipsec tunnels uh redundancy with these device reporting of data that these devices are collecting so all of that could possibly incorporate topics that would be involved in just one aspect of a cyber security internship now how can you prep for it and sure you're a good candidate at that point I think having we talked about this in the last study group having some tasks that you've already done in your home lab so have you have you ever loaded pfSense in a virtual machine and run that firewall why haven't you especially if you're going to be walking into this uh this internship it would be great if you could show people what you know about this particular firewall show them some of the things you found when you connected this firewall to your internet link run some reports that show how much data you were able how many attacks you were able to see from the internet side in an hour on your internet connection you know all of these things can show somebody you're not only interested in the technology but you're also interested in the cyber security side of things certainly the I.T security side of things and you want to know more you want to work with more of this technology you want to do more with security another good security task might be to load up active directory and windows and start working with the group policy functions and lock a system down make it so that they have to have a password that's 10 characters long or more and make it so that uh certain aspects certain things inside of the operating system are disabled so maybe they can't run certain programs or maybe they can't install certain applications how could you set up Windows to do that we can use Group Policy we could use permissions rights and permissions in the file system itself we can use active directory permissions for that add people to groups remove them from groups if you have not installed a Windows server with active directory and then installed a VM for Windows and connected it then how are you supposed to have that story to tell so there's those are two really good security related tasks you could do in your home lab you could download it right now and get both of those running in an hour you're probably not though you're probably gonna something's not gonna work right from the beginning and as I mentioned in the last study group when something is not working right you need to document that one of the great things about working with these Technologies and telling the stories of these Technologies especially when you get around a group of folks it's after hours you're at the bar you're it's it's an off-site meeting that you're having things always wrap around to these stories in the trenches and talk about the worst situation you ran into that dealt with encryption oh you'll never believe what I saw on this ipsec link the other day they were still using triple desk can you believe that and we can all laugh about it yeah the equipment was ancient it was 20 year old firewall running triple deaths and and we were upgrading it and some people say I didn't even know they were still running tripled so you can have all these conversations it's a story so anytime you're installing one of these Technologies in your home lab and it's not working document the story of what was wrong how you figured out how to fix it and then what happened after you fix it that's a five to ten minute conversation you can have with somebody when you're sitting down to talk about a potential intern ship that here's a problem I ran into security related here's how I did the research to find out how to resolve the problem and it was really a two-minute fix once I figured it out and then I got it up and running and then I set up active directory and I disabled and turned it into kiosk mode and we did this lots of things you can do at that point so those are my recommendations maybe that can help you as well if you're somebody who's trying to get a job or an internship some of those things might help you when you walk in the door have those stories available make sure you're familiar with those um other questions uh caliber asks you didn't mention watch caliber but caliber asks do you offer military slash active slash Reserve slash veteran discounts for your products I absolutely do both PDF and physical yes I do for my products there are discounts available if you want more information on those and you are a active or inactive military Reserve veteran or similar please send me a note uh either as a contact us link on my website or if you already have a membership you can leave a ticket and I'll be glad to give you instructions for those other questions we'll keep going um other things in this list um we'll keep going on these uh the other thing by the way as you work through these problems and and issues with questions are are some somewhat challenging sometimes to find the information you might need so uh if you ever run into that there's a lot of great folks over on our Discord too that have also gone through these similar home labs they might even have some other great ideas too so make sure you join our Discord if you have questions on those as well um question do you know how the exam will be is it uh only multiple choice uh would it be nice it used to be only multiple choice but in the last number of years CompTIA has added a number of questions right at the beginning a handful of questions that are performance-based questions so there will be a number of questions in fact people started their exam and they're noticing first question was not multiple choice it took me 15 minutes to get through the first question and then I got to the second question and it was even more involved and that took me 15 minutes and then I went to the third question and by the time I got through the four or five performance-based questions I had 70 multiple choice questions to go through and I ran out of time this is a common problem and then they come out of the exam and go I hadn't I was not expecting these more involved questions at the beginning of my exam because they did not do the research and they did not know there were performance-based questions on this exam one of the the big hints I will always give people is to read through the performance-based questions at the beginning of your exam and then skip them read through every single one of them skip it read through the next one go the next read through the next question go to the next question read through the fourth or last performance based question and then go do your multiple choice based questions and the reason I say to do that first is that the performance-based questions do tend to take a little bit more time than the multiple choice if you're ready for them they won't take a lot of time but if you've never seen these before you're unprepared you've been blindsided when you start the exam because you weren't expecting this it's going to take longer than it should so I tell people skip over them go through the multiple choice as you go through the multiple choice you'll start to pick things out you start to remember things that are in the questions and some of the things in the multiple choice based questions might remind you of topics that will help you for the Performance Based questions at the beginning which you will go back to once you have finished all the multiple choice so there are strategies you can use here that might help you in the exam that's just one of the many that can help you but that's a great way to step through and it's certainly going to be more than multiple choice you will have many different types of questions that you will have to go through fortunately not a lot of them so that's that's the good part I guess is you won't run into a ton of them and being able to work through them other questions let's keep uh keep going through this list if you do have a question by the way I'm taking questions from the chat room you can simply type it into the YouTube chat or the chat that's on professormesser.com live and I will see them pop up as we go through I'll try to get through as many of them um this is this is not an unusual question either uh this is uh this is a welcome to the family question Eli asks I've been struggling a lot with the Linux command line specifically the vi editor or even perhaps even using Vim on the latest versions of Linux I just cannot figure out how to maneuver through the documents without destroying them um and as I mentioned Eli welcome to the family welcome to the club of people that use VI we love it and we hate it at the same time it is a fantastic editor it is powerful it works extremely well and it's ubiquitous it's on practically every Linux distribution you will ever run into and it's one of the hardest editors to use uh really not used but hard is one of the hardest editors to learn there's a bit of a learning curve with VI and the real secret of the vi I'll give you my quick secret and you can take this back and start working on it if you don't know what's happening on your screen you haven't figured it out hit the escape button at least twice and you'll be okay everything in in VI deals with uh these these commands that you would type in and you have to know the commands you have to know that colon W writes colon Q quits it's not intuitive it's not obvious and if you type certain buttons in the wrong way it will delete everything on your screen sort of suddenly lines will go missing suddenly paragraphs will disappear suddenly pages will go blank and it's very easy to do in VI the real key is knowing how to work VI so that it does not cause these problems and you'll have to get comfortable with the process of putting the commands in and when you do that and if you're in insert mode you can't put commands in and if you put commands in you better not be in insert mode there's there's a lot going on there so I would highly recommend hitting that escape button a couple times then putting your colon commands in and you're in much better shape when that happens that's that number one thing hitting that escape a couple times will save you very often um and it they've got great help there's some great videos on VI there's great tools to learn it it is a powerful utility it is extremely useful and as I mentioned because it's in Linux everywhere you can rely that it's it's going to be there either VI or Vim is going going to be something that's in your distribution which makes it very easy to find an Editor to work with and I look forward to your cards and letters telling me about which editors are better which ones you I should be using instead of them and I will tell you right now you're wrong them really is the best editor no use emacs and said no it's not you can you can tell me it's easier and it certainly looks easier and it certainly appears that it could be easier but anybody who uses VI is already so invested into the learning process with VI that we simply cannot bring it to ourselves to admit that anything else would be better so there you go it's it may be or may not be that VI is better but it doesn't matter because I've spent so much time on it I refuse to consider anything else I think that's the I think that's the same way to look at anything really isn't it that's and that describes politics in the modern world there you go uh that that is the situation but but in Linux if we're talking about Linux certainly we're having a fight I can't for the life of me I can't find any other reason you would run Linux unless you were willing to fight with people that seems to be the reason you would install it you can tell me if I'm wrong or not uh other questions let's keep going through this list I just I just I just put those out there I I Troll and we we just see if I'm able to get anything on the hook that's all that is uh we'll see next time if I got any great messages on it and we'll share those with you uh other questions let's keep going um the next on our list um I need to scroll scroll scroll back to be able to find these um other ones that we may be working through so uh this this is a good one because it's it's a challenge to get experience in our industry and of course when you're trying to get your first job in it you run into that that Catch-22 situation where everyone wants you to have experience but you can't have experience unless you have the job but the job they won't hire you for the job because you don't have experience so there's your problem there's the the universal problem you run into with this a question from the chat room in x86 asks do self-study or internships count towards your required experience are the skills involved Rel are is the skills involved are relevant to what they're asking in a job position what about private schools other than College uh so I said if if this if the skills involved are relevant to what they're asking for in a job position what about private schools so here's the problem with that Catch-22 is that how do you get some practical experience without getting a job somewhere well there is kind of a middle ground uh in the YouTube video description of this video there is a link to my video on how to get a job in it with no experience it's a 30 minute video which I realize that's a that's a long video in the world of YouTube but as you probably know my videos are tight they they keep information packed in there so this is 30 minutes of a really packed full of of information kind of video one of the things I mentioned in that video is employers would like you to have a formal education they would like you to have some some uh some industry certifications they would love it if you had uh they know somebody who works there or you were familiar with employees who were already part of that organization and the fourth one is you have some practice experience now I'm sure most employer employers would like you to have professional experience which means that you have experience that someone paid you for but if this is your first job you don't have that professional experience yet but you could get practical experience I gave you some examples earlier about installing Windows server with active directory I gave you another example of a home lab that you could set up with pfSense and being able to use different firewalls or any open source firewall it doesn't have to be PF sense use anything you'd like and we came up with some others in our last study group different types of Home Labs I mentioned taking a USB drive doing a quick format and then recovering the data on that USB drive how would you do that what software would you use you know put some data put a bunch of data on a USB drive do a quick format of the USB drive and then try to recover the data did it work did it not work did you try different methods for Recovery different applications which ones work better that's a great conversation to have for an internship for a for a job that you're going on an interview for and it's it's a home lab and something you can do in an afternoon it you can take an hour to do that one and if you even extend out let's try different programs to see what they do uh let's load up Linux and load up uh a copy of a software in Cali maybe we'll run the Kali distribution and it's got tons of tools in there for recovering files maybe we run autopsy which is a very complex yet powerful utility for storing images and looking through that image for user data so that was another example I gave on the study group a couple days ago is I bought some drives off of eBay that had been formatted or actually they didn't even mention if they had been formatted or not I just bought the ones where they didn't even mention them being cleared out and they sent me drives and the drives had data on them and so I loaded up autopsy and I went through the data and I found emails I found bookmarks I found browsing history one of the drives was from a apparently from a point of sale terminal a cash register there was registered transactions inside of it what a great story to tell if you're sitting down for a security job and you could say have you ever sold have you what happens to your hard drives once they leave the building because here's what happened to me here's what I bought on eBay and you'll never believe what I found there you go there we just put in a click bait right there you won't believe what happens next and you can take them through the story in fact it'd be great if while you were in the room you prepared for this right you have with you some documents you printed out yes on paper I guess you could show it on a tablet that here's what was on the drive here are the types of things and maybe you you made sure you got rid of information that would be sensitive data but you showed them look look at these transactions that was freely available on drives that I bought from eBay and all they had to do and you can explain here's what they should have done to protect these drives if they wanted to use them again and you could talk about the differences between uh simply the formatting or deleting a file versus secure deleting or completely formatting a drive and what the differences might be there you go there's another way so when you're walking into these internships when you're walking into these opportunities for a security job or a system administrator bring to the table something interesting to talk about and it's even better if that thing you're talking about ties directly back to the tasks that would be expected of you for that particular job I think those are those are things you can do in an afternoon and that would be a powerful investment when you start walking in this room nobody else is going to have that story they're not even going to come close okay uh other questions on here uh other types of things that would go through let me clear out this and we'll just keep scroll scroll scrolling through our list um this is this is probably let me find one that some folks are are putting into the list for those of you wondering I'm looking at the list of questions coming through from our YouTube chat that's what I'm sort of scrolling through to figure out the details with it we'll certainly find out the ones that are there um other questions that have come in so this is a pretty good one and and I'm going to try to since we're sort of our our task today has been about minimizing anxiety uh let's talk about braiders who says what is the pass Mark for the exam as in how many questions will I need to get correct to actually pass I find this certainly helps with levels of anxiety and it should help with levels of anxiety but I'm about to show you how it won't thought to show you how you can take that one right off the table if you're hoping to somehow get more insight into the grading process I'm going to show you how you never will so we're going to go back to a slide that I bring up first in the study group over an hour ago and it's about the exam so this is the part I want to look at it's the exam requirements 90 minutes once the exam starts let's say we're taking the 220 1102 and so you would have to get a 700 that's the score but it's on a scale from 100 to 900. so is it 800 points so does that mean I need to make 600 out of 800 or how does that work and some questions are going to be uh partial credit and some are not maybe we don't know and there's no way to tell and there's no way to know afterwards either and on top of that each question is worth a different number of points so therefore you can't calculate how many questions must be correct in order to pass this exam because you think you'd be able to at the end you can count through a hundred I know a hundred percent that I got these questions right that means of these 75 questions I got on my exam or 90 questions or whatever they gave me I think I have enough to pass but you don't know there's no way to know because each question's worth a different number of points what if the questions you know you got right were the ones worth the least that means that you'd need more points to pass if you answered another different set of questions correctly that were worth more points you would pass so that's your problem at the end of the exam you can go and log into your CompTIA account and you can look at the results from your exam these exam results will tell you which sections you got questions wrong so it might tell you let's bring this up in fact I'm going to bring up a set of the exam objectives because I have these right here so um here's a good example this is from that's not it there's a good example from this is the 1102 exam objectives so section two security section 2.1 summarize various security measures and their purposes so for physical security you need to know about access control vestibules badge readers video surveillance alarm systems motion sensors door locks etc etc look at how many bullets there are just in this one single topic in fact if you go to my course there are probably one two three four five four or five different videos just from that one section and you have to know everything in this section at least for your exam now what if you got a question on email and then let's let's let's uh let's highlight with our with our highlighter here so let's say you got a question on email you got a domain question on your exam you got a question um about door locks let's say you got three questions on your exam and when you uh the question you got a question about door locks question about emailing a question about domains when you look at the results of your exam it says you may have gotten one or more questions wrong from section 2.1 summarize various security measures and their purposes okay but there were three questions which one did I get wrong I don't know they weren't they aren't going to tell you you never see the questions again you never see the answers again once you submit the exam it's gone forever you will never see it all you know is that you remember you sort of remember there were three questions from this section and you got at least one of them wrong but you don't know which one that was so this is the situation where uh you you really don't know how many questions to get right and at the end of the exam you don't know if you got them right or not so what I will tell you from and speaking and I mentioned there's a link here to anxiety is that when you start getting into trying to duplicate the grading process or trying to understand more about the grading process or trying to find a strategy that works with the grading process is a big waste of your time and it adds more anxiety to the entire process because you will never know the grading process they used you will never know how many points a question is worth you will never know if you got a particular question right or wrong you think you know but you'll never know for sure so I will tell you don't spend your time trying to reverse engineer the grading process in the hopes that it's going to provide you with some type of strategic Advantage because ultimately there's no way to do it and if you do come up with some type of formula in your mind it may not be accurate it may be the wrong formula it may not be may not be good at all to follow that particular path so uh the way that I say you should approach this is you release it into the universe you let it go you don't let it have anything to do with the exam process ultimately if you know your content you know the material you know the bullets from the exam objectives you've done your studying the score on the exam is going to take care of itself and it's going to be whatever it is and by the way if you pass your exam here's what happens or if you even better if you fail your exam here's what happens nothing happens just failed it that was it we have all failed industry certification exams before I have failed one exam multiple times until I finally got it right this happens all the time and if you fail your exam what you do is you study a little bit more you buy another voucher and you go take your exam again and you just keep taking it until you pass it so there's no penalty for failing if anything there's an advantage for failing because now you've been through the process now you've seen the some of the questions you have more of a feel for the style of the exam you understand more about the testing center you're in or at home you understand more about the software that's used during the exam there's actually advantages now you've actually learned something during the exam process and the second time you take the exam a lot of the stuff you worried about before now it's not a worry now you know what to expect you walk in the room we're not we're not even sitting through the first 15 minutes of the candidate agreement we're starting let's go and now you step through it so it can only be helpful for you to take these exams what you don't want to do is have that fear of the unknown or if the fear of failure because there is no there's no nothing bad about failing these exams it's it's something that you have to work through whenever that failure comes up but you really only fail if you stop if you are still studying and you're just going to take it again well buy another voucher go take the exam again that's what you should be doing and that's not failure that's a win because you're going to earn your certification it's a pass fail score so that's what I would recommend too don't worry about the exam process don't worry about the grading process don't even try to put your head in that space I'm going to figure out how they do the grading and we're going to figure out the net don't do it just don't even bother because you'll never be able to know for sure uh the real key is sit down know your stuff sit down in the exam and just crush it and if you don't pass the first time go back reset go do it again in fact the exam results you get should be some pretty good Intel because it will tell you which sections you got a question wrong in and you may find there are certain sections or certain domains you can study up more than the others so it may allow you to readjust what sections you may have realized wow I got a lot wrong in security I thought I knew security really well but that was the section I missed the most on let's go back and study harder on that section and we'll pass it the next time through so there's some there's always a silver lining to this and that's the Silver Lining to to failing an exam is that now you've got Intel you can use to go back and crush it next time uh other questions um this is from Dennis who asks do I have a library of it books um I don't have any physical I.T books anymore I used to keep quite a library of it books you know back before back before they had the internet we have books that's how we we didn't have a Google to go to we did not have any online electronic resource that we could ask any question to and it would find the answer for us or at least something that would approach the answer we had to buy books and keep those books on the Shelf so that if something happened in Windows we could pull that book down and say what are they talking about active directory what let me go okay I have to find that section oh here it is and it talks about okay we need to replicate It's gotta okay I'll find the Forest we got it okay and we put the book back on the shelf and we we go through the steps um these days of course there are certainly some fantastic it books out there and uh if you are trying to focus on a particular Niche they can be very very valuable one of the best books I ever got was one on DNS from O'Reilly and I don't remember which animal it was on the front and I bet I still have that book around here somewhere because there's there's like two or three books I refuse to ever get rid of and that was one of them and it was so good because it was this enormous thick book and I thought DNS how hard can DNS be this is this is what people say when they get into the industry well how hard can that be and then you start reading the book on DNS and you realize oh everything uses this the entire world would stop if DNS disappeared and if and as we say online uh if there's ever a problem if you walk in on a Monday and something isn't working if you are called in in the middle of the night because something is broken it's DNS is it is it Dina's yes it's DNS I really don't think that it's it's DNS it's totally DNA but that's sort of a and it sort of said jokingly that it's DNS but it's remarkable how often it's DNS because there's so many moving Parts under the surface so if I had to I bet I've got that Library I've got that book around here somewhere in my life I wouldn't really call it a library it's stuck in a box somewhere and I never pull it out anymore because obviously there are electronic versions of these books available at your local library online and in other places in fact you should really check your local library to see if they have subscriptions to some of these Services you may find they already have a subscription to O'Reilly and you can pull down every book they've got and read about HTTP and read about SQL server and read about Windows and read about DNS and they're all there so some great stuff there obviously there's tons of great resources on the YouTube and now with videos and video training I'm obviously a big proponent of that but it has to be tempered with the right amount of study materials from other places as well there's some great stuff out there and I think that's that's uh that's my library now is the internet I think it's probably the that way from most people is it's it's now the internet is our library um don't really keep much books around at that point anyway I do have some what books do I have on my on my tablet let's let's see what I've collected Through The Years shall we I'm going to bring up my iBooks I'm not going to show you my iBooks but I'll tell you what's in here so in my iBooks um if I spell it right I guess it's just called books isn't it they don't call it iBooks anymore so in my books um I've got a number of ones here uh first the first one that comes up is a book on bitcoin you can tell I was doing some uh some cryptography work uh creating some new materials so there was one that's technology uh what other books do I have in here that are technical books um is that the only technical book I have right now I cleaned it out recently for a trip I don't think I have any other technical books I wonder what's in the cloud where's my cloud um cloud cloud cloud uh Cloud all so here's some others that I have here so interestingly enough I have a professor Master Security Plus course notes I always test my materials on my tablet so my stuff's on here that's easy um I've got of course I've got exam objectives on here I have a book on let me keep going I have a book on CCNA iOS commands I don't think I've touched it since I downloaded it but there it is um I'm always looking for something interesting in that that way uh I've got a book on I've got some 800 series A Plus books from what 10 years ago something like that this is how long it's been since I've been in my library uh I do have uh some Cisco certification materials because I was doing some Cisco search not training search I was getting a Cisco cert uh that was back in the days when I needed to get a Cisco cert to do something else and obviously I don't need a Cisco 30 anymore that was there and a couple of books on um there were some programming books I was looking at earlier because I was thinking about what would it take to create an app that would do this this is one of those things you're in the shower and you're thinking I got a great idea for an app let's see what it would take to write this app and then I read the books and I realized there's a lot that goes into writing an app and perhaps I won't be doing that right now but I have a list of apps if anybody wants to no I'm not even gonna do that I'm not even going to get into the world of app creation uh let's concentrate on creating content for a plus Network plus and Security Plus right now and I think we're going to be okay uh let's keep going uh with others there obviously that's kind of a sad little bookshelf you can tell how much I read uh most of the time I'm creating content so I don't have a lot of time to watch television I don't have a lot of time to read books uh somebody asked me what's the last book I read I don't know that I'd have an answer for them because I can't remember what the last book I read happened to be a long time um it's interesting because I uh I was just I just saw that Apple has released a new series called silo and it's based on a book that I read 15 years ago I think the book was called wool it was a incredibly popular self-published book which was another reason I was so interested in it uh being someone who self-publishes and um fantastic book fantastic series of books um and if and I and I uh I was telling Mrs Professor Messer oh yeah I I read that book and she looked at me like I was crazy like you did what you read a book like back in the day when I used to fly on a plane and get on a car and just travel all the time and spend the night in hotels I did used to have books that I would read on my mobile phone and on my tablets so uh that was like the last time I read a book was 15 years ago um isn't that bad I I don't think getting a book on active directory or reading through a book on security or reading on a a book on ipsec or reading a book on DNS I don't think that counts as reading a book I know it is but I don't to me reading a book is something that is you do in your leisure time when you're at the beach kind of thing you're on vacation just sit back and read a book um I just haven't done that in a while so there you go that's a completely pointless task of me going through my books to see what's in there and it turns out not so much uh in there some folks even in the chat room going you don't even watch sports you don't watch apparently there's some sports ball that's currently happening that I'm not involved with uh so no I don't watch any of the sports I like sports I played Sports all the way through school I was on the basketball team um but I I wasn't good so I I was I was the free throw Champion one year but that was it that's that's about as simple as basketball gets stand in one place and shoot I got that we're good oh now we have to move oh screws up everything now I can't we can't play uh I didn't do bad I was pretty good at basketball but not good enough to do anything with it let's let's be clear I know my limitations at some point you can't do it anymore that uh I like that was I a good three-point shooter back when I played basketball you're wearing a three points there you go the old guy really sets the calendar right there yeah three I guess I would have been I like shooting from the outside but there were no lines because we did not have them they did not exist see there at the time there was no internet again just so you're clear uh finally something that we definitely will not fight about Matthew asks do you prefer Windows or Mac OS I like both actually I think Windows 11 is great people complain about it I think it's fine but my my daily driver is Mac OS the thing that I use the most uh if we look at let's give you a view from the bird cam uh in the bird cam you can see there's a system right in front of me uh and the system to my right these are the same machine just two monitors that I have here it's a it's a Mac Studio you can see the Mac Studio right behind my tablet you can see it much better on the bird cam than I can see it because my tablet's in the way um so that's what's driving these two and then I've got a MacBook Pro that's showing you the slides that's all it's doing it's a little bit overkill for MacBook Pro but I've had this sitting around it's like 10 years old and it works great so that's what we use for the slides and then way over here this is uh a piece of Hardware it's a switching unit from Blackmagic it is their uh Blackmagic Studio 4K something like that um and it is I don't even know what it runs inside it's not windows it's probably some Linux or similar kernel so that's what this machine and monitor is doing it's really all the machine is in the switcher itself so it's on all in one unit it's not got not just the button but inside the unit itself is all of the technology and then on the right side is the simple screen that is showing you the output from a streaming Hardware that I have down here it's this Blackmagic streaming Hardware device that's down here at the bottom I don't need to dust in there it's very dusty um and so that's what's showing here I think that's also Linux based but I don't know for sure it's a purpose-built appliance this is a purpose-built appliance not only do I not know what's inside of them I do not care because it's simply performing a single function for me so my daily driver is Mac OS but I have Windows running on other devices and windows VMS that I use especially for my a plus and in fact if you watch my a plus uh my a plus video on active directory that's part of the 1102 that's all done in VMS so it's running on a Mac but it's running Windows 11 on a Mac or Windows server on a Mac um just in a virtual machine and if you're on professormesser.com or use any of the services that surround professormesser.com it's Linux I know you didn't ask specifically about Linux but I think it's valuable for technologists to know the most they can about these three popular operating systems so if you can get your hands on Windows on Mac OS and on Linux you should at least get familiar enough with those operating systems to know where things are and how to get in and troubleshoot those particular systems I'm My Own administrator I'm the system administrator for my website for my database servers for my caching servers for my load balancers for everything I use and I run Linux mostly on those infrastructure devices windows for some of the training systems and I have Windows on an older streaming server that's in the back that I have as a backup and mainly Mac OS as as my daily driver mostly because I could never get Windows to not reboot on its own after installing drivers or updates so I would set my system up I did some video editing I set up six videos to render back in the day this took a long time to render some of these videos so I would tell it to work overnight I go go and I'd walk out of the studio for the night and I'd I'd go to sleep and I'd wake up in the morning and I come into my studio and find that an hour after I walked out windows installed an update and rebooted the system and the render stopped so the entire night was wasted got nothing done and I thought well that's not good Let Me Tell Windows do not install these updates automatically do not reboot the system ever go oh glad that's fixed and then the next time that I did a long render I set it to render overnight I walked out of the studio I walked in the next day and an hour after I'd left it re installed and updated and rebooted the system and I looked I did more studies I did more reviews and said why did Windows reboot and everybody said oh yeah you can tell it not to do that and you could tell it to prevent it from rebooting but it doesn't pay any attention to that it does it anyway and at that point I was done with Windows and I dropped it and I went to Mac OS that's the only reason well it wasn't the only reason but that was the biggest reason uh it turns out it was a pretty good move especially from a security perspective and when I began working with companies in a security role as a security systems engineer they handed us MacBook Pros because they knew that was a more secure environment for somebody on the road to work with these Technologies than running Windows on on a laptop and we can fight about that one too but if uh on a preference if it's a if it's a service or technology that needs Windows I'm running Windows do you have a gaming system of course you do you're running Windows for Mac OS it's my daily drivers what I do everything on everything you see here is built on Mac OS but I make sure it also will run on Windows and works perfectly on Windows as well because we use all of them so it just makes sense um do I plan on making study guides for any vendor-specific certifications Joe asks um I have lots of plans I got I got plenty of plans um I have a huge list of things that I would like to do and some of those in fact most of those are for technologies that are specific to a particular manufacturer so there could be Microsoft and Azure it could be AWS from Amazon it could be Cisco related materials it could be uh Oracle it could be Microsoft SQL Server it could be there could be tons of different ones I'm not locked in or have any exclusivity to any particular technology I can do anything I'd like whenever I'd like um the real challenge of course is physics how many days are in how many hours are in a day how many days in a week how many days how many weeks in that in that year that's the problem is finding the time to do as much as I wish I had the ability to do so I have in my in my list a number of things that I would like to do for additional certifications uh it's everything you would think it would be I guess there's nothing too exciting in there pick all the most popular certifications and other Technologies in the world and that's what I would work on that's what I would use so I think that's that would be that would be pretty useful to have those there um question about um so any Mac OS version I would recommend I don't know um whatever the latest is that's one of the nice things about Technologies and being able to work with them the uh the version yeah we got those got the weird the weird message that pops up on the screen there I gotta work on my on hiding hiding the ones that are there that's not supposed to be there but that's okay we'll be fine you'll work through it any Mac OS version I recommend what am I running here let's find out um on my Mac if we look at my Mac Studio let's have a look at the Mac Studio uh where is it it's right here put me up on the screen so this is my Mac Studio uh it's an M1 Ultra 128 gig of memory I'm running Ventura 13.3.1 a don't know what that means but that's what I'm running so that's the system that is running pretty much everything as my daily driver uh plenty of good stuff there too so if you're someone who is uh usually they do a pretty good job um on the on on Mac OS of keeping everything up to date and bringing them through um I guess I guess the real challenge yeah I just got that security update with the A on the end people in chat room going yep the A's that security thing they put out sure is I I loaded it up pronto and getting it there um and so uh Matthew says oh well Mac OS the updates don't stop after five years like Windows they do not now eventually the hardware that you have will be end of life and there will no longer be updates released for that particular Hardware you won't be able to update it to a new version of an operating system and eventually they will stop security releases for that version but they're pretty good about supporting years into the past so by the time your system is no longer supported you probably would not want to run that system anyway so it works out so no they don't have a an update stopping after five years but it does stop after a certain amount of time I don't know what the end of life policy is for apple everybody's is a little bit different but it might be maybe it is five years maybe I've just not realized it because I get a new computer every three years or so and so I just don't notice when it's there um other questions uh do I recommend test out for a plus I technically have never seen it I've heard about it um test out is a company that makes testing and training materials for uh primarily focused on the K-12 school they have other clients as well but that was their their big claim to fame that's the number that they have is uh is they got a lot of of customers who are in that particular place but I will tell you you can stop calling it test out now uh you can start calling it CompTIA because CompTIA uh in January of this year purchased test out so test out is now CompTIA CompTIA is now test out they are they're now the owner of test out um so that's I don't know what's going to happen with that I did have a meeting with CompTIA just an update meeting recently where they said hey did you see the news what do you think um those types of things the uh but they weren't able at least you know they don't know exactly what the strategy will be quite yet for working with those products we don't know if they're going to switch all of their products over to the test out engines we don't know if they get rid of all the test out stuff and only take the maybe they bought test out just for the the list of customers list customer lists are valuable um but it's now all CompTIA so it's not third party anymore it's all the CompTIA breakdown I think not much has changed at the moment but of course things will change over the coming months uh certainly you can't just buy a company and then not do anything so something will happen uh for those and to make those happen let's talk about the the uh Performance Based question that we had today was about the malware steps and there are a lot of a lot of comments during that Performance Based question about why would you do this and this doesn't make sense and what if you can't get rid of the malware as Dennis poses uh posits here uh considering that performance-based question if we can't remove the malware is it better to format the computer well it may be if you want to have access to this computer again and as I mentioned the best way to deal with malware I mentioned this in my videos too is you delete everything on the computer and you restore it from a known good backup or you reinstall new from trusted installation materials that do not have malware that's what that means somebody's asked me what do you mean by known good I mean backups that don't have an infected malware instance on them um and and that is that's truly the best practice for for not removing malware but it's a best practice for dealing with malware is to Nuke everything and reinstall in fact that's the only way that you can 100 percent guarantee that you remove the malware is you remove everything even in the process of going through that malware removal steps you may think that you removed 100 and if you talk to people that do this and they remove malware in this way by removing it from a system they will always tell you always that they are 100 they got everything on that system or how do you know that are you sure 100 could there be any chance at all that perhaps there's some malicious code still on that system that your removal program didn't know about is there a chance yeah there's a chance okay well if there's a chance we're not going to take it we're nuking the whole thing and we're going to start from scratch that really is the best reason or the best process for removing not really removing malware technically it's removing malware it's for recovering that system back to a workable state but one of the things that I find interesting about this is that um there is this process they have in the company exam objectives for removing malware except most of the people in the industry would tell you that's not what you do you just nuke it re-image and keep moving nuke it re-image and keep moving because you can re-image in a matter of minutes you can delete and re-image the system 30 minutes later this person's back up and running and your system your everybody's efficient again everybody's doing their job so that is for the most part the proper process but as I mentioned there may be times when this system now is not booting properly it's got malware on it but there's some software on there or some data files you must remove you've got to take them off of there it's Mission critical otherwise we've lost a week of work it's a competitive situation we don't have the time you've got to get that file okay well let's step through this process to to try to remove as much as we can so that we can now regain access to the system and be able to remove the data files at which point and I think this is the eighth step that they don't give you is once you've done all of this and you've educated the user you nuke everything and you you recover from a known good backup ultimately that's what most people will do anyway so I would highly recommend doing that I think that's a good way to do it so if you're someone who's working through uh trying to figure it out I think that's that's a pretty important one it's pretty important to to be able to work through this uh other questions uh let's keep going um in here um let's keep going through the other ones that happen to be there I had a question that I saw earlier so I'm just going to scroll up a little bit try to gain access to the chat software that YouTube uses changes constantly and uh it's a real challenge sometimes to flip through and find the things we need to do I need a better way to submit questions I'm just kind of Pop through them but we'll worry about that uh at some other time I'm I'm welcome I'll take your suggestions if you have any of those um other questions that came up I'm going to keep scrolling up there are a number of you that that understand the world of collecting books and not having the internet so solidarity to to the other old folks out there congratulations um there is something about physical books though um Alex mentions this uh in the chat says I just don't like reading books online and I get that reading books on a tablet or reading books on your phone or reading books on a screen is different than having a physical book in your hands it was one of the reasons that you know when I first introduced my practice exams and my course notes as I've I release them as digital products and said well here's because no who's going to buy a physical book who's going to want to hold a physical book um and I I mentioned this to Mrs Professor Messer and I said well I've got these course notes that are digital and somebody asked me today if I had a physical version of that can you believe a physical book haha and she goes no that'd be great because I she likes physical books she likes the feel and the flipping through and drawing on that and touching and there's something tactile about studying there's something that it fires a different synapse for her if it's this physical thing you can touch and I I had not thought about it that way and so I said well okay well I'll I'll just put the option out there you know it costs more money to print there's you know resources but I live in a part of the world where we grow trees just for this like there's an enormous industry around paper and it's a renewable resource we're not going to run out of paper because we can always grow trees and we can do it very well so I thought well I'll just create the option of getting physical books and it turns out a lot of people agree that they would prefer the physical book over the digital I think that's reasonable so that's one that uh that I thought was a an idea I had not thought of but as many people will tell you when you're kind of figuring it out when you're running a business and you're trying to figure out what do people need you don't always know kind of have to ask others what what do you think about this and sometimes there's those things you just miss and somebody has to explain to you no you dummy you need a physical book what's wrong with you get a physical bug for the people like the physical books oh you're right I was gonna it was kind of myopic there so we'll figure that out and work through them um Dennis has found the DNS book that I that I use DNS and bind is the book that I used and if you're somebody it's a good book if you were in charge of the DNS server if you just want an overview of DNS it's way Overkill it's super Overkill but if you want to know everything there is to know about managing a DNS server it is excruciatingly complete uh and doing all of that and it's a it's a great resource also um I like that book has some good stuff in it so thank you for finding it I think that's that's a good one to have there uh we're coming up on I'm way over time on this so let's uh let's do two things here there's a couple questions that I saw come in this first one's pretty good from computer learner which we all are asks how long should it take to prepare for both the 1101 and I think you mean 1102 exams so those are the two most recent most current a plus exams so the 1101 and 1102 I find that the average for these exams for this would be for most people uh is somewhere around two to three months is the average it takes to prepare for each of those so if you were taking both it would be somewhere around four to six months of study now that is an average it's a very broad representation of everyone because people that come in to take these exams some people have been in this industry a long time and they might be able to read through the 1101 exam objectives they already familiar with these Technologies they've been using these Technologies a long time and so they'll find the places where they need a little more help they read through those chapters two weeks later they take the exam and they pass two weeks for one of those a plus exams that is uh for someone who's in the industry that's not crazy that's a that's a relatively good starting point for somebody who's very familiar but if you ask me how long it took me to take my first aid plus exam and then my second a plus exam and how long did it take I think it took about six months for me to get both of those done because I've got another job I'm doing during the day I come home at night there's tasks for me to do let's get the kids to bed let's get the dogs fed let's finally sit down for an hour and that's all I've got got an hour or two maybe that I can focus on these materials read read read study study study study lab Lab question question and we just do the same thing tomorrow so instead of me sitting down for an entire eight hour session during a day and reading through I get one hour okay it's going to take me eight times as long than someone who's got eight hours in a day so there's your problem it's more of a Time motion study than anything that's why it takes me so long to get through this material because when I take one of these certification exams I'm most comfortable when I really understand it I don't mean like have a basic memorization of port numbers I want to know how do those port numbers work what do they look like on the network where do I configure them in the software how can I change a port number if I want to what if I try to attach to a service and the port number is different how would I find the port number if it was different you know that's that's a lot in my head going around when all it really needs me to know is that SSH is 22. so that's that I really got to know about SSH well can I start my own SSH where how does it work what does it look like what do the packets look like let's do a packet capture how do I protect it how do I set it up for authentication how can I set it up for certificate based authentication rather than password-based authentication now I'm way out of scope they're never going to ask me about that on the exam they just want to know if SSH is 22 and what it does but sometimes I go a little bit deeper than I need to go because it helps me know more about the technology so that's why if you're in that same boat and you're trying to prepare for these exams you can stick to the exam objectives you can get through these each exam in approximately two to three months sometimes longer if you don't have the time but that should be a pretty good guideline for most of us I think uh anyone who does get it one of those exams done in two weeks they're able to get through the entire two courses in a month that's an unusual and and I'd say relatively aggressive schedule I think it's more important if you're able to know the material get into all of this understand what they're trying to have you do and then go take the exam sometimes that's a month sometimes it's six it just depends on how you how you study when you study and how much of this that you walk in the door already knowing before you start your studies I think it's important too um other questions um let's see what's here um and this may be a a good one um let's see I saw one that's there and I need to scroll thank you uh YouTube chat for doing this to me um let's keep going and this is this is good by the way um I need to if you ever see this I want a picture of it uh Dennis says I saw a man reading your Security Plus book at the airport I I'd love to see a picture of this I've had people tell me before oh I've been reading your stuff forever and they talk about someone else's products I'm like well maybe you weren't reading my stuff forever maybe you're reading that person's stuff forever um it's it sometimes happens uh the uh the pi what about the pine people want to know about the pine trees now and the um I live in a part of Florida where the couple of counties over there is an annual Pine Tree Festival we do a lot of festivals in this country we love our festivals and usually our local cities uh where I grew up we had a Watermelon Festival the next County over was Pine Tree Festival the county north of us was a Rose Festival so in my part of the world I grew up in a very agricultural area uh non-technical area and um this happens all the time so I I do know a little bit about the pine tree industry just because there are so many families and people I know in this area who are connected to the logging and uh pine tree um the Pine Tree Business the whole thing some of it's about driving trucks some of it's about cutting the trees some of it's about working at the the well in the logging equipment maybe it's uh at the plants uh maybe it's distribution uh or maybe it's just under Mifflin and they're just selling the paper it's one of those situations where something it's a whole circle there and it all happens out here in the woods quite literally to get the paper to you and that's that's one of those and I have family members who have plots of land growing trees on it and they you know grow the trees for seven to ten years cut it down at seven to ten years and then grow them again it's just a cycle they do over and over and over again um and and relatively profitable so maybe maybe that's what we should focus on our next study group is all about agriculture no more computers well they actually as with everything else they have an I.T Department there's lots of technology behind the world of growing pine trees so it doesn't matter you're going to hit I.T anywhere you go um there's always something in the technology world that you're going to find regardless of what the business is uh other questions I think we maybe we can get um another one um there there's a few I will mention and some people are using this um as well uh and somebody made a mention about it in one of the the things I saw go by but our Discord the professor Master Discord we have study uh events going on there all the time they're not scheduled study events most of the time I'm not even involved in them it's all of you getting together into a chat room or into a voice room or into a video room and studying the material whether it's watching the videos together and commenting and trying to parse out some of the things I'm telling you sometimes people going over questions they have sometimes just talking about the exam objectives so if you're interested in that you should definitely be part of our Discord you can pop in there practically any time of the day and there is a room open with people talking if there isn't I have built into my Discord this Dynamic room creation process where all you have to do is click on the very first audio room which says click here for your own audio room and it pops you out into your own managed room that you control so you can decide who's let in you can decide if somebody needs to be kicked out you can decide to open it up to the world and then you can allow people to present to talk to discuss it is a great opportunity to talk to other people who are studying the same thing as you and if you run across questions or things about the technology you want some more clarification there are a number of people out there on our Discord that have already gone through these classes they've already got their certification and they're already working in the field so they may have additional insights in some of these that either I just don't have time to put into my video course or it's one that they can actually speak from a position of oh I do this every day and here's what we do with it so that's my sound of my final recommendation to you you today is if you want even more and you need something to kind of add a little accent to the studies that you're doing today and perhaps even speed the process a little bit for you there's a lot of like-minded folks there you can find it all at professormesser.com Discord well I think that's a great place to kind of stop for today I want to thank everyone for being here in the first hour where I got to ask you questions from the exam we do that again next month so make sure you check the calendar professormesser.com calendar if you ever want to know when the next live event is going to be if you like this video I want to recommend again that you give us a thumbs up thank you so much also for doing that we really do appreciate it and thank you for all your support throughout the month we could not do this without you thank you for the messages you send thanks uh for the things you say in Discord and that's where we will be once we're done here is over on Discord we'd love for you to join us at professormesser.com Discord thanks everybody and we will see you next time on the a plus study group

Channel: Professor Messer

Views: 13,871

Keywords: professor messer, study group, A+, comptia, information technology, certification

Id: zHq3YQPMbaY

Length: 176min 39sec (10599 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023