Last week I got back on the horse and started studying again to get myself ready for another attempt at the CCIE voice lab. I had a pretty poor session (by my standards), and resolved to get on with it. So this weekend I fired up all the phones, routers and virtual machines and started on an area of weakness – CME features and functions. IPExpert have a nice lab on this which is all CME - yes three CME – highly unlikely for the real lab – but it does enforce those CME principals.
Well as I’ve mention before, I’m no fan of IPExperts DRM and for the workbooks have printed them into OneNote and make my notes etc in there. However, I haven’t done that with the proctor guides – as I have the PDFs and am likely to be online – and it seems that I can no longer do the OneNote shuffle (I tried a while back and it said OneNote was not a valid printer). So I got to a certain question and was having trouble with it (rustiness), so I went to the proctor guide, got asked for my login and password by that annoying FileOpen plugin which it accepted, and I got a book full of blank pages. Initially I blamed Adobe, as I had recently updated Acrobat Reader to version X, so I tried on my Adobe Reader version 9 laptop – same thing. So now I was frustrated by the question and frustrated by not being able to look up the answer and had wasted much valuable study time.
I have logged a support ticket, but its the weekend and there is no support on weekends. It really annoys me as I promote IPExpert as a great training provider and then this. I’ve paid for the material, and for their bootcamp, and yet I can’t access what I own. I’m not likely to give away what I paid for, and I don’t object to watermarked PDFs (which they are) – so lets get rid of the DRM it just causes me to tell people not to buy the product.
PS. I did eventually work out the answer, I was just misreading the requirement, and eventually I got past the issue. Lesson there – just because you think it might violate the question, doesn't mean you shouldn’t try it!
Update: IPExpert support got back to me and suggested that I re-download the PDFs to update the encryption. Yesterday when I tried to re-download all I got were "404 file not found". Today they download fine and I can read them again. Thanks IPExpert for your responsiveness - but I still hate your DRM.