Why I hate IPExpert’s DRM for their workbooks

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.

Now What ?

So it’s been nearly 30 days since my first CCIE voice lab attempt and I’m soon able to take a re-sit. So where am I and what have I been doing ?

Well contrary to popular wisdom of throwing back into the books and finding where I went wrong, over analysing my mistakes and generally fretting about a re-sit, I had a holiday! And thus we go slightly off-topic. I played golf (well hit a golf ball around most of a golf course) for the first time in 20 years, thanks to my two best friends in the world – nothing better for dismissing a score report, which turned up as I was entering the first tee (as I knew what it said – I wasn’t going to let it spoil my day – although three days later when I had a look it did read better than I had expected!), than creaming a little white ball 200 yards down the middle of the fairway (I like to think that’s what I did – the reality was more 50 yards and very left or right!). I (with family of course) went to Port Douglas in Far North Queensland where I swam with turtles here.

We also got to see some really live and wild crocodiles too! He’s 3 metres in length and eating a mud crab claw!

The rest of the holiday was a celebration for my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary and my Dad’s 60th birthday – so much merriment occurred.

I also did do some study – it' just eats at you when you know there were things in the exam that you should have known and didn’t, so I now understand how to configure some of the things I didn’t expect to see (see I broke rule number 1 – expect everything to be there!), and I already feel that I have filled in some of those tiny cracks that will better prepare me for next time.

I have been struggling with flu-like symptoms since I’ve returned so I haven’t touch a router or phone in anger since the exam. I’m now looking at dates in June for Brussels – there seem to be plenty towards the back half of the month. I will have that booked shortly and we’ll go again, after all very few people pass first time do they!

Hand crafted AXL scripts and HTTP/1.x

In my current day-job, I sometimes create hand crafted pieces of AXL scripting for some of the trickier reporting aspects of auditing of provisioning process. These AXL scripts will most probably these days be crafted in Java, as I like the eclipse development environment which makes it very easy to debug these scripts (I’m not a professional developer – just someone who went to university and was taught how to write code in many languages). Just before I went away for my month to Australia and the CCIE Voice Lab, I had some reports that my script wasn’t working. Often these are just minor issues like a user not having AXL privileges or the input file format not being quite right, but this one was different – the script worked fine on our CUCM 6.1.3 and CUCM 7.1.5 servers, but not on our newly upgrade 6.1.5 servers.

So after that month off, I came back to reports that it still wasn’t working and could I investigate. So I fired up eclipse and dived right back into debugging mode. The response I was receiving from CUCM was “HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request” – this I was not receiving from the other servers (i.e the none 6.1.5 clusters). I could not work out what was going wrong – I tried forcing the authentication to fail – still the 400 errror. I compared to other pieces of had-crafted AXL that we have, and they looked the same as mine. In the end I was on the point of giving up when I noticed in an example on Cisco’s developer site that one code snippet had the following:
        POST /axl/ HTTP/1.1
whereas my code had:
   POST /axl/

So I hunted through CUCM release notes for any mention of this change – no luck. I checked the tomcat release notes (having noted that the tomcat version changes between 6.1.3 and 6.1.5) and still no luck  - although there were a lot of changes related to POST processing. Checking the original http RFC-1945 states that “

The version of an HTTP message is indicated by an HTTP-Version field in the first line of the message. If the protocol version is not specified, the recipient must assume that the message is in the simple HTTP/0.9 format.”

However it seems that the tomcat within CUCM does not any longer adhere to that (although I can’t find this documented) and follows the HTTP/1.1 RFC-2616 section 5.1 which explicitly states that a request must have the HTTP-Version.

So I changed my code to contain the HTTP version and like magic it worked again. If only I used less hand-crafted scripts this would never have been an issue!

Not this time

So here I sit in Sydney airport (in a bar with a beer), reflecting on what happened today, and the headline is that I know already, before the proctor looks at my lab, that it’ll be take two in Brussels in the next couple of months. How do I know ? Well as can happen, I hit an issue – mgcp was it’s name and a reload of the router was the solution – I knew my configuration was good – but I didn’t think to try that until it was much much too late. I’m sure there are plenty out there who can relate.

Now how to describe the experience within the bounds of the NDA. Sydney is a relaxed lab with a great view out of the lunch window (or the lab window if you are not doing voice). The proctor is from Russia – and is very pleasant. There was one other candidate today – doing Service Provider (the last time that version of the lab will be sat!) – he was from Taiwan having his second attempt. 8am start is more of a guideline than a fixed time. I’d be there at 8, but not be concerned if you don’t start exactly on the clock.

Why so confident that I didn’t make the grade – well after I hit my snag, it sapped time and energy for the other sections as I knew I’d not have enough to make it, and there were a few other bits and bobs that had me stumped.

Was it a fair test – hell yes. Should I have passed –maybe – it was the kind of exam I had hoped for, and on initial inspection thought I had a good chance. I now understand the mentality needed to pass and I don’t think I’m far away (although the score report will say otherwise – I know where the problems were and more importantly how to fix them)

I have already debriefed myself into my ever growing list of notes on how to pass the CCIE – that was over a Tea in Starbucks – after a beer round the corner from the exam centre.

Time now to enjoy my holiday. Not worry about CCIE things for 3 weeks, then look to book another attempt when I get back to the UK.

Thanks for all the messages of support, they are greatly appreciated. I’ll do better in Brussels. I am not beaten and I don’t believe in #fail !