Friday 20 January 2012

Just passed the TOGAF 9 Certified Exam (Level 1 and 2) with 90% pass mark!

Just passed the TOGAF 9 Level 1 and 2 Combined exam with a pass mark of 90/100. Part 2 was particularly difficult as expected and really tests your knowledge well. In particular, it tested my knowledge of the different architecture viewpoints that are tailored to match stakeholder concerns.

I won't give too much away (lest I violate the non-disclosure agreement) - but the official Study Guide for Part 2  (https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/jsp/publications/PublicationDetails.jsp?catalogno=b096) absolutely has to be known back-to-front to be able to answer the Part 2 questions. It contains content that isn't obvious from the publicly-available TOGAF 9.1 document (http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/)
I was a bit worried going into the exam as I had just discovered one of my colleagues failed the TOGAF 8 bridging exam. Luckily I survived the gauntlet (with several late nights of study) and made it through.

DDK

Tuesday 10 January 2012

SonicWall VPN - "The peer does not allow saving of username and password" - How to Automatically Log in without entering username and pass every time

There is a server-side flag in the SonicWall Firewall Administration Tool which prevents you from saving your username and password. By default this is on - and if you go to the settings for your VPN connection, you cannot put them in. The text boxes are disabled, and you are shown the following message:

The peer does not allow saving of username and password

If your connection is poor, you will have to enter your username and password in several times a day - and this can be very frustrating. To work around this, you can use the following commandline for your SonicWall Global VPN Client if you don't want to enter the username and password every time you log into your VPN:

"C:\Program Files\SonicWALL\SonicWALL Global VPN Client\SWGVC.exe"/e "VPNName" /u "username" /p "password"

WARNING:
note that if you save this to a batch file, it will not be encrypted - and so your system is inherently less secure if your machine gets stolen. Naturally, that's the main reason the "save username and password" functionality is disabled by default for all users.

DDK