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CompTIA Server+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide
Complete coverage of every objective for the CompTIA Server+ exam
Take the CompTIA Server+ exam with confidence using this highly effective self-study guide. CompTIA Server+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide (Exam SK0-004) offers complete coverage of every topic on the latest version of the exam. You will get in-depth explanations of the latest server types and components, virtualization, IPv4 and IPv6 networking, cloud computing, security, troubleshooting, and more. The book and electronic content provide 350+ accurate practice questions along with in-depth answers, explanations, learning objectives, and exam tips.
Coverage
- General concepts
- CompTIA Server+ essentials
- Server hardware
- Server operating systems
- Storage
- Network concepts
- Security
- Troubleshooting
- Performance optimization
Electronic content
- Practice exam questions
Take the CompTIA Server+ exam with confidence using this highly effective self-study guide. CompTIA Server+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide (Exam SK0-004) offers complete coverage of every topic on the latest version of the exam. You will get in-depth explanations of the latest server types and components, virtualization, IPv4 and IPv6 networking, cloud computing, security, troubleshooting, and more. The book and electronic content provide 350+ accurate practice questions along with in-depth answers, explanations, learning objectives, and exam tips.
Coverage
- General concepts
- CompTIA Server+ essentials
- Server hardware
- Server operating systems
- Storage
- Network concepts
- Security
- Troubleshooting
- Performance optimization
Electronic content
- Practice exam questions
449 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 23, 2016
54 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 12, 2020
I used this as my primary resource to prepare for the exam (along with my previous experience), and I passed on my first attempt. So, it got the job done, and I plugged a few gaps in my knowledge. It comes with a practice test, which was a nice confidence booster, although I found the real exam a bit more challenging. The author has also made an effort to throw in a few jokes; whether he succeeded is a matter of opinion, but at least he stops the material from being too dry. However, there are some mistakes, and I would have liked to see more detail in some areas.
In the networking chapter, I was glad to see a description of IPv4 that went straight into CIDR notation without even mentioning class A/B/C addresses. (I've been annoyed by several other books that start with outdated concepts and then throw in CIDR as an afterthought.) The author also has a decent grasp of IPv6. However, I would have preferred to see the 5 layer TCP/IP model rather than the 7 layer OSI model. (The TCP/IP model is mentioned in the glossary but not actually explained in the main text.) Also, the book mentions that switches can be connected to each other using Ethernet cables (fibre-optic or copper), but it doesn't mention stacking switches together into one logical unit.
The networking chapter also recommends that you should "specify at least two default gateways for remote network connectivity in case one router becomes unavailable". I've never seen that done anywhere; it's far better to create a VIP address for your routers, then use that shared address as the single default gateway on all the other devices (clients and servers). In fairness, configuring HSRP or VRRP is outside the scope of this book; that's material that I covered for the CCNA syllabus. However, if your network team give you 2 default gateways to configure on a server, I think they're doing something wrong!
On the whole, I think this book did a good job of covering the exam objectives. The introduction has a list of the objectives, along with the corresponding chapter/section in the book, but some of these are more thorough than others.
For instance, objective 5.2 is to "compare and contrast various ports and protocols". The list includes LDAP 389/3268, and the introduction says that this is covered in chapter 5. However, chapter 5 only mentions this as a single line in table 5-5, which says that LDAP runs on TCP port 389; it doesn't even mention port 3268 at all! According to Microsoft, port 3268 is for global catalog queries while port 389 is for standard LDAP searches. Although this isn't part of the exam objectives, you should also be aware of port 636 (used for LDAPS), because Microsoft are trying to phase out plain-text queries.
As another example, objective 4.2 covers server hardening techniques. This includes installing the latest patches for the operating system and applications. According to the introduction, this is covered by chapter 6 of the book, specifically the "Operating System Hardening" and "Application Hardening" sections. However, all the chapter really does is repeat the advice to install patches; it doesn't say how, and I would have liked to see that in the exercises. If you've done A+, you probably know how to install Windows updates, but Linux can be a bit different. (In brief, you should use "sudo apt update", "sudo apt upgrade", and "sudo apt full-upgrade".)
I would have liked to see more detail about clusters; since the lab involves setting up 2 Windows servers as VMs, it would be possible to configure them as a cluster. I'd also like to see more detail about volts, amps, watts, etc.; in the exam, I wound up drawing on my Physics A level more than this book!
This book is copyright 2017, based on exam objectives from 2015, so it's not really fair to expect it to be current in 2020. However, some of the advice was already outdated when the book was published.
* The author says that you should use VMware Workstation 10.x for the lab, but according to the version history, version 11 came out in 2014 and version 12 came out in 2015. So, why suggest such an old version? (I used version 15, which worked fine although the user interface was slightly different.)
* One of the lab exercises explains how to set up a Certification Authority, and the author says that you should accept most of the default values; this includes SHA-1 hashes, which were deprecated back in 2011! The instructions will still work for the purposes of the lab, but it's not good practice.
* The book mentions various types of VPNs, including PPTP. That's accurate, but it should also have mentioned that PPTP has been deprecated since 2012 due to security vulnerabilities.
* The networking chapter says that "In larger networks, multiple 24-port switches might be linked together to accommodate large numbers of devices". That's not wrong exactly, but 48-port switches have been around for several years.
Basically, be aware of this book's limitations; it will touch on topics, giving you enough awareness to get through the exam, but it's not going to teach you how to be a server administrator.
This book applies to version 4 of the exam, and it's common for authors to update their previous book each time a new version of the exam comes out. That makes sense, rather than re-writing the entire thing from scratch. So, I initially assumed that these were examples of "legacy" text, i.e. they'd been written for a previous edition and then missed during the overhaul. However, as far as I can tell this is the first book that the author wrote for the Server+ exam, and the first "All-In-One" study guide. So, I'm a bit baffled by some of these choices.
I've submitted an errata list to MH Education, but I don't know whether they'll actually post it on the book's website. Unfortunately, I exceeded the 15k character limit when I tried to post it here!
Some of the errors are just typos, e.g. UEIF instead of UEFI, which don't change the meaning of the text. They're worth correcting, but not really a big deal.
Being pedantic, the book refers to 802.1x (lower case) rather than 802.1X (upper case). This is a common mistake in lots of books. Quoting from the 802.1 Working Group: "Upper case letters identify (standalone) standards, and lower-case letters identify amendments (previously called supplements) to existing standards. There should never be two projects differing only in the case of these letters!" Again, this doesn't really cause any ambiguity.
The book is inconsistent about whether SI prefix (e.g. mega and giga) refer to powers of 10 or powers of 2. Personally, I prefer to use IEC binary units for powers of 2 (e.g. GiB for gibibyte), but I recognise that common usage is to "adapt" the SI units. The problem comes with a sentence like this (on p142): "Windows Server 2012 R2 will allow up to 128 partitions, each being up to 256TB in size, although theoretically the partition size could be up to 9.44 zettabytes (ZB)". The maximum size of a GPT partition is either 8 ZiB (powers of 2) or 9.44 ZB (powers of 10). However, the current limit for NTFS is 256 TiB (power of 2). So, that sentence should either say "256 TB and 8 ZB", "256 TiB and 8 ZiB", or "256 TiB and 9.44 ZB". However, "256 TB and 9.44 ZB" is misleading. It's also worth noting that hard drives are always sold using powers of 10 (e.g. a 1 TB drive has 1,000,000,000,000 bytes), despite what the book says.
In the networking section, the book talks about configuring VLANs. There are various ways to do this at layer 2: you can use static port assignments, or assign the VLAN based on the client's MAC address, or use 802.1X. However, the book keeps talking about using the IP address. According to Reddit, this is possible, but only if you use particular hardware, i.e. it's proprietary rather than standards based (which the book doesn't make clear). Even then, you're making a layer 2 choice based on layer 3 info, which isn't ideal. Also, be aware that DHCP won't work in that situation, because you'll have a chicken-and-egg situation: the client can't get an IP address from a DHCP server until it's assigned to a VLAN, but it can't be assigned to a VLAN until it's got an IP address. The exam syllabus doesn't mention IP-based VLANs at all, so it would have been better for the book not to mention them either; I suspect that this is the result of a misunderstanding on the author's part.
I'd also disagree with some of the quiz answers, based on my work experience. For instance, there's a question about what a UPS is used for; according to the author, the only valid answer is to shut servers down gracefully. However, I think that "keeps servers running when the power goes out" is also correct. It's common for critical systems (e.g. a data centre) to be protected by a backup generator, but this might take 30 seconds to kick in when the mains power goes out. It's not a problem if the lights go out and then come back on, but you don't want all your servers to abruptly lose power. That said, you don't necessarily want them all to shut down gracefully either; the generator can supply power indefinitely, as long as its supplied with fuel (e.g. diesel). So, I think it makes sense for a UPS to bridge the gap, keeping the servers running until the generator can take over.
In the storage chapter, the description of RAID 5 and RAID 6 is flat-out wrong; I recommend reading the Wikipedia page instead. According to the author, data "is broken into blocks (stripes)". Blocks and stripes are not the same thing! A stripe consists of one block on each disk; for n disks, there will be 1 parity block and n-1 data blocks. That also means that it doesn't make sense to talk about a "data stripe", and you don't have a 1:1 relationship between data blocks and parity blocks.
I don't think the author quite understands how the CAM table works in a switch. This stores a lookup table of MAC addresses and port numbers, but it has nothing to do with collision domains. If a switch port uses full duplex then there will never be any collisions, regardless of broadcast traffic. Also, a MAC flooding attack will effectively turn a switch into a hub (on all VLANs), but it won't cause data on one VLAN to be visible on a different VLAN.
In the networking chapter, I was glad to see a description of IPv4 that went straight into CIDR notation without even mentioning class A/B/C addresses. (I've been annoyed by several other books that start with outdated concepts and then throw in CIDR as an afterthought.) The author also has a decent grasp of IPv6. However, I would have preferred to see the 5 layer TCP/IP model rather than the 7 layer OSI model. (The TCP/IP model is mentioned in the glossary but not actually explained in the main text.) Also, the book mentions that switches can be connected to each other using Ethernet cables (fibre-optic or copper), but it doesn't mention stacking switches together into one logical unit.
The networking chapter also recommends that you should "specify at least two default gateways for remote network connectivity in case one router becomes unavailable". I've never seen that done anywhere; it's far better to create a VIP address for your routers, then use that shared address as the single default gateway on all the other devices (clients and servers). In fairness, configuring HSRP or VRRP is outside the scope of this book; that's material that I covered for the CCNA syllabus. However, if your network team give you 2 default gateways to configure on a server, I think they're doing something wrong!
On the whole, I think this book did a good job of covering the exam objectives. The introduction has a list of the objectives, along with the corresponding chapter/section in the book, but some of these are more thorough than others.
For instance, objective 5.2 is to "compare and contrast various ports and protocols". The list includes LDAP 389/3268, and the introduction says that this is covered in chapter 5. However, chapter 5 only mentions this as a single line in table 5-5, which says that LDAP runs on TCP port 389; it doesn't even mention port 3268 at all! According to Microsoft, port 3268 is for global catalog queries while port 389 is for standard LDAP searches. Although this isn't part of the exam objectives, you should also be aware of port 636 (used for LDAPS), because Microsoft are trying to phase out plain-text queries.
As another example, objective 4.2 covers server hardening techniques. This includes installing the latest patches for the operating system and applications. According to the introduction, this is covered by chapter 6 of the book, specifically the "Operating System Hardening" and "Application Hardening" sections. However, all the chapter really does is repeat the advice to install patches; it doesn't say how, and I would have liked to see that in the exercises. If you've done A+, you probably know how to install Windows updates, but Linux can be a bit different. (In brief, you should use "sudo apt update", "sudo apt upgrade", and "sudo apt full-upgrade".)
I would have liked to see more detail about clusters; since the lab involves setting up 2 Windows servers as VMs, it would be possible to configure them as a cluster. I'd also like to see more detail about volts, amps, watts, etc.; in the exam, I wound up drawing on my Physics A level more than this book!
This book is copyright 2017, based on exam objectives from 2015, so it's not really fair to expect it to be current in 2020. However, some of the advice was already outdated when the book was published.
* The author says that you should use VMware Workstation 10.x for the lab, but according to the version history, version 11 came out in 2014 and version 12 came out in 2015. So, why suggest such an old version? (I used version 15, which worked fine although the user interface was slightly different.)
* One of the lab exercises explains how to set up a Certification Authority, and the author says that you should accept most of the default values; this includes SHA-1 hashes, which were deprecated back in 2011! The instructions will still work for the purposes of the lab, but it's not good practice.
* The book mentions various types of VPNs, including PPTP. That's accurate, but it should also have mentioned that PPTP has been deprecated since 2012 due to security vulnerabilities.
* The networking chapter says that "In larger networks, multiple 24-port switches might be linked together to accommodate large numbers of devices". That's not wrong exactly, but 48-port switches have been around for several years.
Basically, be aware of this book's limitations; it will touch on topics, giving you enough awareness to get through the exam, but it's not going to teach you how to be a server administrator.
This book applies to version 4 of the exam, and it's common for authors to update their previous book each time a new version of the exam comes out. That makes sense, rather than re-writing the entire thing from scratch. So, I initially assumed that these were examples of "legacy" text, i.e. they'd been written for a previous edition and then missed during the overhaul. However, as far as I can tell this is the first book that the author wrote for the Server+ exam, and the first "All-In-One" study guide. So, I'm a bit baffled by some of these choices.
I've submitted an errata list to MH Education, but I don't know whether they'll actually post it on the book's website. Unfortunately, I exceeded the 15k character limit when I tried to post it here!
Some of the errors are just typos, e.g. UEIF instead of UEFI, which don't change the meaning of the text. They're worth correcting, but not really a big deal.
Being pedantic, the book refers to 802.1x (lower case) rather than 802.1X (upper case). This is a common mistake in lots of books. Quoting from the 802.1 Working Group: "Upper case letters identify (standalone) standards, and lower-case letters identify amendments (previously called supplements) to existing standards. There should never be two projects differing only in the case of these letters!" Again, this doesn't really cause any ambiguity.
The book is inconsistent about whether SI prefix (e.g. mega and giga) refer to powers of 10 or powers of 2. Personally, I prefer to use IEC binary units for powers of 2 (e.g. GiB for gibibyte), but I recognise that common usage is to "adapt" the SI units. The problem comes with a sentence like this (on p142): "Windows Server 2012 R2 will allow up to 128 partitions, each being up to 256TB in size, although theoretically the partition size could be up to 9.44 zettabytes (ZB)". The maximum size of a GPT partition is either 8 ZiB (powers of 2) or 9.44 ZB (powers of 10). However, the current limit for NTFS is 256 TiB (power of 2). So, that sentence should either say "256 TB and 8 ZB", "256 TiB and 8 ZiB", or "256 TiB and 9.44 ZB". However, "256 TB and 9.44 ZB" is misleading. It's also worth noting that hard drives are always sold using powers of 10 (e.g. a 1 TB drive has 1,000,000,000,000 bytes), despite what the book says.
In the networking section, the book talks about configuring VLANs. There are various ways to do this at layer 2: you can use static port assignments, or assign the VLAN based on the client's MAC address, or use 802.1X. However, the book keeps talking about using the IP address. According to Reddit, this is possible, but only if you use particular hardware, i.e. it's proprietary rather than standards based (which the book doesn't make clear). Even then, you're making a layer 2 choice based on layer 3 info, which isn't ideal. Also, be aware that DHCP won't work in that situation, because you'll have a chicken-and-egg situation: the client can't get an IP address from a DHCP server until it's assigned to a VLAN, but it can't be assigned to a VLAN until it's got an IP address. The exam syllabus doesn't mention IP-based VLANs at all, so it would have been better for the book not to mention them either; I suspect that this is the result of a misunderstanding on the author's part.
I'd also disagree with some of the quiz answers, based on my work experience. For instance, there's a question about what a UPS is used for; according to the author, the only valid answer is to shut servers down gracefully. However, I think that "keeps servers running when the power goes out" is also correct. It's common for critical systems (e.g. a data centre) to be protected by a backup generator, but this might take 30 seconds to kick in when the mains power goes out. It's not a problem if the lights go out and then come back on, but you don't want all your servers to abruptly lose power. That said, you don't necessarily want them all to shut down gracefully either; the generator can supply power indefinitely, as long as its supplied with fuel (e.g. diesel). So, I think it makes sense for a UPS to bridge the gap, keeping the servers running until the generator can take over.
In the storage chapter, the description of RAID 5 and RAID 6 is flat-out wrong; I recommend reading the Wikipedia page instead. According to the author, data "is broken into blocks (stripes)". Blocks and stripes are not the same thing! A stripe consists of one block on each disk; for n disks, there will be 1 parity block and n-1 data blocks. That also means that it doesn't make sense to talk about a "data stripe", and you don't have a 1:1 relationship between data blocks and parity blocks.
I don't think the author quite understands how the CAM table works in a switch. This stores a lookup table of MAC addresses and port numbers, but it has nothing to do with collision domains. If a switch port uses full duplex then there will never be any collisions, regardless of broadcast traffic. Also, a MAC flooding attack will effectively turn a switch into a hub (on all VLANs), but it won't cause data on one VLAN to be visible on a different VLAN.
November 28, 2020
This book contained everything I needed to know to pass this exam on the first try.
April 5, 2021
Another good addition to the "golden book" collection for IT! Concepts are all there and online resources helped prep for the test.
December 9, 2021
not very up to date nor acknowledges whats out of date.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews