CCNP and SDM

I'm halfway through my study for CCNP ISCW I have just moved on to device hardening / secure tunneling and it seems to rely an awful lot on the SDM. I'm quite biased, I hate GUIs. In fact when I first saw the SDM barely mentioned I was quite put off.

Its probably quite elitist of me but I really don't the need for GUI anything in a professional level certification. I feel like any chump can click through a wizard. Plus it really irks me that config for MPLS VPNs is passed over but we have to spend time learning about SDM. rarrr.

Be interested to know how you guys find it in real life, I'm probably jumping the gun a bit..

SDM can be usefull for seting up quickly a VPN tunnel or things like that, but as you said, any chump can go for a click-and-go system, seems Cisco wants to cover up what Checkpoint, Netscreen, etc made up by having a great GUI for nitwits.

Ofcourse, nothing beats a real Cisco guru with great knowledge about the CLI. CLI makes your config more clean (that is if you know what you are doing ) and you have more control over what is happening.

Nevertheless, the SDM is pretty good, but I never use it myself.

Ofcourse, nothing beats a real Cisco guru with great knowledge about the CLI.

damn straight!

Goodpoint re competing with other vendors on similar technologies. I was quite agitated because 1. Firefox and SDM were being screwy on my lab PC and 2. my lab 1720 doesn't support SDM. But everything is ok through Dynamips. As a benefit the last few chapters went by quite fast with all the freakin screenshots taking up so much space..