[colug-432] Opinions on Certs?

[Jack Exley]

Interesting discussion, I'll put up my two cents as well.  I self studied for both the RHCSA and RHCE back in 2012-13.  I had years of Unix/Linux experience previously but I knew the exams were difficult and time based.  I can see why they offer up GUI tools at the start to help admins ease in that transition.  But I feel it's a double edge sword.  Linux administration happens on the command line, and they should be upfront about it so it weeds out those who can't and/or refuse to do it.  Whenever my advice is sought, I always state to not even bother with GUI tools, force yourself to do it from the command line right from the very start.  Yep, it's hard, but you may as well get used to it because that's how it is in the real world.  I realize I may sound a tad harsh, but if you teach yourself everything on the command line, you will always be in demand.
Jack Exley

      From: Bill Schwanitz <bilsch at bilsch.org>
 To: Central OH Linux User Group - 432xx <colug-432 at colug.net> 
 Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2014 2:59 PM
 Subject: Re: [colug-432] Opinions on Certs?
   

> On Dec 11, 2014, at 2:18 PM, Rick Hornsby <richardjhornsby at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It depends on what you want to do.  IIRC LPIC is more "pure" Linux - not as focused on a single distro and spends more time in the OS/shell than in Gnome/KDE.  When I was studying for the RHCSA, I noticed that RH's approach uses their GUI tools quite a bit. 
> 
> In my experience, servers are rarely running X.  You need to know how to manage, diagnose, and repair a host from the shell.  That's where I felt like the RH certification approach does a small amount of disservice.
> 
> I will be honest with you: if I'm interviewing you, I'll be happy you have a RH certification because  while not a replacement for experience, it tells me that you've made an investment in yourself and demonstrated some level of knowledge and skill. But if I ask "how you do determine what DNS servers are configured?" and you say something about "click on this and click that to open some config tool" I'm going to ask you to explain it without the aid of a mouse.  (The correct answer is: look in /etc/resolv.conf).  If I ask what the MAC address of eth0 is, I'm looking something like "use the command ifconfig eth0" (not click on the icon of the Ethernet card).  I would imagine that most experienced *NIX admins would expect the same.
> 
> Full disclosure: I never followed through to take the RH exam when I meant to a couple of years ago.  Why not? I have several years of experience behind me, the time wasn't there and the ROI didn't seem worth it.  I also had very good teachers early on (at least one of whom is on this list, Tim Randles) and spent a ton of time figuring things out on my own, running my own production-like servers, etc.

I’ll offer my own $0.02 though its likely worth less ;) I took the lpi 1 on 2007-04-25 and lpi 2 on 2008-01-19 for context.

I took the LPIC exam for levels 1 and 2. The questions on the exam I thought were pretty good and they do focus on knowing the right args/options. The only complaint I had during the exam is that they had goofy things like a missing char as an option just to see if you were paying attention ( or maybe just to prevent making the answer too obvious, lack of options on multiple-choice ). They did have a few where you had to type the name of a command which I liked.

They also focused on some shell scripting exercises - so knowing how to use cut, sed, awk and sort will be on there.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596804886.do is the book I referenced while studying. I did not feel it necessary myself to take a class - I just needed to brush up on a few things. They covered things like printing ( pre cups even, lprng ) and nis which I don’t see in the field a lot.

My certs have likely long ago expired but I am happy I took the exams - I learned a few things/tricks.

Sadly, I cannot compare to the redhat/suse certifications. My only view on suse certifications is that I have a suse cert because they did a promo a while back - if you had an lpic cert you got a complimentary suse cert. Kinda waters the certs down IMO ;)

Hope this helps!

Bill


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