[colug-432] Opinions on Certs?

[Tim Randles]

FWIW - I took the RHCSA exam a couple years ago because it was required by
my employer.  The course and test was all done in-house.  I have 15+ years
of experience and found it to be pretty easy.  The nice thing about it was
that you were given a set of tasks to accomplish on a virtual machine.  It
was a mix of basic debugging (IIRC the networking was misconfigured with a
bad subnet mask that prevented you from reaching an LDAP server elsewhere
on the network) and service/system configuration.  You weren't tested on
rote memorization of commands and options.  Man pages were available,
/usr/share/doc was populated, etc.  As long as the system was configured
and running as required and it all survived a reboot then you were good to
go.

That being said, aside from the one employer that required it, the other
places I've worked have valued experience much more than certifications.
I'll echo Rick...If you're just starting out getting a few certs is a good
way to demonstrate the ability to at least learn and apply some level of
admin skills and might help land you an interview.

I won't take any credit for teaching Rick.  He's one of the brightest guys
I've had the pleasure of mentoring in my career.

Tim

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 12:59 PM, Bill Schwanitz <bilsch at bilsch.org> wrote:

>
> > 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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