What is on Your Mind?

It's becoming harder and harder to have "general" knowledge about Linux as distros become more specialized, Windows-like, and sundered from each other.

Unity, dbus, pulseaudio, systemd, featurism, dependency hell, ego-driven development, ...
I really start to like BSD and Solaris.

They do look good, but the quality really depends of the person effort later on.

If you just take class, followed by exam (full of useless stuff as you folks say)
and never use the knowledge, it is useless and will vaporize over time.

Of course, good things can be heard from a great teacher.
But they are not always so great..

You mentioned kerberized nfs, iscsi, selinux.
Those are actually great techs and great to know.
The world will insist more on those things as time progresses.

As for ISCSI, i find it a great cheap learning/education tool for virtual clusters on work/home PC for disk backend.

Regards
Peasant.

Thanks for such quick responses from so many. I agree that leaning is generally a good thing, it's just should I bother re-taking the exams? I'm not after a CV builder, especially at my age

I might take it again for personal pride. I was very much a "rabbit in the headlights" for the exams, especially given that I didn't know before Monday morning that there was RHCSA Friday morning and RHCE in the afternoon, so no prep-work and I hadn't done the course for RHCSA

At least I kept making sure that may machine booted and the changes I built up were persistent. There are many stories of people scoring zero because there was a fault somewhere that stopped the server boot, e.g. a duff NFS mount.


The big thing is that it's not multiple choice, but actually delivering things that just seem irrelevant to everywhere I've ever worked and you have to remember enough so you read the right man pages without wasting too much time - oh and you have to crack into the OS and set the root password, which is a different process from RHEL6 and before. They only mention it briefly, miss it and you are doomed




Kind regards,
Robin

My long standing and constantly reenforced view is that certifications are basically worthless and certification companies are mostly just money making machines, pure and simple.

For example, I was a well known Internet security expert long before I took the time to get my CISSP certification. But I thought (one day, a long time ago in a spacetime far far away), hey! I'll sit for the CISSP exam so I can put "CISSP" behind my name and hang out with CISSPs.... haha

Honestly, I enjoyed studying for the exams and when I finally sat for the exams, I finished hours ahead of schedule to my surprise. I passed the entire CISSP battery of exams with flying colors and proudly flew the CISSP flag after my name for many years. For a year I was a featured ISC2 blogger on their site.

Then, I noticed that almost every CISSP I met had almost no operational experience, only textbook knowledge. I noticed that the world was pregnant with "certified experts" without any true operational experience against a real cyberattack and no general data center operational experience. Most of the certified people whom I started to associate with were "cybersecurity or IT arm chair quarterbacks" who talked such a great game but never had been on the field. This was amazing to me.

Then, I noticed that the organization that controls the CISSPs had a system of "professional credits" that were required every year to stay certified; and that much of these "continuing professional development credits" came from their commercial partners. For example, if you took a class from a partner of theirs, or you subscribed to a magazine (this is crazy!) in the "recommended magazines", you could get "credit" to keep your CISSP!

However, if you wrote a bunch of great blog posts about actual real experience defending the real world against real cyberattacks, or published a paper in a journal not directly associated, you got zero credit. In other words, the CISSP "system" turned out to be a kind of commercial enterprise which churned out a lot of unqualified, but certified people.

I finally just gave up on my CISSP cert because it was useless and a kind of a farce; as the more CISSPs I met, the more I met people who had a lot of book knowledge about cybersecurity but most, I would say 90 to 95% or higher, had no true hands on operational experience defending high value networks. Most had never even done any system admin on a critical server!

My advice has always been to get hands-on experience and stay hands-on and operational. If you are too inexperienced to get hired, then create your own project (be a doer, not a talker) or join a open source effort (volunteer and contribute); write code, write code, etc. Do sys admin. Never become an arm chair quarterback who claims to be an expert because they got certified.

On the other hand, I enjoyed all my studies when I prepped for my CISSP exam; and I did learn a few good things from my exam prep time; but only because I had many years of hands on operational experience to validate and apply the theory too. I have met a few CISSPs who were "operational" and great people (few and far between, however).

I can name very few people with hands on operational experience compared to the multitude of certified people who have ever worked in a data center or been a sys admin of critical infrastructure (but claim to be experts).

In closing, Certs are "OK"... if you want to do them; but nothing is more important than continued hands on experience at the system level, learning new skills, coding, writing solutions, building and securing systems.

In my very biased view, 100 certs are less valuable than a few years of hands on system level (admin / system programming) experience with mission critical IT infrastructure.

Cheers!

I agree with most of the sentiment already expressed so I'll keep this post as brief as possible. My history is in technology company ownership; corporate I.T. Systems supply and support, storage specialisation, and biometric security systems.

Certifications (or 'tickets' as I call them) are great to augment a university or college qualification as it shows motivation to specialise and improve. However, it will only help you get your first (trainee) job. Your first employment will be the main consideration for your second employment, not your tickets. When I was interviewing candidates, hard experience would always beat tickets; no contest whatsoever. A guy who'd run a support centre for 3 years but had no tickets and been made redundant through no fault of his own would win hands down against a rookie with tickets. Also, as we all know, a lot of the stuff you have to learn on these courses you will never use again.

We had a trainee here, who'd accomplished some Cisco Certification (done via internet as it revealed later). Don't know exactly what it was. But she somehow managed to not even know how IPv4 works.

I read some offers here and there in the internet:" If you take our premium support offer you always get serviced by an >> LPIC Level 3 certified senior system administrator <<".

Especially the LPI Exams cost a lot of money if you want to keep them especially at a higher level. After 5 years you have to recertify.