[TriLUG] Career planning - certs(?)

[Greg Cox]

> With that said, what can you put on your resume that is learned
> in the home lab?

*opens resume, cross-references against hardware and process lists*

Stuff I've gotten good at just from home:

Linux (Debian and RedHat); MacOSX.
DNS (BIND); DHCP; LDAP; MySQL; Perl; mail servers (postfix and
sendmail); IMAP (dovecot); Nagios; Apache; NFS; cfengine;
Cisco LAN switching.

Oh yeah: set up your own certificate authority and get good at SSL
cert management.  Everyone loves security.

> I realize knowledge is knowledge regardless of where you learned it,
> but if I setup LDAP at home and my 8 year olds uses it to login, that
> doesn't exactly count as experience.

It's not an enterprise, no.  But it's definitely experience.
You should be able to tell me 'ldapadd' and the kinds of things that go
on the command line.  You should know how ugly slapd.conf is.  I'd hope
you knew about slapcat and making a backup.  You won't know how I'm
using it, but if you've got the basics you're still ahead of the curve.

Look at it this way.  If you're so green that you are coming in at a
junior SA level (which I think is a safe assumption given that we're
even having this chat), what I want from you is passing familiarity, basic
knowledge, and the ability for you to pick up the setup the senior staff
has put into place and get into it without too much handholding.

I'd rather teach you things on the job than have you come in as a
hotshot and break a setup you don't understand fully.  And even if a
cert covers exactly what the job entails, there's no guarantee that
things were set up fully standards compliant.  Maybe there's some
funkiness going on, either from ignorant predecessors or from Important
Business Reasons Long Since Forgotten.

> I believe in certain certifications
> because they put a professional face on your home grown experience.

I'm abundantly anti-RHCE.  The experience I've had from interviewing
them is that too many have drunk the RH Kool-Aid and they don't know any
way that isn't The RH Way.  Some of my favorite interview answers come
from RHCE-enhanced interviewees: 'what's postfix?'; 'No, there's no
other way to restart a daemon than `service foo restart`'

My favorite, though, was the RHCE who argued with me that, on a Solaris
box, 'init 5' will start X.  In case you're not a Solaris person
let's just say that's not what it does.

I'm sure there are perfectly competent RCHEs out there, so any RHCEs
on the list, untwist the knickers.  But I just don't the value in the
cert.  I like SA's to be more well-rounded and hetrogenous.