win2lin

[Ronald K. Wechter]

Brandee:

Thanks - Ive already done all of that and have my own server here at my
house.  The whole point of the certification question is that during 3 of my
interviews the employers said (for UNIX admin), "I see that you have quite a
bit of experience BUT the last X (number of candidates) have Network+, MCP
(etc) certifications."  I am just trying to apease the corporate gods :).

Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nflug at nflug.org [mailto:owner-nflug at nflug.org]On Behalf Of
brandee at buffnet.net
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2001 4:58 PM
To: nflug at nflug.org
Subject: Re: win2lin


personally i feel that certifications are a very poor way to gauge an
individuals ability. rarely on the unix/linux side of the steet do you
see or hear people talking about certifications. just because so and so
has xyz certification doesn't make that person an expert in that field,
all they did was pass a test.

since there a number of unix platforms, each vender has there own test
for there hardware and OS. the all pretty much look the same on top but
are totally different under the hood. if your ever on a sun machine do
an ls -l on the /dev directory and you'll be as confused as i was when i
saw it was nothing but softlinks.

the best way to "prove yourself to the marketplace", at least in my view
would be to have a good understanding of TCP/IP and the major network
services. get a couple of old boxes and a hup and setup a LAN and
configure different servies on each box. SMTP on one, DNS on another,
NIS+ or YP on another, NFS, HTTP, FTP, the list goes on and on. i'd
start setting something like that up and insuring that all the other
machines can "talk" to those other services. i also wouldn't go and get
the lastest RPM or package from redhat or whoever. go and grap the
source code and compile these programs from scratch. this way you can
customize them to fit your needs. for example go and grap BIND from
isc.org, version 8, 9's still to new if you ask me. figure out what you
need to do to "hide" the bind version number before you compile the
source. that way when you setup your DNS server out on the net some
cracker won't be able to dig you bind version and hit you with the
newest exploit. doing stuff like that forces you to think about security
as well.

just my $.02

darin


"Ronald K. Wechter" wrote:
>
> Darin:
>
> I am an aspiring Unix Administrator - What steps do you recommend to take
to
> head in the right track.  I currently have lots of experience but no
> certifications - Now I need to play the certification game and get what I
> need to "prove" myself in the marketplace.
>
> Thank You