[ale] Certification (cont'd)

[James Cochrane]

Christopher Fowler <cfowler at www.topform.com> writes:
> When we go into and interview and we tell the employer that we "know Linux",
> would it not look better to have a piece of paper that proves it. Some
> employers ignore paper, but some don't.  It is a "win win" situation.
> 
>
Yes, it would.  Of course, currently, I don't know of any fully
established generic Unix certification course, and the only specific
Unix certifications I know of don't necessarily mean that a person
knows a particular architecture.  Right now, I'm a sysadmin on SCO,
HP-UX, Solaris, SunOS, BSD, and AIX platforms (with Linux at home). 
But am I necessarily a fully qualified sysadmin on all aspects of those
systems?  Nope.  Have I found any courses that I think would adequately
increase the knowledge I've gained from working in the field, and using
Unix for years as a student?  Nope.

It isn't just a Linux problem.  It crosses the spectrum of Unix
flavors.  For one thing, it's hard to quantify exactly what skills such
a sysadmin needs.  What are the needs of the employer?  Someone to
completely configure a network architecture, to include DNS/NIS,
sendmail, routers, etc?  Do they need someone who can walk in and
basically take an existing architecture and keep it running, with the
odd upgrade or hardware replacement?  Do they need someone to
administer a highly flexible network environment where subnets can be
created and removed daily, with new hardware and software constantly
under test and developement?  Do they need a sysadmin who can write
their own device drivers and large scale scripting, or do they intend
to mostly use canned products?

A sysadmin, or anyone else who claims to "know" a particular brand of
Linux, is likely to need some knowledge of all these aspects, but how
do you test that?  If a business is investing in Linux as a lower cost
alternative to SCO, SunOS, HP-UX, etc, might they also be trying to
keep costs down with hardware purchases, requiring the sysadmin to deal
with a hodgepodge of architectures and accessories?  How do you test
for that?  For instance, where I work, they discovered that SMC/Western
Digital network cards seem to have problems when installed in a Win95
workstation that must coexist with X sessions on the network.  Do you
test for all the esoteric "tricks" such as that?

Those are my thoughts, hope I didn't annoy anyone too much :-)

James


> Thanks,
> Christopher Fowler
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