LPIC or RHCA

[Corey Kovacs]

I agree with this except for the bit questioning your base knowledge
solely on the
fact that you are a Comp Sci major. So am I and I am one exam away from my RHCA.

What I will say however, is that going through a certification process
is _not_ the way
to really _learn_ about how to be a good Sys Admin etc. It's how you
put yourself up against
a gauge so that others (employers) can judge your baseline knowledge.

The title "Systems Administrator" used to mean so much more but has,
in my opinion been
watered down a bit. Largely due to the way in which certain large OS
companies target
CIO's and Universities by telling them "Sys Admin work is so easy now,
your secretaries
can do it." which was followed by utter crap. That and the
ridiculously fast growth rate of
our industry as a whole.

My personal opinion (of which I clearly have many) is that the best
way to learn deep
level knowledge is to install a base system via a distro of your
choosing and then forgo
any packaging of anything for a while. Go source builds from top to
bottom. At the university
I started out at, we started with Slackware (before distros were
shipping with shared libs)
and would rebuild the compilers, libs etc in about 2 hours time. I am
not suggesting doing
that now though, it's simply not required any more but give yourself a
task like setting up
samba, or a LAMP stack. Then build everything from sources, chasing
down dependencies
and dealing with that. Then, once you have a good understanding of how
it's all put together,
start using package management systems.

Then go deeper by learning how to tune your system. What's going to
keep apache running
when it's facing the internet and not just the dorm? Set up a DB and
write software to pound
the living hell out of it. Then tune it so that it hums. Get your
disks and file systems tuned
to maximize the I/O for different work loads (this can be futile if
you don't have lot's of spindles
to test against so ymmv)

Your a comp sci major so write some server code in python or perl and
write your own init
scripts to start your daemons or build some tools to help streamline
your role as a sys admin.

The term Sys Admin in certain circles is still synonymous (in the good
way) with the term
Hacker and it should be. We are the ones who need to understand how
our system of choice
works under the covers and bend it to our purpose. We generally
shudder at the term gui, unless
we wrote it and consider the lack of a serious shell tantamount to
having a car with no steering
wheel.

Anyway, in the end, it only matters to you and your employer what cert
you get. For real knowledge,
go deep, ask questions and then question the answers (as there are
many). Find what works
for you and experiment constantly.

Good luck

-C




On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 11:32 PM, Matty Sarro <msarro at gmail.com> wrote:
> It depends what you're looking to do. Are you more interested in general
> Linux knowledge? Are you interested in all Unix operating systems? What is
> your purpose for getting the certification? I'm going for my RHCE because I
> work solely on red hat in my engineering pursuits so it makes the most
> sense. Lpic makes sense if you're going to be doing lots of stuff with
> different OSs.
>
> If you're a computer science major, will you even need to know this stuff? I
> mean, many programmers have no clue about operating systems or hardware. You
> don't need to know how engines work to drive cars (crappy analogy but I hope
> it makes sense).
>
> Good luck either way!
> -Matty
> On Mar 19, 2011 1:01 PM, "vaibhav gupta" <gupta2007vaibhav at gmail.com> wrote:
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