On Wed, 2002-07-17 at 22:01, Michael Piemonte wrote:
> I'm signed up at St. Paul Tech for Linux System Adm.  Its a brand new 
> program there it trains for your RHCE Cert.  That is the only school I 
> found that offers Linux training.

The real problem is that you also need to really get into the
community.  Just having a certificate doesn't exactly get the 'best'
jobs automatically.  Many of us here with nifty jobs got them partially
because we were familiar and active in the community.  We have knowledge
of how the packaging and distribution systems work and how to work
within those systems to create an overall managable system.  Having a
certificate saying you know how to use unix systems is nice, but having
experience and/or time working with groups of machines in a 'system' is
excellent.  IMO, doubly so if your using free tools to do so and
contributing back (in the form of 'tips' even, someone needs to put up a
"all the cool shit you can do with cfengine" page) to the community.

Grabbing 5-10 machines (somehow, 3 would probally be fine) and just
playing with having a way to centrally manage machines that aren't
exactly the same (different packages, different hardware, etc) is
valuable time.  Probally more valuable than learning arcane unix
commands.

The problem I have these days is that I wish I had more time to work on
distribution-type-stuff at work.  Not necessairly working on debian
things, but just prepping the next release to get pushed out to
machines.  I originally thought I would have more time to do so and had
gradiose ideas about how I could push out new software every 6 months or
so.  Then I messed around with stablizing a unstable snapshot.  Its not
impossible, it just takes a bit of time compared to just grabbing the
newest release.  Of course, this goes into an argument about release
management and other ideas that wasn't really on topic anyhow. :)

[for the record, I've only got one certification, the SAGE cSAGE
certification, www.sagecert.org.  I'll proally get mSAGE or whatever the
next level up is when it comes out.]

-- 
Scott Dier <dieman at ringworld.org> http://www.ringworld.org/