The input is great! Was in Rochester today to meet with the Workforce 
people and see what I can get for help with funds and such, as I've just 
come back from being laid off. My thinking is that I would get certified 
in a few things and do the self marketing things. Right now I've done 
small PC work for family and a few customers here and there. Also setup 
a network up in my home, but never did setup many different 
types...guess I got to comfortable. My network spans over 4 apartments 
at one point and time, unfortunately it was all in windo$e. Right now 
I'm just working on web hosting and trying to figure it all out. The 
hard part is to take the pay cut from trucking and do work as help desk, 
but whatever it takes just wish there was a better way to keep the money 
moving. Working both trucking and desk help stuff is probably the way 
I'll go but it just leaves no spare time for other hard core learning 
such as school or just hammering away at home! By the way 8 yrs of 
windo$e and 6 months of Linux!! learned more in that 6 months of Linux 
than I did in 8 yrs of windo$es. Lugs are awesome!!!



Scott Dier wrote:
> 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.]
>