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@xxxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > -- > redhat-list mailing list > unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list > -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
