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IT Certifications Summary
A reader writes: "Icrontic.com has a new article up called 'All You Need To know About IT Certifications.' It talks about several of the major Microsoft certifications, and of course, a few of the Linux certs, including Linux+ and RHCE. "
Is certification really that important vs. having the experience anyways?
Why in the hell did Oracle get stuck in the end? Oracle Certs are some of the most valuable out there, and they're fairly damn popular, too, with those who know what in the hell they're doing.
This article missed all the certs in the security field.
CISSP
CISA
SANS GIAC
In general, CISSP and CISA are more heavy on theory and SANS GIAC are more on practical knowledge (hands-on). Notice that GIAC actually offers many different certs in different area.
They are all hard to get. For example, CISSP requires a 6 hours exams (which isn't easy at all). GIAC requires a practical assignment (to show hands-on knownledge - require real world experience) as well as one or two 2 hours exam.
I have struggled with this certification issue and my employer didn't want to pay the money for RHCE. Then one day I seredipitously managed to stumble across LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell by O'Reilly.
Suprisingly the LPI isn't covered in the article.
As Linux certs go it doesn't depend on the financial solvency of a company (get an RHCE and if RH goes out of business then what?). It's vendor neutral (rejoice Mandrake and Suse fans).
Plus there's an animal book on it! Instant credibility.
Plus if you want to own your own certs and not have an employer to hold it over your head you can't beat the price (only a few hundred bucks for the whole shooting match).
More info available at lpi.org
SAIR is not good. Basically they want you to buy THEIR books which spell the answers out for you. The LPI certs are very good and do a great job of being vendor neutral. I wrote an LPI study guide so I may be biased, but not much because I took both certs before deciding on which one to write.
I took the CCNP exams last November after taking a two-week bootcamp course. I took over at my office and we were tired of paying $200/hour for consultants to do work we should be doing in house. The boot camp I took from Global Knowledge was excellent with very good instructors. The exams are tough but they ask real world questions.
If you want to study at home I suggest the Cisco Preparation Series books as well as a lot of equipment. Without being comfortable on the equipment it's hard to get used to all the commands and which one is appropriate in certain places.
I learned a lot in the class and getting the cert...things I use every day now and it has really cut down on our consulting expenses and makes me a lot more valuable.
The CCNA exam is a joke. Every desktop support guy I know has it or is getting it. So, don't expect to get a job working on routers with that. Without real time on a production router most people won't care at all.
I just took the LPI 101 exam (passed) and will probably take the 102 to get level 1 certification and go on to the 20* exams.
The exam is weighted (good) and is very vendor neutral (good) and does have areas for you to comment on questions you get (good). But some of the quesitons require memorization of various flags (bad) and ask about outdated information (real bad). I can't give examples of questions, since I signed a nice form saying I won't disclose any of the questions. Hopefully the weighting takes these facts into account.
The price for the exam ($100USD) was affordable, even when unemployed, and there are at least a dozen locations within 20 miles of here (Boston, MA) where I can take the exam.
The fact that the Novell CNA/CNE certifications weren't even listed says something about how little weight they carry these days. I completed mine about this time last year, and stupidly thought it was my ticket to fame and fortune. Turns out, even in Utah (Novell's stomping grounds and probably its most die-hard install base), there's not an overwhelming demand for it.
Now, the program I got my CNE from was an excellent program. By the time you took the test, you had a good deal of hands-on experience, and really understood the material. The course even included an internship with an IT department. It certainly beat the pants off those courses advertised on TV ("Get certified in four weeks, and make six figures a year for life! Call now!") But job hunting was just depressing. Send off a dozen resumes, and get maybe one call back. The closest I ever got was a, "Well, we would have hired you but we decided to eliminate the position."
Certifications don't mean a whole lot. Even within my own program, there was a wide variance in the competence of the students. I'd say that the entire concept of certifications was designed to make life easier on HR departments. And too many of the training schools have the "certify them quickly and let them get experience on someone else's dime" mentality. It cheapens the value of the certifications themselves, and hurts the entire industry.
In my case, I've decided that I can finally afford to go back and get a CS degree. It's not the ticket to fame and fortune either, but at least I get to learn some cool stuff. But if someone in the Salt Lake area is looking for a geek who knows a bit of everything and will work dirt cheap, I'm interested.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
For anonymous TCP connections, there was once a limit of 10 (in the early NT4 days? i believe O'Reilly once campaigned against this). But in these days of gnutella, this would be tough, and (no wonder) Windows 2000 handles multiple TCP connections just fine. In fact, I just blasted Apache on my Windows 2000 workstation with a infinite-loop wget script from my Linux box, and Apache chugged along just fine, servicing well over 100 connections per second.
Call the three men A, B and C. A and his wife cross the river. A returns. B's wife and C's wife cross the river. A's wife returns. B and C cross the river. B and his wife return. A and B cross the river. C's wife returns. A's wife and B's wife cross the river. C returns. C and his wife cross the river.