Seeking Hands-on Training Programs?

thekernel32 asks: "Recently the topic of getting people trained in the Linux/UNIX environment has troubled me. Where are people going for this stuff? I recall taking an Microsoft Networking Essentials class that I dropped out of. The reason why I dropped the Microsoft class was because we were being taught about the existence of Routers, File Servers and other networking topics, but we never saw or [worked with] any of them. I really feel that it would have been more useful to get hands on experience with daemons and real hardware, rather than just being told that they exist. What decent training programs out there have a hands on approach?"

Comments

Re:Recomendation: Onsight, Internal Training Depts

[RoughDesigner]

I'd totally agree with the last note in the parent post. Big training firms that put out more classes than you can remember definately put out some really poor quality classes. I wouldn't suggest you take any class they haven't offered for at least a year. Of course this means you can't take any class about new technologies until they're older technologies, but you're better off that way since you won't learn it wrong.

My company sent me to two Learning Tree classes which sounded great on paper, but were pretty lame . The instructors seemed to have walked in off the street and read the training paperwork, but didn't have any real world experience, so they couldn't help me with anything not in our handouts.

I also took a class from some other similar company (forget the name) and had a worse experience, so I guess Learning Tree isn't the bottom of the barrel.

I'd definately try to find a local LUG and pick brains of other geeks. You will learn one way to do it which is not guarenteed to be the best way, but it's a start. How you really learn is to have several LUGgers try to teach you the best way, and you get to learn a lot in their holy wars as they explain the pros and cons of their positions.

Re:Programming vs. Sysadmining

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing is more satisfying than watching a system work. Maybe your system is a single box, a pair of boxen on a hub, a homogenous enviornment composed of 100's of boxen or perhaps your system is the network of scripts and utilties that keep everything running.

Your array of monitors are your eyes and ears in this world. Often, you know when something is going to blow and can fix it before anyone notices.

Of couse, you could be referring to client machine administration. I don't do that and I never will. :) That's for MCSE monkeys.

You haven't seen the worse

[jsse]

The reason why I dropped the Microsoft class was because we were being taught about the existence of Routers, File Servers and other networking topics

You know what - THAT's an advanced topics in Microsoft Networking Essential! I once received a call from an MCSE asking me why he couldn't see the domain controller and its neigbours in the Network Neighbourhood. I checked and told him that he's in the wrong domain and he insisted that he's in the right domain because he has typed the correct domain name in the 'NT domain' box something like that. I told him it's the TCP/IP domain we are talking about and the Netbios traffic couldn't passthru the routers. Then he, with pride and professional tone, told me that Netbios is on the top of any networking protocol and devices such that it SHOULD be transparent to Microsoft Network, and that I should look into the problem...

Things go downhill from there.

Newcastle University

[MyGirlFriendsBroken]

At my uni there is a sysadmin course for the information systems studends taught in a special lab cut off from the rest of the network as that the students. Looks like a fun course but its not available to the CS guys which is a shame.

Does anybody else have this sort of course available to them as part of their degrees>