I started at a community college, getting an Associates in Network Administration. In the process, I got to know the professors and staff, which got me in as a lab aide then as a network tech. Transfered to my four year college and began work there on a degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Kept learning stuff on the side, took some vocational Cisco courses, Microsoft courses, etc. Didn't go as far as to get certs (although for giggles might get my CCNA). While still taking classes at my four year, got a job at my same community college as a Network Engineer. I may only be pulling down $65K (but with a government, union job and full paid benefits), but I'm only a short ways off from completing my four year degree. That coupled with 5+ years experience as a Network Engineer... we'll see how it goes. Right now they're trying to lure me over to a lead programmer job ($75K) based on my project management, programming and scripting skills. The comp sci dept at the college is also asking me to teach some of their vocational networking/Linux courses, which also lines my pockets.
But I probably would be still a starving college student at this point, had I not gotten my foot in the door. Many people have stated this already above, and they're right; take a low road to get your foot in the door and gather experience. Sure you might be dealing with idiot users and menial endpoint equipment. But it's like a rite of passage. Employers are more and more looking for a combination of considerable experience plus a four year degree and maybe a few certs before they'll take a gamble on you. So you have to make yourself irresistible.
Our evals covered (now Cisco) Airespace, Aruba, and Trapeze. In the end we went with Trapeze. We didn't really care for Airespace from day one, mostly in part to the crappy team the Cisco reseller sent to us.
As far as use, we found both Aruba and Trapeze to have fairly robust and convenient interfaces. The Aruba configuration/monitoring software was housed on the box that also served as the wireless controller, which we saw as a possible problem with disaster recovery and software updates. The Trapeze solution is a application you install on another win box that manages the controller.
Reasons we ultimately went with Trapeze:
1) Cost. Cost per AP was a bit more for Aruba. And this might just have been a poor site survey on their part, but the proposal we were given by Aruba to light up a handful of our buildings required roughly twice as many APs as the Trapeze proposal. That added up real quick.
2) Appearance. The Aruba APs are pretty damn ugly. And *obviously* a piece of technology, begging to be tinkered with/stolen. And even though it's a dumb AP so our network wouldn't be compromised in the event of a theft, we'd still have to buy new ones. Plus, their suggestions for 'discrete' placement involved cutting a slot in a ceiling tile and letting the antenna stick out. Ugly as hell. The Trapeze AP looks like an over-sized smoke detector. Mounts nicely to suspended ceilings. Most people don't even notice them.
3) Experience. Our eval with Trapeze was the best we've had so far. They brought out for eval a wireless controller, a boxed copy of the management program, and like a dozen APs to play with. When they found out we didn't have any PoE switches to power the APs, they drop shipped us a handful of power injectors. This was back in like February. We have received our new system and APs and are readying them for deployment, and all the while they've let us keep the eval system in place.
This is old news. When my organization was looking at managed wireless vendors a year ago we did an eval of Aruba and they were already bragging about getting the Microsoft account.
That said we didn't go with Aruba, mostly because their pricing was pretty Microsoft-esque. In other words, worse than a prison shower.
As if the temperatures below 50 Kelvins wasn't a deterrent. Besides, one is only like 40 miles across. Enough space for an Arco station and a Starbucks.
I'm not entirely sure if you're looking to replace Exchange or Outlook... either way, you make it sound like you don't want to use OWA. Why not just use RPC over HTTP in Outlook 2003? You get full Outlook features encapsulated in SSL.
Our IT department is pretty unforgiving -- can't send at 100MB, can't receive at 150MB. 5MB limit on attachments. Of course there are exceptions, mostly higher ups that we have to kiss ass to anyways. We've got 900 mailboxes on our exchange server, and our full backups are running 65GB or so. Oh, and we're a community college. A very poor and understaffed one.
Quite right. And Sobell makes that point exactly, over and over again. I use this book to teach an intro to Linux course. He touts the use of man pages and using the internet to look up answers. But that doesn't mean having a handy reference guide by your side as one learning is a cardinal sin... I love his command reference in the back of every book because it contains basically the man page, plus several *good* examples of using the syntax.
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Do everything. No, seriously.
... we'll see how it goes. Right now they're trying to lure me over to a lead programmer job ($75K) based on my project management, programming and scripting skills. The comp sci dept at the college is also asking me to teach some of their vocational networking/Linux courses, which also lines my pockets.
I started at a community college, getting an Associates in Network Administration. In the process, I got to know the professors and staff, which got me in as a lab aide then as a network tech. Transfered to my four year college and began work there on a degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Kept learning stuff on the side, took some vocational Cisco courses, Microsoft courses, etc. Didn't go as far as to get certs (although for giggles might get my CCNA). While still taking classes at my four year, got a job at my same community college as a Network Engineer. I may only be pulling down $65K (but with a government, union job and full paid benefits), but I'm only a short ways off from completing my four year degree. That coupled with 5+ years experience as a Network Engineer
But I probably would be still a starving college student at this point, had I not gotten my foot in the door. Many people have stated this already above, and they're right; take a low road to get your foot in the door and gather experience. Sure you might be dealing with idiot users and menial endpoint equipment. But it's like a rite of passage. Employers are more and more looking for a combination of considerable experience plus a four year degree and maybe a few certs before they'll take a gamble on you. So you have to make yourself irresistible.
Our evals covered (now Cisco) Airespace, Aruba, and Trapeze. In the end we went with Trapeze. We didn't really care for Airespace from day one, mostly in part to the crappy team the Cisco reseller sent to us.
As far as use, we found both Aruba and Trapeze to have fairly robust and convenient interfaces. The Aruba configuration/monitoring software was housed on the box that also served as the wireless controller, which we saw as a possible problem with disaster recovery and software updates. The Trapeze solution is a application you install on another win box that manages the controller.
Reasons we ultimately went with Trapeze:
1) Cost. Cost per AP was a bit more for Aruba. And this might just have been a poor site survey on their part, but the proposal we were given by Aruba to light up a handful of our buildings required roughly twice as many APs as the Trapeze proposal. That added up real quick.
2) Appearance. The Aruba APs are pretty damn ugly. And *obviously* a piece of technology, begging to be tinkered with/stolen. And even though it's a dumb AP so our network wouldn't be compromised in the event of a theft, we'd still have to buy new ones. Plus, their suggestions for 'discrete' placement involved cutting a slot in a ceiling tile and letting the antenna stick out. Ugly as hell. The Trapeze AP looks like an over-sized smoke detector. Mounts nicely to suspended ceilings. Most people don't even notice them.
3) Experience. Our eval with Trapeze was the best we've had so far. They brought out for eval a wireless controller, a boxed copy of the management program, and like a dozen APs to play with. When they found out we didn't have any PoE switches to power the APs, they drop shipped us a handful of power injectors. This was back in like February. We have received our new system and APs and are readying them for deployment, and all the while they've let us keep the eval system in place.
This is old news. When my organization was looking at managed wireless vendors a year ago we did an eval of Aruba and they were already bragging about getting the Microsoft account.
That said we didn't go with Aruba, mostly because their pricing was pretty Microsoft-esque. In other words, worse than a prison shower.
As if the temperatures below 50 Kelvins wasn't a deterrent. Besides, one is only like 40 miles across. Enough space for an Arco station and a Starbucks.
This was after Goofy and Minnie were rejected.
I'm not entirely sure if you're looking to replace Exchange or Outlook ... either way, you make it sound like you don't want to use OWA. Why not just use RPC over HTTP in Outlook 2003? You get full Outlook features encapsulated in SSL.
Our IT department is pretty unforgiving -- can't send at 100MB, can't receive at 150MB. 5MB limit on attachments. Of course there are exceptions, mostly higher ups that we have to kiss ass to anyways. We've got 900 mailboxes on our exchange server, and our full backups are running 65GB or so. Oh, and we're a community college. A very poor and understaffed one.
Mentioned in passing, much like csh and ksh.
Quite right. And Sobell makes that point exactly, over and over again. I use this book to teach an intro to Linux course. He touts the use of man pages and using the internet to look up answers. But that doesn't mean having a handy reference guide by your side as one learning is a cardinal sin ... I love his command reference in the back of every book because it contains basically the man page, plus several *good* examples of using the syntax.
and I never will. I could never forgive them for the death of my show.
I got a free invite just for using Blogger ... and so did another friend using it. I'm assuming all Blogger users get one ...
So of course I signed up for mine. Free is free, right?
I always liked how Visual C++ 6 refused to allow friend functions ... just a minor bug that made me learn gdb to finish my Intro to C++ class ...
Shhhhh ... it's not dying ... it's just sleeping ...