2025-01-02 05:06:00
On the tail end of 2024 I have finally achieved my goal of holding all four entry-level Linux system administration certifications. I set this goal so I can test-run all four exams for my students, to see which one's "the best".
Spoiler alert: there is no singular "the best".
I will be taking a look at the four big brand names: CompTIA, Linux Professional Institute, Linux Foundation and RedHat.
Exam type:
Exam format:
Exam time:
Exam costs (no training, only examination):
Current version:
Certification vendors are expected to provide continuous improvements to their exams. CompTIA is on a solid three year renewal cycle, where their Linux+ exam and objectives are completely refreshed. LPI on the other hand is really dragging things along, with an exam that's now over six years old.
Linux Foundation and RedHat frequently update their exams and their objectives, but don't offer much clarity about the content changes.
Exam objectives documentation:
CompTIA and LPI reign supreme when it comes down to publishing their exam objectives. They provide very clear documents, detailing exactly which topics, concepts, commands, etc will be covered in their exams.
LF and RH on the other hand offer short bullet point lists of one-sentence task descriptions which provide no guidance whatsoever as to what a student would need to learn or practice. With them, you will need to rely upon a training or book to give you guidance.
My opinion on the curriculum and exam contents:
I have compared the exam objectives for all four exams. You can read the full details in this blog post.
For Linux+ I did a beta-test of the upcoming version 6 and I'm not as happy about those objectives, compared to version 5. Here's my review.
Study materials:
All four vendors offer exams in test centers. The amount of available testing centers differs per region. I haven't done exams in test centers for years now, I always test remotely, so I'll only compare on that basis.
Remote testing software:
Remote testing ease-of-use and user-friendliness:
You will find so many people on Reddit and Discord who complain about, or fear, the OnVue remote testing for CompTIA exams. Horror stories about mean proctors, or bad software abound. I have now taken over twenty remote exams via OnVue and I have had four situations in which I could not start or finish the exam, three of which were my own fault. 1:20 failed because of the proctoring solution, 19:20 went fine.
The RedHat Kiosk solution is something I hate because the process of setting it up is abysmal. You have to make a bootable USB with their custom Kiosk OS which is known to have hardware compatibility issues, plus you have to have two webcams. Here's my experience from 2023.
The exam itself:
As far as I am aware, the Red Hat hands-on exam will give you two virtual machines and you do most of your work on one of them. The risk in this is huge: if you manage to break that one single machine, you will fail the exam outright!
I like Linux Foundation's approach a lot better: (almost) every assignment runs in its own virtual machine or container. If you break one assignment, all others will still be scored!
I disliked the LPIC exams, their questions were boring and dry. As usual I like how CompTIA write their multiple choice questions, but their PBQs generally range from "meh" to "awful".
This is a tough nut to crack, as return on investment will differ greatly per region/country. For example, CompTIA is a big brand name in the US but in EUW it may garner a "comp-who-now?".
Brand name recognition, by checking LinkedIn jobs that ask for this cert (in the Netherlands, as per today):
Oddly, some positions on LinkedIn ask for "LPIC2, RHCE or Linux+", suggesting they feel Linux+ is equivalent to higher level certs. Which it isn't.
Four job postings ask for "a Linux certification such as ...". I have not included those in the totals shown about, but you could consider that a +4 on each.
It's odd, but LFCE from Linux Foundation seems to be more well-known than LFCS, with 3 vs 1 job listings asking for it.
I can't tell you which Linux certification you should pick, most importantly because of that last paragraph: return on investment is heavily regional. You must always check your local job boards! See which certifications are, or are not, in demand in your area.
My personal view points?
It's clear that RedHat's certifications offer very big resumé value, as they are world-renowned. Everybody knows and respects them. The big downside is their price point, although they compensate this by offering one free retake since 2023. Before that, their proposition was awful, with every retake also costing €500.
I'm a fan of Linux Foundation and the work they do. Their exams are also excellent and I love their at-home testing solution; it just works.
LPI? I don't like. They feel stuffy and outdated. Done.
I like CompTIA's exams well enough, their curriculum is great, their price point is the best. It's unfortunate that Linux+ doesn't get the recognition it deserves. Because of that, I wrote in 2023: "CompTIA Linux+ is not worthless, it's just worth less".
It's ironic that the two exams/vendors I like best, are also the least well-known.
I feel CompTIA offers a better theoretical exam than LPI and I feel Linux Foundation's hands-on exam is much better than Redhat's. But the resumé value of both throws a spanner in the works. :(
Well-known author and fellow-trainer Sander van Vugt and I spoke on LinkedIn about this article. To quote him:
"...I do agree to your conclusions. RHCSA has a huge market value, LFCS is more interesting and more about Linux. Linux+ is important for NA customers, and LPIC-1, well, I dropped that about a decade ago. Their way of testing doesn't make sense to me."
kilala.nl tags: work, studies, mentor,
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2024-12-07 16:54:00
I like to hang out on Discord. As we know, I like it a little bit too much.
This month, I was asked two questions which got me reminiscing about my career. About when I decided to quit IT, about when I almost lost my CISSP. And about how I've been doing things the past ten years.
First off, someone asked me:
"What was the worst job you had?"
The worst job I've had in IT was not a problem with the job, it was a problem with me.
The time I was at my lowest, was after my first five to seven years, around 2006. I was in contracting (as in I was employed by an agency who rented me out to customers), in a job where I was tape jockey and only did minor systems administration. I wasn't motivated to learn or expand, because my employer had a very strict development path where they demanded I first do a few certs that I really didn't want.
So I gave up. I hated that job, slacked off a lot, spent a lot of my time exploring the building instead of working.
And while I did that, I did night classes and one day a week at college to become a maths teacher. This I loved! Mostly because I was challenging myself and because I was working on getting out of IT.
In 2008 I finished my first year with full marks. I even finished a class from second year as well! And I had an internship lined up, so I could go into fulltime teaching. Then we learned we were having a kid and I had to go back to IT, because of money.
A good friend of mine helped me out. I started working with/for him, and really started challenging myself again... Lots of learning, lots of studying, doing difficult jobs again.
So... My worst job? It was when I gave up.
Today, after I told a little bit about my freelancing, someone else asked me:
"I know you've got a LOT of certs, would you say that made the biggest difference getting you to the position you're in now or was there another factor?"
I have 25 years of experience in IT, but somewhere around 2007 I decided to actually get out of IT. That didn't go as planned, but in 2008 I did get a nice "reset" of my career. I took what experience I had to get a solid job in contracting (not yet freelance) and from there on out started applying myself.
In 2009 I slowly started getting a few certifications, most importantly CISSP. That's what got me "qualified" for a few other security positions. After that though, I stupidly started slacking again. I even blogged about it then.
I managed to retain my CISSP, but I was still not really applying myself in "continuous improvement". I did some trainings here and there, listenend to podcasts, read books. In 2013 I'd had enough of that, kicked my own ass with the help of a good friend and made a plan.
Only 11 years ago did I start my "continuous improvement" journey. Every year, I make a list of goals to achieve by the end of the year. A list which grows and fills and shifts throughout the year, with things I feel I need to learn or research...
In 2013 I made sure to keep my CISSP and get my RHCSA. After that, it's been cycles of three years to renew CISSP, renew RHCE (the followup to RHCSA) and also renew other certifications. Plus do other trainings and certifications, which feed into the renewal cycles, but are also actually helpful.
As Auti says: it's the journey. I make a plan for every year, I do 2-3 courses and/or certifications every year. I make sure to keep learning new things.
On the one hand I do this, because I'm honestly afraid of becoming too "old and outdated" for the IT market. But I also do it because my customers value this attitude: I keep improving my value on the market, but staying in touch with tech and skills that are relevant and recent.
Plus I diversify: pentesting, Linux sysadmin, auditing, teaching/didactics, cloud. There are risks in generalizing as I do, but specialism isn't my thing.
kilala.nl tags: mentor,
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2024-12-06 23:11:00
In my Linux and DevSecOps classes, my students run a handful of virtual machines for their labs. We see all kinds of host OS configurations: Windows, MacOS, all kinds of Linuxen. And then there's both Intel, AMD and Apple CPUs. It makes for an interesting mish-mash.
In most cases we build a NAT network, which has the VMs in it. This shields the VMs from the rest of the network (keeping them safer), while still giving them Internet access.
Every hypervisor (virtualisation software) has its own approach for this. In VMWare it's almost by default that VMs end up in the same, shared NAT network. In VirtualBox you have to change the adapter connection from "NAT" to "NAT Network".
UTM on MacOS on aarch64 (Apple Silicon ARM) confounded me for quite a while. Unfortunately their documentation isn't perfectly clear on the subject. But, this week we got it to work!
To setup more than one VM, in UTM, in a shared NAT network, you do the following. For each virtual machine, go into the Networking configuration. Make these settings:
The networking configuration screen suggests that DHCP works out of the box, without configuration, but it doesn't. I have had to manually enter the information which was already in the boxes (but greyed out), to make it work.
Now when you boot the VMs, they will be in 10.0.2.0/24 and they'll get IPs starting at .15. They can ping each other, plus you can SSH to them directly from your MAC without needing any port forwards.
kilala.nl tags: studies, mentor,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.