Certification musings

DevilWAH

It always shocks me the lack of basic skills that supposedly "highly" certified engineers seems to have. And this is across the board.

Recently I had an engineer come in to discuss routing between sites, yet when asked some (what I know relies where) entry level questions about vlans, struggled to tell me any thing, he even seems to have difficulty grasping what I was going on about, and wanted to relate every thing back to EIGRP routing. Designing the trunking with in a layer 3 network seemed a new idea to him!! yet he has been working in networks for years and has a number of certificates under his belt.

However there is one thing I have noticed. Although there are exceptions, I do find with the many consultants I deal with in my job, that there is a defiant tread to be see. Most Networking consultants have a far greater knowledge of the server side, than server people have of the network side. (they may not have in-depth knowledge but they do have general knowledge of the systems and how they work)

I was also on a VMware course last week (really interesting actual an I may well take the exam between my CCNP SWITCH AND ROUTE exams). but the trainer was telling us about the exam, and it was like. Oh you must know this face, you should know this fact. He was even saying things like. Well you can do this in the real world, but if your asked in the exam then say you can't, as VMware don't support it!!! I mean how bad is that, how are you men't to practice, when what the software is telling you, is different to what you have to know for the exam??

HeroPsycho

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Crticism is fine, in fact its good, but it gets tiresome stating my opinion and then having people tear into it because it didnt coincide with someone else opinion.

Not nearly as tiresome as having to correct you all the time.

mikej412

One of my favorite certification musings:

I've seen Cisco CCVPs who couldn't make a phone call if you gave them access to a pay phone and a pocket full of change.

TheShadow

wow had to take my shirt off as there is a lot of heat in here. Where is that Diogenes fellow, we could use a lamp to put some more light on the subject. I certainly did not take offense at what Turgon said and I have a stack of Microsoft certs. However I take exams in whatever happens to interest me for general knowledge, to exercise my brain, and to shut-up the guys out in the field that think it is a measure of manhood size.

At the moment my interest is Juniper, some of the dumpers are so dumb that there were a couple of occasions where they were asking for them on Junipers own site. If Turgon had picked Juniper, or any other vendor, someone probably would have been offended. I.T. is no place for thin skin unless you are going to stay on the porch with the little dogs. Must be end of Winter fatigue. To thine own self be true.

eMeS

mikedisd2 wrote: »

Nothing offensive about Turgon's post. Much more constructive than "Six Sigma Mr. Miyagi/ITIL crap".

Not to continue stirring the pot, but I think I've made several posts over the years questioning the veracity of many of the SixSigma training and certification programs out there. Many are simply scams, as there is no unified governing body for SixSigma certifications. About the safest place to get them is from either GE or the American Society for Quality, which is where mine is from. As far as dumping a SixSigma exam goes, it would depend on from where it's being offered. The ASQ exams are not dumped, because they change every quarter, which is how often they're delivered the last time I checked. Additionally, you have to prove experience with ASQ to get the cert.

As far as cheating on ITIL exams goes...I regularly proctor these exams. It definitely happens. I have been faced with cheating in many forms and have reported it as per the process. The higher up in the ITIL cert scheme you go, the less dumping/cheating there is, as beyond foundation those exams are so rare as to not really be available. The **** companies are interested in the heavy-lift items that will sell a lot, not something that will sell one or two here or there.

Additionally, I think Turgon and I at one time discussed in a thread here large training vendors teaching certification-related classes and using/recommending **** as part of the class. As I remember this wasn't vendor-specific.

MS

UnixGuy

I can't agree more on the topics of Hardware and RAID in general, they're very essential. Most of our time - as Sun support - is spent basically on these two areas because system admins don't get the chance to tamper with RAID and it's too critical, they can't do a mistake with one command, it'll wipe out the system.

Turgon wrote: »

Not particularly important but in discussion with our time served systems architect we briefly moved on to MS certification in general. Two points he raised. One - little incentive to keep up with all the tests and two..he's seen too many Microsoft qualified people who when asked to partition a disk and install windows needed quite a lot of help to do that.

Interesting. I suppose some things haven't changed since the NT days then. It seems there is still a hands on gap. I can only speak for MCSE NT 4.0. When I studied that back in the day, pre VMWare and accessible affordable home labs (i.e you had an NT domain at work you couldnt screw around with and you certainly didnt have access to NT at home to play with), you had to compensate by a lot of book reading and careful analysis of what was in production at work. In the books there was a lot of stuff about ARC paths and RAID and disks and what have you but the basics of getting the OS installed on a machine were poorly roadmapped in the books. Essentially it was you need this minimum spec for a machine to run NT, put CD in drive you will need minimum partition size x, make it PDC give it domain name..etc etc.

Many contract server engineers wiped out installations due to bad installation process and had to start all over again.

The hassles of setting up partitions and hardware RAID (Optional but often used with Compaqs) were avoided in the books as was proprietary smartstart CD use, as was SCSI driver options when installing NT. But it was alluded to if you studied the material hard. Many didnt.

I suppose its just testiment to people dumping the tests without having the hardcore server installation experience really. For those lucky enough to take the Compaq ASE tests back in the day in the late nineties at least the baremetal config of server hardware and OS installation and network drivers and RAID was covered. The ASE has since gone.

But not completely..HP have a variant here for Master ASE

Master ASE ? HP ProCurve Campus LANs [2010] - HP ProCurve Networking

Hardware is important. I recall taking instructions from Sun over the phone back in 2001 to get Veritas Volume Manager removed from some 4000 enterprise Sun boxes and spent a few hours doing it. No offshore flow chart support nonsense, that guy knew his stuff at the command line and only had me to give him feedback over the phone while I typed in his commands and told him what I could see on the box. I always remember 'sugar bin' i.e sbin.. No remote connection for the engineer. How times change.

UnixGuy

DevilWAH wrote: »

He was even saying things like. Well you can do this in the real world, but if your asked in the exam then say you can't, as VMware don't support it!!! ??

let me comment on that. While I don't know the exact things he was tellling, but sometimes I tell the same things to our customers. They try to do things with Solaris; while they might work, they're not support.

There's a reason why certain things aren't supported. First, vendors do test things thoroughly, so sometimes they find certain unfixable bugs, so that things that "might" work sometimes, it might not be the case all the times.

Second, if certain setups/configurations aren't supported due to bugs, it's important to avoid them for supportability. Say a problem happened at a client site, unless the client followed the standards of the vendor (i.e. avoided unsupported configs/setups) then it'll be difficult to "support" and isolate the problem.

I once had a client who insisted that a certain hard drive will fit and work with the server, and he himself installed it. It worked yes, but it wasn't under the supported list of Hard drives for that specific server. I clearly told the customer that if the system crashed later on, it'll be difficul to troubleshoot.

UnixGuy

mikej412 wrote: »

One of my favorite certification musings:

I've seen Cisco CCVPs who couldn't make a phone call if you gave them access to a pay phone and a pocket full of change.

hahaha..., he's not trained on that phone

MentholMoose

DevilWAH wrote: »

It always shocks me the lack of basic skills that supposedly "highly" certified engineers seems to have. And this is across the board.

Recently I had an engineer come in to discuss routing between sites, yet when asked some (what I know relies where) entry level questions about vlans, struggled to tell me any thing, he even seems to have difficulty grasping what I was going on about, and wanted to relate every thing back to EIGRP routing. Designing the trunking with in a layer 3 network seemed a new idea to him!! yet he has been working in networks for years and has a number of certificates under his belt.

Maybe he had a lot of experience with Layer 3 and routing protocols, and not so much with Layer 2 and VLANs, which apparently you are currently studying and thus have fresh in your mind. Just because you pass a cert (or get a diploma ) doesn't mean you retain that knowledge indefinitely, let alone are an expert on every aspect of it forever and always. If you asked me questions about RDS or ADFS, or any of the stuff I never use and only studied while getting MCITP SA and EA, I probably couldn't give you good answers on the spot. If you open a Cisco TAC case, chances are your issue will be handled by multiple people with a CCIE because they specialize in certain areas.

I wouldn't be surprised if that engineer you spoke with is on a forum somewhere complaining about a know it all customer he just had to deal with. I say this because I've been in this kind of situation before, on a job interview actually, and it wasn't pleasant, though I've never complained about it (until now, I guess ). When we were discussing the job opening, two aspects of my then current job (which was my only relevant experience) that came up were that I used BackupExec and did not use Exchange. After that came the technical section of the interview, and one of the questions he asked was about backing up Exchange with BackupExec. Of course I had no clue about this during the interview, and the question was phrased such that I didn't even know Exchange was involved, so the guy gave me a really hard time about not knowing such a basic feature of BackupExec.

I researched the question later, and the question was about a checkbox in the settings for an Exchange backup. So, the reality is that he was a bad interviewer and not paying attention to what I was saying, but I can imagine him complaining on a forum somewhere about the lack of qualified candidates for his job opening.


When facing the phenomena brought up by the OP, you (speaking generally now) can be smug and snicker or criticize someone, and/or feel an enhanced sense of self-worth from the knowledge of your supreme superiority. This will just make you look bad in the long run (if not the short run). Nobody knows everything. The fact that you don't know something is meaningless, but it is important how you handle what you don't know. If you don't realize this, you will likely suffer professionally because the world is all about teamwork, and if you instantly assume any coworker (read: teammate) is an idiot if they don't know every random fact that you do, you will have serious problems. This is my observation from having the misfortune of working with these types of people.

As I've alluded to, people specialize in certain areas, and don't focus on others. Additionally, people do things in different ways. If you find that someone doesn't know something, instead of assuming they are a moron, assume that there is a valid reason. Maybe the guy who couldn't partition a hard drive never had to because they worked in a large environment with many highly specialized departments, where one department did the hardware purchasing, one did the hardware unpacking, one did the hardware racking, one did the cabling, one did the server OS installs, one did the server OS configuration, one did the application installation, one did the application configuration, and one actually used the application, or some combination thereof. Or maybe that guy didn't like to waste time manually partitioning drives and did scripted installs. Or he used drive imaging? Or he setup a complex lite or zero touch deployment solution? Or (as could be the case now) he just deploys VMs from templates he builds only occasionally?

In other words, while you are busy looking down on someone and considering them undeserving of being in your presence, the reality may be that they actually are smart, efficient, and excellent at their job. This attitude is very, very difficult to hide. Humans are masterful at interpreting tone of voice, body language, and other signals, so you will quickly gain many enemies.

DevilWAH wrote: »

However there is one thing I have noticed. Although there are exceptions, I do find with the many consultants I deal with in my job, that there is a defiant tread to be see. Most Networking consultants have a far greater knowledge of the server side, than server people have of the network side. (they may not have in-depth knowledge but they do have general knowledge of the systems and how they work)

This "defiant tread" simply is due to the nature of these positions. If a network engineer knows nothing about the bits traversing his network, he probably isn't a good network engineer. Having knowledge about the protocols and services behind those bits is just part of the job, and by extension you have to know a bit about the systems pushing those bits. Can you say the same if a systems engineer doesn't know how MPLS works, or how BGP (or any routing protocol) function? This is usually irrelevant to the job, so I'd say no.

Further, in many companies, there is a clear specialization of labor. The systems engineers are prohibited from touching any network configuration at all, just like the network engineers don't touch an OU structure or create GPOs. In my current environment, which isn't even very large, I refer anything network related to the network engineer, even easy stuff I can and have done such as VLAN assignments. This point is further illustrated by VMware, because you have the server team doing some network stuff, which just isn't acceptable in many places, so there is now a solution to this in the Cisco 1000V.

DevilWAH wrote: »

I was also on a VMware course last week (really interesting actual an I may well take the exam between my CCNP SWITCH AND ROUTE exams). but the trainer was telling us about the exam, and it was like. Oh you must know this face, you should know this fact. He was even saying things like. Well you can do this in the real world, but if your asked in the exam then say you can't, as VMware don't support it!!! I mean how bad is that, how are you men't to practice, when what the software is telling you, is different to what you have to know for the exam??

The same can probably be said for any cert exam. When I passed the CCNA in 2005, I had to be sure to assume that "ip subnet-zero" was never enabled, despite the fact that it was in widespread use at the time. When I passed CCNA again in 2009, things had changed and I could assume that "ip subnet-zero" was enabled if the question specified that it was. The exam maintainers have to assume a certain baseline, and enforce it, otherwise they will end up with questions that are ambiguous and have multiple answers, or they have to add tons of qualifiers (even more than they already do) to every question.

DevilWAH

MentholMoose wrote: »

Maybe he had a lot of experience with Layer 3 and routing protocols, and not so much with Layer 2 and VLANs, which apparently you are currently studying and thus have fresh in your mind. Just because you pass a cert (or get a diploma ) doesn't mean you retain that knowledge indefinitely,

Although I don't know the details of my zoology degree I carried out 12 years back, and I have been out of the science field for the last 5 years. But I still have all the basic theory Knowlage. Understanding the theory of an idea is something very different from retaining all the exact facts. My issue with this engineer was not only he seemed to lack the knowledge, but that he was clearly trying to make up for it by going on about routing protocols. Not knowing the answer is one thing, but I would rather him have said "sorry I don't know I will find out" Than try to palm me of with lots of hot air.

I researched the question later, and the question was about a checkbox in the settings for an Exchange backup. So, the reality is that he was a bad interviewer and not paying attention to what I was saying, but I can imagine him complaining on a forum somewhere about the lack of qualified candidates for his job opening.

See in this case did you hold up your hands and say you where not sure? and try to suggest what you thought it may be and that you would need to check first before. Or did you simply try to look as though you understood. Now I'm not suggesting you tried either approach, but from a employers point of view, if i was interviewing I don't want to hire some one who is clearly out of there depth and trying to cover it up. (Let me make it clear I am not suggesting for a moment this was true in your case) But I hope you get my point of why I was disappointed with my engineer.


When facing the phenomena brought up by the OP, you (speaking generally now) can be smug and snicker or criticize someone, and/or feel an enhanced sense of self-worth from the knowledge of your supreme superiority. This will just make you look bad in the long run (if not the short run). Nobody knows everything. The fact that you don't know something is meaningless, but it is important how you handle what you don't know. If you don't realize this, you will likely suffer professionally because the world is all about teamwork, and if you instantly assume any coworker (read: teammate) is an idiot if they don't know every random fact that you do, you will have serious problems. This is my observation from having the misfortune of working with these types of people.

as above

This "defiant tread" simply is due to the nature of these positions. If a network engineer knows nothing about the bits traversing his network, he probably isn't a good network engineer. Having knowledge about the protocols and services behind those bits is just part of the job, and by extension you have to know a bit about the systems pushing those bits. Can you say the same if a systems engineer doesn't know how MPLS works, or how BGP (or any routing protocol) function? This is usually irrelevant to the job, so I'd say no.

See we have this set up, with different people doing different jobs. But you notice that the ones that work well as a team, are the ones that take interest in each others jobs. Where I work we discuss what we are doing. We present our projects to each other and try to lean a bit about what the work involves. Because we find other wise that you end up with 5 people working on the problem independently, while the 6th person has solved it a year ago but because no one knows what he's doing they never think to ask.

And yes I will bash the Server guys for a moment here , Because I am often bringing things to there attention. Because although I am by no means a guru in terms of servers, I do know enough that I can see when a networking idea can be taken over in to the server field. I take time to learn enough about the server side, to know how to implement the network, to best support the applications needed. However I have not meet many server people who take the time to learn the basics of networking and take much time to consider them during there development to help out the network.

And maybe MPLS or BGP they don't need to know, But I know plenty of system engineers that don't know how DNS, DHCP, IP address, switching or simple routing works.


Further, in many companies, there is a clear specialization of labor. The systems engineers are prohibited from touching any network configuration at all, just like the network engineers don't touch an OU structure or create GPOs. In my current environment, which isn't even very large, I refer anything network related to the network engineer, even easy stuff I can and have done such as VLAN assignments. This point is further illustrated by VMware, because you have the server team doing some network stuff, which just isn't acceptable in many places, so there is now a solution to this in the Cisco 1000V.

Again I don't like that definitive line between one job and another. to get the best out of a system both sided need an overlap of knowledge. There needs to be understanding at the boundaries to allow a seamless hand over. The systems that work best in my company are the ones where people have discussed each other area knowledge. And agreed at a handover point that suits them both. And the only way to reach this is to understand a bit about each others field


The same can probably be said for any cert exam. When I passed the CCNA in 2005, I had to be sure to assume that "ip subnet-zero" was never enabled, despite the fact that it was in widespread use at the time. When I passed CCNA again in 2009, things had changed and I could assume that "ip subnet-zero" was enabled if the question specified that it was. The exam maintainers have to assume a certain baseline, and enforce it, otherwise they will end up with questions that are ambiguous and have multiple answers, or they have to add tons of qualifiers (even more than they already do) to every question.

See I think this is different, IP subnet zero is a planned config that is a valid part of the config. so yes you have to be able to assume it is one or the other. But cisco would never ask a question like, is "#ip subnet-zero" a valid configuration", have a yes no answer, and mark you wrong for saying yes.. They may ask a sub netting question that relies on you understanding what IP subnet zero does to get the correct answer however, and tell you to assume what it is set to. VMware on the other hand will ask you if a perfectly valid config is vaild, and tell you no because it is not supported.

Forsaken_GA

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Also, if i made a random post about how a lot of peopel with Cisco certs or ##### were cheaters and fakes then you and I both know that the Cisco guys and YOU would have been in that thread chapping my rear end over it. Don't act like you wouldn't be.

For starters, the chances that someone without measurable experience is going to get to touch critical network infrastructure is unlikely in most cases. That's not always going to be the case in the server world. Turgon was also making a point about the interaction between the person, the hardware, the operating system, and the relative knowledge level of each. Working with Cisco gear, you generally don't need to worry about things like disk partitioning, raid, etc. Your potential for casusing catastrophic data loss is somewhat limited.

And then there's the simple fact that he's right. Last week, we had a Dell tech come in to do some warranty work on a customers server. Since our security policy dictates that a non-employee/customer in the building must be accompanied by an escort at all times, the server guys asked me to babysit, since they were a little busy. I agreed. Now, this tech was supposed to be there to change out some faulty memory, and that's it. But he only had one 2 gig stick, when he needed 2 of them. He also had a motherboard with him, which he also decided to replace. His reasoning was that they wouldn't have given him one if they didn't mean for him to replace it. So he did that. And then he noticed that he had a small bag with a cmos battery in it. He decided that since they'd given him that, he needed to change it out on the new motherboard that he just put in as well.

I sat and watched this man for 30 minutes try to get the CMOS battery out. And he did, finally, in a sense of speaking... he pulled the entire battery socket off of the motherboard. And then tried to play it off to me like it was normal and all was cool (I knew better). He changed the battery and then just sat the battery socket back on the motherboard and racked the server back up. And, of course, it failed to POST.

As he was leaving, he had the balls to ask me if we were hiring.

Now, nowhere in this did I mention Microsoft. What I described is someone who obviously doesn't have alot of experience dealing with hardware, and obviously does not have the capability to make good decisions (he wasn't following orders, he subscribed to the theory that he was given the following, so he must use the following, nevermind that it was totally unrelated to what he was *supposed* to be fixing). We chatted while he worked, and he told me all about how he'd just gotten out of school and was Microsoft Certified and this field repair tech job was his first real IT job, and it sucked so bad because he never got to do anything fun, yada yada, so on and so forth.

Now, screwing up with hardware certainly isn't limited to Windows folk. Unix people are just as capable of it, but most Unix folks tend to be self taught with plenty of hands on experience, since you can install some form of unix on just about anything with a processor and RAM. As Turgon mentioned, back in the early days of NT, that didn't happen so much, not many folks had a domain controller to play with and make their mistakes with. You certainly weren't going to be repartioning and setting up RAID on your production servers just so you could learn.

And not having direct experience with the hardware can bite some people in the ass in the network world too. Just go talk to the sales people for resellers and ask them about how many mistakes people make with their orders for fiber gear. Green network admins invariably order the wrong type of fiber interfaces in the beginning unless they've got someone on hand to teach them the difference

astorrs

DevilWAH wrote: »

VMware on the other hand will ask you if a perfectly valid config is vaild, and tell you no because it is not supported.

I would love to know what they asked...

I hate NDAs.

Hyper-Me

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

For starters, the chances that someone without measurable experience is going to get to touch critical network infrastructure is unlikely in most cases. That's not always going to be the case in the server world.

Entirely subjective. I've seen places where they hired so called network engineers with tens of years experience, only for them to brick brand new 5000$ pieces of equipment because they didnt know what they were doing. (in one case, trying to stack several switches that had mismatched firmware.)

Forsaken_GA wrote:

I sat and watched this man for 30 minutes try to get the CMOS battery out. And he did, finally, in a sense of speaking... he pulled the entire battery socket off of the motherboard. And then tried to play it off to me like it was normal and all was cool (I knew better). He changed the battery and then just sat the battery socket back on the motherboard and racked the server back up. And, of course, it failed to POST.

So one idiot that works for Dell doing hardware service means that all Microsoft certified professionals are cheaters and/or idiots?

Forsaken_GA wrote:

Now, nowhere in this did I mention Microsoft. What I described is someone who obviously doesn't have alot of experience dealing with hardware, and obviously does not have the capability to make good decisions (he wasn't following orders, he subscribed to the theory that he was given the following, so he must use the following, nevermind that it was totally unrelated to what he was *supposed* to be fixing). We chatted while he worked, and he told me all about how he'd just gotten out of school and was Microsoft Certified and this field repair tech job was his first real IT job, and it sucked so bad because he never got to do anything fun, yada yada, so on and so forth.

Didnt mention MS? Not until a few lines later. I would venture to say that anyone who has only schooling under their belt and no real world experience is not only entitled to a few mistakes, but will definitely make them. Some bigger than others, but everybody screws up. (regardless of what vendor their certs came from)

Forsaken_GA wrote:

Now, screwing up with hardware certainly isn't limited to Windows folk. Unix people are just as capable of it, but most Unix folks tend to be self taught with plenty of hands on experience, since you can install some form of unix on just about anything with a processor and RAM. As Turgon mentioned, back in the early days of NT, that didn't happen so much, not many folks had a domain controller to play with and make their mistakes with. You certainly weren't going to be repartioning and setting up RAID on your production servers just so you could learn.

The one and only reason for this is that Windows is the prevalent OS in the world. People use it at home and tinker with it and think "hey I can work on this for a living!" and go and mess stuff up. If Linux/Unix actually had a decent market share of home/consumer/desktop users, this trend would propogate to those areas as well.

Also, just because there happen to be a bunch of noobs trying to be IT pros, and they happen to use Windows, does not in any way lessen the value of a truly knowledgeable Windows IT Pro that earned their certifications, knowledge and experience the right way. Oh, and I was self taught from tinkering at home with Windows and hardware, as were many many other people...its not just Nix people that are enthusiasts.

MentholMoose

DevilWAH wrote: »

My issue with this engineer was not only he seemed to lack the knowledge, but that he was clearly trying to make up for it by going on about routing protocols. Not knowing the answer is one thing, but I would rather him have said "sorry I don't know I will find out" Than try to palm me of with lots of hot air.

If that's the case then it was not a good approach of the engineer. As I mentioned it's very important how you handle what you don't know. But in any situation, there is the chance of miscommunication, so I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. If someone is ignoring my suggestion, I will often press them to consider it or tell me why it's not valid. It could be as simple as saying, "hey wait, what do you think about the trunking configuration?"

In one situation I saw, a junior network guy was talking with a senior network team member (who happened to have a CCIE). The senior member appeared to not know that a particular option could cause an issue that was occurring, or at least brushed it off because the symptoms pointed to something else. When the senior guy walked away, the junior guy exclaimed something like, "wow that guy's knowledge is unimpressive!" In this case it was even worse, the junior guy had actually seen the exact problem before, but instead of saying, "hey I've seen this before, this was the solution that time, please check it out", he just said, "here's the problem now go fix it". Definitely the wrong way to handle the situation.

DevilWAH wrote: »

See in this case did you hold up your hands and say you where not sure?

I asked for clarification, something along the lines of "I don't recall seeing that option, what does area of BackupExec does it apply to?" Instead of answering that it applied to Exchange backups, in which case I could have reminded him that I wasn't using Exchange and thus not backing it up with BE, the guy proceeded to go off on me about how I shouldn't put BE on my resume if I didn't know such a basic feature.

DevilWAH wrote: »

See we have this set up, with different people doing different jobs. But you notice that the ones that work well as a team, are the ones that take interest in each others jobs. Where I work we discuss what we are doing. We present our projects to each other and try to lean a bit about what the work involves.

That's a good way to approach work, but not everyone wants to do that, or even can. I've seen network people as well as systems people who were simply unwilling to take on new tasks, so from my own experience I wouldn't say one side knows more than the other. I can imagine situations that would explain what you're seeing, though. Like I said earlier, the network team has visibility into the traffic on their network, so it is typical that they need to identify problems and have an understanding of the traffic. However, systems teams are often discouraged or outright prohibited from doing anything on the network. For example, in my current environment if I want a VLAN assignment configured, despite having a CCNA and past experience performing this task, I still go to the network engineer. The Nexus 1000V on VMware is a solution to this "problem" in that VMware admins won't have to (or maybe even won't be allowed to) configure any networking.

DevilWAH wrote: »

See I think this is different, IP subnet zero is a planned config that is a valid part of the config. so yes you have to be able to assume it is one or the other. But cisco would never ask a question like, is "#ip subnet-zero" a valid configuration", have a yes no answer, and mark you wrong for saying yes.. They may ask a sub netting question that relies on you understanding what IP subnet zero does to get the correct answer however, and tell you to assume what it is set to. VMware on the other hand will ask you if a perfectly valid config is vaild, and tell you no because it is not supported.

In the CCNA I took in 2005 you had to assume it was off, otherwise they would mark your answer wrong. IIRC there were very few questions that would trip you up if you assumed ip subnet-zero was on, so it wasn't a big deal. It's similar with VMware, you can do some stuff that works but isn't recommended or supported, and thus you should assume that you can't do it for the purpose of the exam. I haven't taken the VCP exam yet so I don't know how the questions handle these scenarios. On a side note, one funny thing I noticed was that you can use the CLI to create a vSwitch with a very low number of ports, and the port count will displays as a negative number in the vCenter client.

Forsaken_GA

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Entirely subjective. I've seen places where they hired so called network engineers with tens of years experience, only for them to brick brand new 5000$ pieces of equipment because they didnt know what they were doing. (in one case, trying to stack several switches that had mismatched firmware.)

As I said, everyone can make mistakes, but I'd be willing to put cold hard cash that you'll find more bad windows admins than you will network admins (and I'd make an additional bet that the bad network admins are actually windows admins that are moonlighting )

So one idiot that works for Dell doing hardware service means that all Microsoft certified professionals are cheaters and/or idiots?

Yes.

I mean, I might as well say that, since you're just going to put the words in my mouth anyway, so yes, it's this Dell techs fault. You guys should find him and say mean things about his mother.

Didnt mention MS? Not until a few lines later. I would venture to say that anyone who has only schooling under their belt and no real world experience is not only entitled to a few mistakes, but will definitely make them. Some bigger than others, but everybody screws up. (regardless of what vendor their certs came from)

Oh, I think you'll find that employers hold a different view on whether or not their employees are entitled to make mistakes. I'm betting that if you were to actually ask some folks about that, they'd say 'not on my dime'. Sure, mistakes are going to happen, but if you represent yourself to a potential employer as more capable than you actually are, you're being dishonest. The employer is agreeing to pay you in good faith for work you say you can do, and then if you turn around and break it, you want understanding? LOL, what world do you live in? If you're up front with an employer about your lack of experience, and then they decide to hire you anyway, the onus is on them.

I understand that mistakes happen, and I personally will chalk them up to letting them go as long as the person learns something. But if someone constantly makes mistakes (even if they never make the same mistake twice), it shows a lack of attention and preparation and they need to be shown the door, quickly. And some mistakes are just too big to overlook. Our previous Senior Network Engineer found that out the hardway. Integrating some network gear, an interoperability bug was discovered that ended up causing 6 hours of downtime, which for us was disastrous. It cost us the gross income for an entire month. That engineer 'resigned' within a week.

The one and only reason for this is that Windows is the prevalent OS in the world. People use it at home and tinker with it and think "hey I can work on this for a living!" and go and mess stuff up. If Linux/Unix actually had a decent market share of home/consumer/desktop users, this trend would propogate to those areas as well.

Oh, I don't think anyones arguing that, and whether you realize it or not, you just tacitly acknowledged Turgon's point. So what are you complaining about again?

astorrs

MentholMoose wrote: »

one funny thing I noticed was that you can use the CLI to create a vSwitch with a very low number of ports, and the port count will displays as a negative number in the vCenter client.

Let me guess you made a switch with <8 ports?

Oh and that "would be unsupported"

Hyper-Me

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

As I said, everyone can make mistakes, but I'd be willing to put cold hard cash that you'll find more bad windows admins than you will network admins (and I'd make an additional bet that the bad network admins are actually windows admins that are moonlighting )

Again, entirely subjective. I've met terrible IT pros on all fronts. This might hold true if there are physically more windows admins than there are network admins, but that doesnt mean by percentage either.

Forsaken_GA wrote:

Oh, I think you'll find that employers hold a different view on whether or not their employees are entitled to make mistakes. I'm betting that if you were to actually ask some folks about that, they'd say 'not on my dime'. Sure, mistakes are going to happen, but if you represent yourself to a potential employer as more capable than you actually are, you're being dishonest. The employer is agreeing to pay you in good faith for work you say you can do, and then if you turn around and break it, you want understanding? LOL, what world do you live in? If you're up front with an employer about your lack of experience, and then they decide to hire you anyway, the onus is on them.

If an employer hires someone who is fresh out of college and has no real experience as a Senior Sys Admin or Senior Network Admin, they have noone to blame but theirself when something breaks. My point was that dude obviously hadn't been in the industry long, and to think hes a complete idiot because he made one mistake (albeit, costly) is being a little bit too hard. He may have been extremely nervous because you were standing there watching him. I know I hate people looking over my shoulder when I work.

Forsaken_GA wrote:

Oh, I don't think anyones arguing that, and whether you realize it or not, you just tacitly acknowledged Turgon's point. So what are you complaining about again?

I actually agree with the majority of Turgons post.

What bothers me is that everyone is so quick to point fingers at Microsoft Certified Professionals rather than any other vendor, when cheating is prevalent in nearly any certification realm.

Like I said, the number of cheats and noobs dealing with Windows is more obvious because of the large number of people in this niche area. Same with the apparent security shortfalls of Windows.

There is no shortage of very qualified, very talented, very knowledgeable Microsoft Certified folk, many of which reside on this very forum. To insinuate that noobs/cheats only reside in the ranks of MCP's is plainly ignorant.

rsutton

To the original statement, I don't believe MS certs cover much about RAID/hardware configurations, at least I don't recall reading much about it in my studies. I do lots of hands on work, using VMWare, so I don't touch any hardware. Also, the company I work provides IT infrastructure services to multiple small/medium sized companies in my area. Almost everything is virtual so when I create new Forests/Domains I don't touch any hardware. Actually everything I do is remote anyways. I have worked with hardware and done RAID configs in the past, but it's been years since I've needed to and I will prolly need a refresher before I touch it again.

astorrs

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Also, just because there happen to be a bunch of noobs trying to be IT pros, and they happen to use Windows, does not in any way lessen the value of a truly knowledgeable Windows IT Pro that earned their certifications, knowledge and experience the right way. Oh, and I was self taught from tinkering at home with Windows and hardware, as were many many other people...its not just Nix people that are enthusiasts.

And it shows Hyper-Me. You regularly pipe up about things you have zero or close to no experience about and then become combative when more experienced members call you out. You seem to be wholly incapable of conducting a normal conversation on these forums, instead the entire thread often derails.

There's a lot more to becoming an "IT pro" (as you put it) than some stuff you read in a book. Being a functional member of a team and working with others, knowing when you don't know enough (and should instead sit back and listen or ask others), being respectful of your peers, etc.

Based on what I've seen on these forums from you (and irrespective of any technical skills you may actually have) there is no way in hell I would let you anywhere near my clients datacenters - and I feel comfortable in stating that they'd be way better off because of that.

Hyper-Me

The 291 and I one of the Server 2008 exams (cant remember which right now) covers RAID, but its the builtin OS Software RAID of course.

Its not microsofts responsibility nor market to teach people about hardware. Which stands as a large contrast to another vendor who teaches you about their hardware and the software running on it (i.e. Cisco)

Hyper-Me

astorrs wrote: »

And it shows Hyper-Me. You regularly pipe up about things you have zero or close to no experience about and then become combative when more experienced members call you out. You seem to be wholly incapable of conducting a normal conversation on these forums, instead the entire thread often derails.

There's a lot more to becoming an "IT pro" (as you put it) than some stuff you read in a book. Being a functional member of a team and working with others, knowing when you don't know enough (and should instead sit back and listen or ask others), being respectful of your peers, etc.

Based on what I've seen on these forums from you (and irrespective of any technical skills you may actually have) there is no way in hell I would let you anywhere near my clients datacenters - and I feel comfortable in stating that they'd be way better off because of that.

I'm perfectly capable of having a conversation and seeing someone elses point of view. What gets me is when people jump to insults while trying to make their point known (which lots of people do here).

I'ved worked on several teams in the past, all with high sucess. I've rolled out large projects and infrastructures which have gone off without really any negatives, and previous and current employers are very happy with my end results. I moved from desktop support to being a senior sys admin in 2 years. I also have strict personal rules regarding if I don't know something, I look it up before I pull the trigger. I've had to call vendors, OEMs, and other resources for help before and am glad to do it if it makes the end result the right one.

Just because people get mouthy with me on an internet forum and I retort, doesn't mean I can't function in a business oriented, professional environment on daily basis.

Forsaken_GA

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Again, entirely subjective. I've met terrible IT pros on all fronts. This might hold true if there are physically more windows admins than there are network admins, but that doesnt mean by percentage either.

So my experience is subjective because based on your experience, that's not true?

And you think that makes your point of view objective?

LOL

Welcome to the real world, everything is subjective, and you are not an impartial observer.

I actually agree with the majority of Turgons post.

What bothers me is that everyone is so quick to point fingers at Microsoft Certified Professionals rather than any other vendor, when cheating is prevalent in nearly any certification realm.

Ok, so basically you're bitching for the sake of bitching, and because he said some things that weren't so complementary about a group of people that you happen to be a part of, your feelings are a little hurt.

If you'd really gotten the point of his post, you'd be mad at the people that were cheating for your certification tracks, not the person who stands up and calls the spade a spade. And absolutely nothing in Turgon's post suggested an exclusivity about the Microsoft realm, he was relating his thoughts on a conversation he had with a co-worker. Believe me when I say that legit Cisco guys have serious issues with folks cheating on Cisco exams, and Turgon has his own opinions on Cisco cheating as well.

Pointing out that there's rampant cheating in other tracks does absolutely nothing to change the fact that there are alot of Microsoft certified people out there who can't handle simple tasks like partioning and OS installation. The fact that other people are guilty of the same thing doesn't make MS cheaters less guilty. You seem to want to conveniently ignore that fact and deflect blame. I won't bother to ponder why that might be.

HeroPsycho

Hyper-Me wrote: »

I'm perfectly capable of having a conversation and seeing someone elses point of view.

How many people saying the same things over and over again and how much time does it take?

*Looking at this thread* I'm guessing a lot.

Hyper-Me

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

So my experience is subjective because based on your experience, that's not true?

And you think that makes your point of view objective?

LOL

Welcome to the real world, everything is subjective, and you are not an impartial observer.

Whos putting words in whos mouth?

My point was that everyones view on the matter would be subjective, as there is likely no hard data to back up one way or another. My view was subjective as much as yours was.

Forsaken_GA wrote:

Ok, so basically you're bitching for the sake of bitching, and because he said some things that weren't so complementary about a group of people that you happen to be a part of, your feelings are a little hurt.

If you'd really gotten the point of his post, you'd be mad at the people that were cheating for your certification tracks, not the person who stands up and calls the spade a spade. And absolutely nothing in Turgon's post suggested an exclusivity about the Microsoft realm, he was relating his thoughts on a conversation he had with a co-worker. Believe me when I say that legit Cisco guys have serious issues with folks cheating on Cisco exams, and Turgon has his own opinions on Cisco cheating as well.

Pointing out that there's rampant cheating in other tracks does absolutely nothing to change the fact that there are alot of Microsoft certified people out there who can't handle simple tasks like partioning and OS installation. The fact that other people are guilty of the same thing doesn't make MS cheaters less guilty. You seem to want to conveniently ignore that fact and deflect blame. I won't bother to ponder why that might be.

Im pretty sure I said I was bitching because people only ever point out cheaters of MS tests.

The problem here is cheaters/liars, not cheaters/liars of MS tests. They all go in the same pot, and its a problem that covers basically every certification out there. There is absolutely zero reason to remove other vendors from the argument and focus on one.

Pointing out that there is rampant cheating in the MS realm does nothing to change the fact that there are a lot of Cisco certified people out there that don't know the difference between a BNC and RJ45 connector.

All I am saying is make it a discussion about the real problem, rather than grouping it to a certain vendor and swaying the conversation.

Hyper-Me

HeroPsycho wrote: »

How many people saying the same things over and over again and how much time does it take?

*Looking at this thread* I'm guessing a lot.

I asked Turgon a simple question and you, dynamik and eMeS took it entirely out of context. Thats my fault?