Contributed by grey on from the certifiable dept.
BSD Certification Group Takes Initiative
Today, the BSD Certification Group officially announces their website and group focused in the creation of BSD certification. The public website is at http://www.bsdcertification.org/.
A number of BSD developers, systems administrators and advocates have come together to begin the first steps in the creation of a standard BSD certification. Today marks the official launch of their public website at http://www.bsdcertification.org/.
The BSDs, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, are mature operating systems based on the original Unix developed at University of Berkeley, California. BSD powers global Internet service provider infrastructures, and BSD userland applications are familiar to those running Apple's OS X operating system. BSD tools like OpenSSH are used to securely access remote systems, and many TCP/IP stacks are derived from BSD.
"While some may feel that a BSD certification would just replicate the problems that other certifications have created, namely lack of experience masked by a piece of paper, the committee is convinced that with the proper preparation and testing criteria, a tiered BSD certification process can demonstrate real-world proficiency as well as provide a goal for those just beginning their systems and network administration career," said Dru Lavigne, networking and Unix instructor and the chair for the group.
The BSD Certification Group looks to bring together the BSD projects, important vendors, educational institutions and beyond to work to make this project a success.
The group invites all who are interested to subscribe to the public BSD certification mailing list at http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert.
(Comments are closed)
By Anonymous Coward (66.131.207.182) on
Comments
By Sean Brown (68.147.202.55) on
By Anthony Roberts (68.145.103.21) on
Comments
By George (151.202.61.82) george at nycbug dot org on http://www.bsdcertification.org
I would recommend you reread the initial post. . . we are really at the initial stages. We don't consider this a month-long effort where we throw together 100 questions and stamp in approval or not. We are looking to create something comprehensive, with the support of each of the projects at some level, that is not a cake-walk for anyone, particularly for those who haven't worked on the BSDs in production environments.
So to talk about fees right now would be premature.
Please check out the www site at www.bsdcertification.org for more information. . . I think the site provides the overview you may be looking for.
Comments
By jb (217.35.105.99) on
By Anonymous Coward (64.1.201.130) on
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
Comments
By Anonymous Coward (208.252.48.163) on
Comments
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
Comments
By George (66.65.59.124) george at nycbug dot org on http://www.bsdcertification.org
Somebody is in a bitter mood today.
1. "Vague hand-waving" seems a bit over the top, don't you think? It's a *press release*.
2. We are not looking for magic. Hell, I don't even believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny myself. Just don't tell my mother.
3. As was made clear from the press release, we are not impressed with the majority of other certifications, and we do not put any on a throne. I personally do think that there's useful and positive lessons from a number of certs, such as the SANS certs, Cisco, etc.
4. We are not interested in selling this to anyone. We are convinced that a cert, created with the oversight and backing of key players in each of the projects, could be useful to dealing with the *perception* that the BSDs are not commercially supported.
Anyway, it seems like you're having a bad day, but frankly, that's nothing a discussion about a BSD Certification is going to change.
Comments
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
Comments
By Anonymous Coward (80.108.115.184) on
First, the general attitude towards certs. Whether they're easy to get for money, whether they say anything about real world knowledge and abilities.
Second, about the BSDcert idea/project in particular and their lack (at least for now) of more concrete information about their idea.
By Anonymous Coward (80.219.121.189) on
I didn't finish my degree because I didn't really care, I prefered to study on my own.
When I worked in finance, I refused to turn up for my market-making cert (easily worth a $10k/month salary, not counting annual bonuses), because I didn't feel the need to be certified for something that I was already doing for several years.
I've refused to do MCSE's at least 3 times, even though I probably have the knowledge, and would have had it paid.
When Linux was the buzzword, I chose Openbsd. Because it was technically better, and the ideas behind it were sound.
Recently, on a bad day, I even signed up for CS at the age of 35 (with 20+ years of computing behind me), hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge, but dropped out once more because the curriculum did not in any sense fit my interests/needs, any more than it did 15 years ago, when I opted for humanities instead.
However, I find this project interesting and have signed up for the lists. Why? Because it's a community effort. And HR drones are not going to disappear overnight.
You don't like it, fine. But at least let them attempt their thing without slagging them so vehemently beforehand.
They're actively looking for input, which imho merits a broad press release.
By Anonymous Bastard (12.33.195.201) on
a. have attempted certs and failed
b. dont have the balls to even try
c. are not motivated enough to try
given that this seems to be a community/volunteer driven effort (as opposed to a corporate effort), it would be my guess that there will be little profit to those involved. that's what seperates us from the m$ admins, or so i thought. we do this b/c we like it, sometimes we make a living doing it and sometimes we dont. in the end it seldom feels like work though.
Comments
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
Comments
By Tom (192.216.27.32) on
That all said... I think I've finally landed my first admin job and without the help of anything but showing a manager I knew what I was talking about when he asked me questions. :)
Comments
By Anonymous Bastard (12.33.195.201) on
for the record, i am cisco certified (ccnp/ccdp) just so you know where i am coming from. i get them for all of the obvious reasons: career advancement, pay raises, and last but not certainly not least, to actually learn something I didn't know before.
Comments
By Tom (192.216.27.32) on
More so my last post was over the frustration of dealing with IS people who really shouldn't be in IS but the alphabet soup on their resume keeps them there. Nothing is more annoying then having to explain to IS people why they need to test our latest software release before going into production with it. My company doesn't provide just a dinky little app, our stuff provides the bulk of a hospital's IT infrastructure. There are a lot of people who can pass technical tests with little or no common sense. Having to compete with those people and needing to spend time to get as much alphabet soup on my resume was pretty annoying. That said, I'll still be going for a CCNA even though I don't need it any time soon now. (Different group which I don't want to work for.) Now I can concentrate on the certs in areas that I really want to learn.
Comments
By Bert (216.175.250.42) thrashbluegrass@antisocial.com on
And you talk about an alphabet soup after the name, you've got MS, MA, MBA, PhD, etc. This is the same gripe that many professionals have for other professionals, regardless of the profession.
Comments
By Tom (192.216.27.32) on
You mean... It never gets better!?!
Seriously though, it usually takes somebody older to knock some sense into me every once and a while. Thanks. ;)
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
By jb (217.35.105.99) on
if it's expensive like sht.
I suspect that everybody around value education and knowledge, and
reckon they can know more tomorow because they're now reading some
random doc or manual page, or because they'll be working around some
problem in two minutes.
Also, capturing the knowledge of folks in an examination simply doesn't
work, unless they know it all or are totally dumb. That's one of the
reasons you have continual control in schools and universities, at least
where I leave. You can't get away with studying, but surely you can get
away with fixed punctual exams.
I believe that I don't need a certification, but give me another
sysadmin and he/she'll tell if I can work for her (or not), if only
because I can put some "huh, dunno, need to read the man page" at the
proper places in the conversation.
Long story short: you can't evaluate someone with an exam and see if she
gets the big picture or the detail, according to the job needed, even
if it lasts a couple of days, knowledge is too fuzzy for that.
But then again, HR drones don't understand fuzzy, they need stamps and
forms. It's a shame more than an honor to give up and be bullied, or
to organize the bullying, for that matter (especially if you don't make
money out of it! You're crazy or what?)
The folks that are organizing this BSD thingy seem decent chaps, maybe
they could think again ?
Comments
By Anonymous Coward (168.100.249.178) on
Comments
By Anonymous Coward (168.100.249.178) on
By Jim B. (151.198.130.50) on
One challenge to this is figuring out how this would work globally. Sure, I can set something up at the local Sylvan Center, but that's not available in (__insert non-US country here___). It's very important that this effort achieve legitimacy all over the world, not just the US.
Yes, Xen, qemu, VMWare and other options have been mentioned. Nothing concrete yet. Ideas, options, and solutions are welcome on the bsdcert email list.
By Anonymous Coward (66.11.174.150) on
Comments
By Jim (128.36.236.7) on
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
By tedu (64.173.147.27) on
By Anonymous Bastard (12.33.195.201) on
I know some people won't like me saying this, but I didn't realize DragonFly had a large enough user base to be included in something like this already.
On the positive side, I do think this is a great ideal, that is, to have a *BSD certification - as long as the quality and difficulty maintained is at least several times that of the Mc$e. I am also glad to see it's not a FreeBSD or NetBSD etc certification, but rather an umbrella *BSD cert. In that respect this group seems to have learned a few things from the history of *nix. No more civil wars please.
so now for (major) *nix certs we have:
1. solaris - system, network, security
2. Redhat
3. gnu/linux
4. BSD - woohoo!
any others *worth* mentioning?
Comments
By Jim B. (205.156.188.254) on
The idea is that we wanted to be be inclusive of the major BSD projects. That said, we had to draw the line somewhere or everybody who can cut a BSD ISO would want in. It's going to be hard enough preparing materials to cover the major projects. Other projects may be added in the future after the first certifications are out the door. That remains to be seen.
One other note- there is considerable discussion on the bsdcert mailing list about how the certification(s) should be structured, what they should include, testing, lab exams and so forth. If you feel the BSD certifcation should be a heavyweight, join the list and get involved. There will plenty of work to go around.
Comments
By Anonymous Bastard (68.58.153.70) on
By Chas (147.154.235.53) on http://rhadmin.org
...which to be called the 3HO-002 exam (I passed the old version). See their web page.
This exam is (or used to be) cut into three areas of focus: a) general unix, b) HP-UX sysadmin, c) networking.
You could probably combine a very intensive part (a) with a light, platform-independent part (b), then split part (c) off into a separate (bsd-oriented) exam.
There really isn't a good, general unix certification, and I think that there is a market for it. Heavy, heavy focus on scripting in the members of the Bourne family, awk, regex (no pcre), vi (manditory for cross-platform admins), device files, POSIX syscalls and shell utilities to control them (i.e. ipcrm), general filesystem (perms, redirects, fifo, etc.), etc. Maybe what is platform-independent is too simple, but people who know the lineage and capabilities of unix cli tools are rare. A cert would help identify them.
My favorite question would probably be "Which member of the Bourne family of shells does not implement 'print'? a) ksh88 b) zsh c) bash d) pdksh?"
Summary: I don't think that the BSD intro exam should focus on BSD.
By Anonymous Coward (69.193.143.53) on
By Anonymous Coward (66.131.207.182) on
Comments
By George (151.202.61.82) george at nycbug dot org on http://www.bsdcertification.org
Good question.
We haven't worked out any of the financing issues at this point, AC. It would of course be important to us to keep the cost of the certification as inexpensive, and give anything we can to the BSD projects.
It seems common that one of the larger hurdles to attaining certifications is the cost of test-taking and training, which is something we would be more than happy to avoid.
We are really still at the point of determining the structure of the certification. We have some sponsors and endorsers lined up, but haven't even begun to ask for financial backing.
It would seem that the biggest financial costs are going to be related to test centers, testing applications and testing materials.
By Boris (218.103.119.24) on
FAQ page:
"the ability for employers and employee candidates to gauge proficiency on the BSD platform."
Somebody who needs certification to help gauge proficiency should not be hiring any staff.
"We also believe that a certification process can begin to address the lack of paid support for BSD systems, allowing BSD to integrate more fully into the marketplace."
Speak for yourself, there are a lot of good paid support for BSD, and there has been for decades. you're lowering the existing market.
Nobody has certified you to certify others. BSD and certification are not of the same world, and are better not mixed up. spend time coding rather than certifying people.
If you're capable of certifying people, you should code. not waste your skills on certifalsification.
If you want to help others learning the BSD way, learn it very well then teach it in universities and schools first. there are plenty students waiting.
Comments
By Shawn (199.89.64.40) shawn.bsd@casid.net on
Maybe, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a lot of people in the business world in this position. Sure some of them should outsource the hiring to a professional firm that can better guage the technical abilities of the applicants but in a lot of cases thats not financially possible.
"Nobody has certified you to certify others. BSD and certification are not of the same world, and are better not mixed up. spend time coding rather than certifying people."
The market will ultimately certify them based on the results of people with this certification.
"If you're capable of certifying people, you should code. not waste your skills on certifalsification."
Not everyone is a coder, nor is that the only needed task in a sucessful operating system. To think otherwise is just foolish and ignorant.
By Anonymous Coward (192.133.42.1) on
By evild (66.159.249.56) on
a thing that many people here are missing, is that the knowledge they have in most cases took years and years to accumilate. for an experienced admin trying to go from one platform to another it may be useful to go the cert route. its more structured, and its knowledge hand picked by experts. its not the end all be all, but its definately useful.
oh, and please lets stop the straw man attacks ok? why does everyone use MCSEs as an example instead of CCIE/RHCE? even then, an MCSE may not prove that one is a good network engineer, but making a bsd cert several times harder than an MCSE is tarded. several times more useful is good. ive seen people here say getting an MCSE is easy, its not. i wonder how many people here have an MCSE, i know i wouldnt unless it guaranteed me a pay raise at the time. one positive side-effect was that when recommending non-microsoft stuff to clients i could always play the MCSE card :).