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Good God the A+ 901 is an insipid test. Took it this morning and man a good 80% of the exam was completely irrelevant to my helpdesk/junior sysadmin job. When the gently caress am I ever going to be crimping cat6 by hand?? Took it mostly cold and passed just fine fortunately. Might study a bit harder for the 902 if its test asks similarly inane questions.
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Sep 20, 2017 18:03
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Cat Army 
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Kashuno posted:I've crimped quite a few cables in my day. Yeah the 902 was easy in comparison. Way fewer questions I was unsure on. The Sims were a tad more difficult than the 901, but not by much and only because they restricted what I'd typically use to troubleshoot and disabled the switch list for commands. Which is fine, whatever, good to know, but while the information relating to how systems work and troubleshooting principles are all fine, the rote memorization was annoying as all hell.
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Sep 21, 2017 15:54
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MrBigglesworth posted:If you want to work on networks you by God better loving drat well learn your color order! Nothing about color order was actually in the book or on the test, though I think I've had the importance of knowing your CAT6 suitably impressed upon me  In any event, A+ is done. Already have a job so I'll wait till I've been there long enough for them to pay for certs before doing my Network and Security+. After that, CCNA or the various Microsoft certs I think.
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Sep 21, 2017 18:21
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Peachfart posted:I don't envy anyone who has to beta a CompTIA test. Other than Sec+, their tests are focused on memorizing lots of pointless garbage(and even Sec+ has pointless stuff on it). I can only imagine how bad the beta is. Warchalking.
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Oct 12, 2017 21:16
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So my boss and I had a meeting today. Long story short, he wants me to bring to him a list of certs/courses I want to take, and my employer will cover them. While I've actually been working on a lot of really interesting stuff - helpdesk is maybe half my job with the rest being SCCM and infrastructure poo poo... I only have my A+, and my networking and storage fundamentals are pretty weak. So, I guess what I'm asking, what are some decent courses, if any exist, for Network+/ICDN1 that are relatively inexpensive? Or would it be better to buy a good workbook and study of that instead? I'm not footing the bill either way, but there's no official training budget yet and I don't want to just throw a thousand dollar bill at my boss Security+ I'm just gonna toss on there for completion's sake, though is there a good workbook for that so I can memorize more inane poo poo like mantraps and warchalking 
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Jan 12, 2018 22:30
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Colostomy Bag posted:SCCM is no joke, installing that a few years back in native mode was a complicated mess. Sorry this took so long for me to get back to! I do internal IT for an org of about 800, about 60% macs 40% PCs. My job is about 50% helpdesk - people come to me when their computer breaks, or they need help with a zoom presentation, or whatever. Then there's newhires, AD unlocking and password resets, and a weekly action on found security threats. Also dealing with vendors, cell phones, purchasing, the like. The more interesting stuff is the other half of my job. While I didn't set up the SCCM server from scratch, I'm the point woman for SCCM administration. So for example, I'm the one scripting MDT task sequences and setting up OSD, writing packages and software deployment, WSUS patch management, integration of USMT, et cetera. I also focus pretty heavily on security, ranging from GPOs to analysis of Darktrace logs and subsequent reporting, employee interviews or investigations. I also own the deployment and administration of our new antivirus. Which is poo poo, I used powershell to basically build an automated weekly report from scratch since there wasn't any built in reporting or auditing. I've been asked to write a deficiency report as a result. I've also done some minor work with managing shares and storage, but not anything to write home about. I'm 22 and I've worked in IT for a grand total of 9 months, including an internship, all at my current org. I'm entirely self taught from learning on the job, and 3/4ths of a Political Science degree. There's a few things I want to aim for. My understanding of networking fundamentals is patchy, pun not intended. While I have a basic understanding of how networks work, I don't know enough to really flourish in this field. I'm very interested in security in particular, but I also kinda want to learn more about basic server administration and setup, and obviously I need to work on my understanding of networking. My boss also recommended I look into storage as well. I also ordered the powershell in a month of lunches book to work on my scripting. so, tldr: I'm very much a generalist I don't know networks as well as I should I'm very interested and have done a lot of work with security I'm also interested in building and maintaining our server infrastrastructure, but don't have any hands on experience. I am, essentially, the SCCM administrator for my organization. My initial thoughts were to actually study/take a course for the N+ or the ICND1, and then just buy the textbook and blow through the Security+, which everyone and their mother says is a huge joke. The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jan 16, 2018 |
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Jan 16, 2018 17:08
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guys it's the USAF The bar is set at not raping japanese schoolgirls or trading intel for hookers and kickbacks I can't think of a similar Army scandal off the top of my head. Not cutting the parachute straps on, what was it, an MRAP? The point is that technical proficiency is gravy, and being able to qualify for a TS/SCI and walk in a straight line is closer to the expectations being set here. The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Jun 26, 2018 |
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Jun 26, 2018 14:16
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Space Racist posted:Well that makes my life a hell of a lot easier. I was planning this weekend to schedule the AZ-100 for late April. Yeah, may as well get the test done before may now. Convenient timing if nothing else. Any recommended resources? I've done a lot of o365/azure AD stuff but mostly heading into this fresh.
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Mar 22, 2019 13:09
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Passed my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate today! Took about a month to prepare with no prior AWS experience, studying around 4-8 hours a day with a couple of my own projects that I was interested in mixed in. I used the ACloudGuru course that everyone and their mother recommends, and it lives up to the reputation! Very engaging, fantastic instructor, and holy cow I learned a ton. The practice exams were utterly dreadful though, I gotta say. They used outdated services and terminology that haven't been around in a few years, included completely irrelevant questions, and I even noticed one question that was identical between the two practice exams but had different answers on each one! Worse, explanations for the questions were, by and large, utterly unhelpful. I would heartily recommend this set of practice questions to help you prepare as well. Mostly for extensive, in depth analysis of every single question and answer, complete with diagrams, links to external tutorials, and multi-paragraph long explanations for pretty much every single question. It's an incredibly valuable resource and I heartily recommend it. I actually failed the exam the first time around by 1 question, which tbf makes sense when you don't sleep and spend the whole night cramming. Second time around was way easier.
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Jul 5, 2019 22:33
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Any tips on the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam? I'm scheduled to take it in 2 weeks. Have some notes from when I took the exam. It's less memorization - beyond service names - and more scenario questions. I'd highly highly recommend doing as many practice tests as you can - Udemy has a bunch for cheap. Reread every question so you don't miss something small and stupid. https://docs.google.com/file/d/1UxWmvwPcHG2X3uKriAX7ipelnvjixsb8/edit?usp=docslist_api&filetype=msword Meanwhile I'm taking my okta professional cert next weekend. Anyone taken it?
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Nov 8, 2019 14:25
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Irritated Goat posted:I need to get some advice as I'm starting to lose direction\doubt myself. Oracle mini webseries on oauth 2.0 that i'm going through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEysfgIbqlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZX7554l8hY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVCzv50BslE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CHpnTysVOo everyone's moving to the cloud, so cloud certs are a great place to start. don't be married to Azure either, AWS and GCP both have excellent cert paths that don't involve dealing with azure's microsoft-y ish and identity management principles are pretty consistent across cloud/onprem and cloud providers individually. also being a self starter about this won't hurt. you're losing direction? that's fine, just so long as you're learning. watch those random youtube videos. also do a lot of home lab stuff. build an IM system with riot.io. create your own VPN tunnel and bastion-hosts. start running your own personal DNS resolver with a pihole and unbound in the cloud. looking like someone who is ambitious and a self starter is often more important than years under your belt or certifications.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:06
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I know I want to get out of helpdesk and I liked managing O365\Azure AD a while back so I'm a little lost. Which Azure cert? Should I tweak it and learn more virtualization\cloud junk? Is over 10+ years of Helpdesk just completely ruined me?
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Ups_rail posted:I feel sheepish asking but my friends husband, (who has mental health issues) is going back to school and was talking about getting certs. I asked him a few questions about the certs and felt he didnt really understand (or maybe was it was just bad communication on both our parts). Linux+ tests basic Linux commands - how to set permissions and how to use bash. It's probably great foundational knowledge honestly but I wouldn't call it a useful certification. Network+ tests your understanding of computer networking and architecture. This is a very useful certification and probably the only valuable cert comptia has ever made.
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Jan 14, 2020 14:22
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I'm writing my GCP associate cloud engineer exam next week. Any tips?
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Jan 23, 2020 00:35
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Passed my GCP Associate Cloud Engineer cert today! Was a pretty easy exam and I finished in about 15 minutes with minimal review. Learning kubernetes was super fun! I only had 37 pages of notes for this one instead of like 80 for AWS so I'm definitely learning something Mostly k8s stuff, not super comprehensive. Link for anyone interested: https://1drv.ms/w/s!Avct7YQ-auOFgYRS9l4SXcLPDJGgBA Big thanks again to the acloudguru course for this.
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Feb 4, 2020 19:18
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Certs are great because as a woman I need to demonstrate knowledge above and beyond my male colleagues in order to be taken seriously, and I personally love the way they effectively package up a subject for easyl, well defined learning. Also I've more than doubled my salary in the past four years from starting my career only a bit above minimum wage to making significantly more than that today. Certs help quite a lot!
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Feb 12, 2020 15:08
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air- posted:Where does that GCP Associate cert falls vs doing CKA? Good luck! here's the most up to date version of my AWS notes: https://1drv.ms/w/s!Avct7YQ-auOFgYNXMsgwb4LvGb_1hg?e=0wrba2 Knowing your main services at a high level is enough to pass SA Associate. It wasn't a super hard exam other than the dozens of different services you need to know.
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Mar 5, 2020 19:10
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22 Eargesplitten posted:How useful would an AWS SA Associate be if my Linux skills are limited to grep/cat/ping/ssh? I've just been given a sign that I should stop being lazy and start studying again, but I'm not sure how valuable just having the cert is with what's otherwise pretty junior admin levels of experience. You don’t need anything other than grep, cat, ping and ssh to do most cloud stuff. It is extraordinarily valuable because studying for it and achieving it means you are no longer a junior admin in terms of experience.
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Mar 7, 2020 06:18
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Thanks, currently about an hour of studying done after coming back a few chapters in. I probably need to refresh myself on some of it. A month. My pet project was putting a pihole in the cloud and making it highly available. Honestly, you can find a million things to do. Do whatever holds your interest.
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Mar 9, 2020 00:54
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Thanks. Hopefully I'll be able to get it done a bit faster, I've got like four hours per day at work where I'm not actually doing any work on average, just waiting for alerts to come in. You can definitely do it faster especially if you’re studying 4 hours a day. I studied several hours a day but took plenty of breaks. There’s nothing very complicated but there is a lot of material you’ll to know. I posted a bunch of notes last page that I’d recommend you check out.
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Mar 9, 2020 02:46
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Yeah, I'm going to check that out. I really appreciate that, I'm terrible at taking notes. It seems like whenever I try I end up getting the unimportant stuff and while I'm writing down the notes I end up missing the important stuff. nothing much has changed between 2019 and 2020, networking's still the same, EC2s are still the same, etc. I don't think there's any major hot new services that would be on the Associate SA exam in the last six months, but either way the ACloudGuru courses are new for 2020. In general with any exam, I find that taking notes was a massive help for me in understanding and comprehending the material. If you're not sure whether something is important or not, write it down anyways! the act of writing something down on paper does more to write the content into our brains than listening or watching can ever do. Doing is always going to be better than passively consuming, which is why everyone and their mother gives you projects alongside the course material. Jinnigan posted:I've been looking into getting an A+ certificate but the one thing I have been getting stuck on is: how do you actually take a goddamn test? I understand that I need to spend ~$250 on a voucher, but then... is it an online test? Do I have to find a scheduled in-person test somewhere? What's the deal? Google just pulls up pages and pages of classes and people trying to bilk me out of money. buy a voucher, redeem it for a seat, and you'll take the test in person at a testing center, I think Pearson VUE runs most of them.
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Mar 9, 2020 18:51
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Writing the GCP professional cloud architect exam tomorrow. Any advice? Particularly re case studies.
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May 10, 2020 18:12
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Vintimus Prime posted:Dang just saw this. I took the test back in February and passed. How did you do? I postponed it till the end of the month actually! I was only getting around 70% in my practice tests which convinced me that a week of prep would not in fact cut it.
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May 17, 2020 01:26
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You don’t need to know instance types. You can find practice exams for a tenner on udemy and they’re only moderately good. They tend to the slightly out of date. Still, it’s good to know the format.
The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 01:24
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Passed my GCP professional cloud architect exam! Took about 30 minutes and the remote proctor was simultaneously a bit of a pain while also weirdly charming. Buddy asked me to turn my classical music down though  On a that note Zotix, the cloud is how I got into Linux. Looooots of Linux servers for webapps. Honestly the distro doesn’t particularly matter to me for that reason, except if you’re using selinux I guess. I’m mostly used to CentOS these days for that reason, but I don’t think I’d use it for a desktop environment. don’t be too wedded to one distro vs another, use whatever fits your given usecase best. They’re not completely interchangeable, but outside of apt-get vs yum and selinux, does anyone really care*? *excluding alpine for containers and other specific use cases. Genuine question though, they’re all just a shell to me :p
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Aug 1, 2020 21:44
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Vintimus Prime posted:Congratulations on the pass! I’m looking at the networking cert to tackle next myself. Same as it happens! I’ve booked it for early September. Anyone done the exam and have any tips?
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Aug 20, 2020 17:02
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freezingprocess posted:About to land my first job in IT. It is with the DoD. better than working for facebook
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Dec 17, 2020 18:04
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Don’t bother with the cloud practitioner certs. They are very general and it’s a bit of a waste of money. the associate cloud engineer certs are a great place to start and will actually get you cloud jobs. You’ve been a sysadmin long enough you don’t need to do the warmup certs. As for which one, well, you can’t go wrong with AWS. But just pick one, the skills are broadly transferable.
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Jan 18, 2021 22:42
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Passed my GCP Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification today! Definitely overstudied, the exam was a breeze and I literally finished in 10 minutes. to my surprise, a big part of that was because the udemy practice exam set I purchased a few hours before for $20 had 70% of the exact questions and answers. So I think I bought a brain dump by accident lmao.
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Jul 23, 2021 23:22
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Hughmoris posted:Passed the Microsoft DP-900 Azure Data Fundamentals this morning. ugh lucky you lmao. Had to reconnect twice cuz my video was hosed up. I’m also now worrying that I’ve flagged an anti cheat thing because I finished the exam so quickly. It was an easy exam! I was shook!
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Jul 25, 2021 02:18
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Boba Pearl posted:How much do you guys make a year with these certs those who want to share? (Also general area.) oh I forgot to share this AWS Solutions Architect Associate GCP Associate Cloud Engineer GCP Professional Cloud Architect GCP Professional Network Engineer (once I get the drat email from Google anyways!) a recently expired A+ that I don’t put on my resume Salary is 123k CAD, which kinda sucks these days. new jobs are opening their negotiations at 150k Canadian so it’s probably time for me to  . Which I don’t really want to do, because I like my job, my managers, and it’s relatively low effort. Maybe in 2022. In other words take that 83k USD Support Job and run with it because it’s almost as much as I’m making now for what I imagine is much more senior work.
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Jul 25, 2021 17:25
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Boba Pearl posted:Is glass door legit? I feel like I'm either misunderstanding the job requirements, or glassdoor is just bullshitting about numbers. levels.fyi is pretty good ime Don’t trust the salary ranges on indeed, glassdoor, etc. Or at least add an extra 20-30%
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Jul 27, 2021 02:43
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I can’t comment on the SIEM stuff, but I can say that 15 weeks of full time studying for a cloud practitioner cert is insane. You could get through the needed material for that cert in like, a day or two at most. I’m morbidly curious how they intend to fill the time, but I would equally say your time is probably better spent studying on your own for more advanced cloud certifications. The exams are all multiple choice and therefore not very difficult. I’d say rather than focusing on SIEMs specifically, it would probably be better to go for a more general security cert like the sec+. If you really want to learn how to security, you should combine it with your cloud work! Build something in AWS, and then learn how to secure it, and use CloudWatch and CloudTrail to monitor. You can set up open source SIEM tooling if you really want, but I think the above is simply a far more practical sort of knowledge.
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Sep 12, 2021 16:08
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passed my gcp security cert. very easy exam if you know IAM in any depth. some annoying gotchas with their add ons like forseti, but i was super confident in about 95% of my answers with about a day or so worth of studying. Which just about does it for GCP certs for me. Having finished the Professional Architect, Network, and Security certs (and the associate engineer cert but that's basically just "name the service"), the Architect cert was by far the hardest due to the case studies. Very much recommend taking a course for that one. The other two can be entirely self taught just by reading the documentation. Not quite sure what to do next. My AWS ACE cert is expiring next summer, so I'll use that an excuse to dip my toes back in those particular waters. Not remotely looking forwards to memorizing the terrible Amazon names for their services. Otherwise, I think it's probably time to branch beyond the major clouds. I'm thinking maybe a linux cert just to formally learn everything in depth, probably one or two k8s certs as well. Beyond that, I guess a CISSP once I actually have 5 years of working experience, which I've heard miserable things about but every employer including our favourite Pillow Man seems to be obsessed with. Pentesting always seemed like fun to study in depth, but I think I'll need some more JS experience first. I'm taking suggestions here is what I'm getting at.
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Sep 14, 2021 00:07
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Famethrowa posted:Caveat that I am still working on my CCNA, and have not yet gotten into the field. This is based on all the reading and talking to folks I've done over the past 3 years. cloud networking is a very underrated skill - you can and should combine them!
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Sep 21, 2021 19:25
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Vorenus posted:Still working on Cantrell's AWS SAA course. I know the answer can vary from person to person, but how long should such a course take to get through? I don't want to be a lazy and spend six months on it, but I'm also trying to pace myself especially through some of the very dry theory such as the inner workings of DNS and IP protocol. A month is probably the longest I’d spend on the matter.
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Oct 1, 2021 05:55
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George H.W. oval office posted:https://csc.docs.microsoft.com/ignite/registration/fall2021?WT.mc_id=AZ-MVP-5000399 As good a reason as any to finally start playing around with Azure. Thanks for the link!
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Nov 13, 2021 07:07
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AnonymouseNo5 posted:What career(s) posting should I be focusing on if I'm getting the "trifeca" certs from CompTIA (A+, Net+, Sec+)? I've got two so far, and I've been applying to help-desk and other places with no "professional IT experience" and struck out so far. Get a couple interviews, "we'll get back to you"/ghosting or "you have no experience, so we're passing" responses. Register a LLC, fix your friend’s and family’s tech poo poo for six months, do a few cloud projects (idk host a nas with user accounts for movie night, or a pihole dns server, make it something you actually use), and put IT Consultant and AWS on your resume. You can probably even skip the LLC.
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Nov 19, 2021 05:58
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AnonymouseNo5 posted:So nobody help/remote will actually "train"/let you shadow for a few weeks and then go from there? I mean, I'm not going to "rm -rf / [-no-preserve-root]" a file system. I know of Active Directory, I just haven't ever used it being focused on SOHO stuff. I have never been trained by an employer, ever, in all my five years of working in the industry. People want experts out of the gate. You’re going to have to be able to present yourself as one. It’s unfortunate, short sighted, self selects for certain types of people… but it’s how the game is played. I really think the best way to get a job with no experience is to do it yourself so you can almost honestly say you have experience already. With a modicum of critical thinking skills and ambition you’ll be better than 90% of the rest. Once you’re in, the bar is so so low… by posting here and being motivated, I have no doubt you’ll excel. It’s just getting in that’s the harder part! Also happy to answer any questions folks have, on AWS or otherwise. People here want to help. I genuinely recommend doing some casual consults and putting it on your resume if you haven’t gotten bites, and playing with the cloud in the interim. The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Nov 20, 2021 |
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Nov 20, 2021 07:43
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Uno Venova posted:So what are the bare minimum entry level jobs you can apply for with an A+ and AWS CCP Certification? What's the job titles? I’m not sure either are really worth much on their own without experience. Get the associate eng cert and then you might be talking. Set up a consulting gig, do some AWS projects for your friends/family and put them on your resume.
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Jan 12, 2022 05:41
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Uno Venova posted:You're talking about the Solutions Architect and/or the Sysops Admin right? Yeah, sorry, they somewhat blur together at this point. I would consider the associate solutions architect the real baseline AWS cert. CCP is for sales and Directors up imo. It’s not really meant to be a technical certification.
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Jan 13, 2022 00:25
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