CherryPopper

After a day of cramming as much info into what little brain cells I have I'm finally certified to do my job .

Follow up:

Late last year I took up the offer to become a Sun certified SysAdmin in Solaris 9. The certification consists of 2 exams. I did the first one in October last year and passed easily after studying for 2 days. It was a little easier since I had done 80% of what the exam was on quite often in my job.

The second exam was a lot harder as it tests the functions/feature you use 1% of the time and need to know them well. They throw a command at you with different valid switches and you have to remember what switch does what, when most of the time you would consult the man page just to be sure. No man page access during the exam so it all has to come from those failing brain cells.

After taking the day off to study & grabbing the course notes & practise exam I delve into the world of NIS, NFS, Jumpstart, LDAP, RBAC and more. I have used NFS & Jumpstart a bit and now enough to be dangerous but as for NIS, RBAC & LDAP... I got no idea. So I waded through the texts taking notes and saying to myself every now & then "wow it can do that" I got to the end and was ready to test myself.

Starting out with the practise exam (not made by Sun) I was going well got a few right, few wrong but overall was doing ok until I got to one question. I answered it then looked at the answer only to find that I was wrong, after checking my notes I had put the correct answer. I checked the book and again I was right while the test answer was wrong. I then called one of my work colleagues who also confirmed that the book was wrong.

Fucking great.... now how am I meant to get an confidence up when I don't know if I'm right or wrong. I continued on only to find a few more like this. So I gave up on the test exam & just revised the notes I had made.

Today I came in and sat the exam and to my surprise the questions I had found to be incorrect in the test exam were on the real test!!! Hopefully my answers were really correct.

In the end I walked away with a decent score, should have done better but given 1 day of real study I think I did quite well.