On Jan 30, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Gustavo Beathyate wrote:
I'm also certified (ACTC), had to do it so my company would be able to
resell Xserves. I had two different instructors, one was excellent and
the other one was a waste of money, so be careful. I found the server
essentials course very useful because I got an MCSE cert before and
Microsoft and Apple (or UNIX) have different approaches to things.
I definitely think that books are the way to go, buy Bartosh's book.
Thanks. Schoun's is definitely more appropriate for ACTC though.
But I have two questions:
1. Is it worth to pay for the ACTC or ACSA exams right now? with Tiger
coming within the next couple of months...
I believe so, yes. Panther deployments have long legs. Tiger isn't even
here yet, and even once it is it probably will not be deployable in
institutional and heterogeneous environments till 10.4.3 or 10.4.4
(judging by history and keeping in mind some of the very invasive
changes coming to the Core OS in Tiger, in addition to Apple's recent
institutional and enterprise product introductions).
2. Do you recommend taking the Directory Services course before or
after the ACSA certification?
If you're going to take it, take it before. The DS class is a vertical,
taking the Directory Services content from both SAC and SAS. It's
actually a pretty good idea to take DS if you're only going to take one
class. It covers the portions of the certification material that tend
to be new to most admins. Directory Services require some new ways of
thinking about old problems, whereas conceptually there's not much
that's really new about file system permissions, web servers or file
servers. The DS class can significantly lessen the preparation load,
and it's a pretty good deal since it's only three days long (although
covering that material in the proper depth in 3 days is extremely
difficult; when I teach the class it usually means pretty long days,
class running through lunch sometimes and an hr or so late every day).
