I began my Linux hobby in 1999. I was given a CD of RedHat Linux which I installed on an old computer. At first use, it was slow and buggy and uninstalled in favor of Windows 98. I installed Debian a few months later and discovered I could install a different desktop environment – KDE which looked like Windows, but was different. After playing with it for a few weeks, I discovered Knoppix – a live CD that didn’t overwrite my hard drive and let me play around without grave consequences. A friend then introduced me to Gentoo which allowed for complete customization for my 1ghz single core processor. After a few failed misconfigurations and a desire to get back to binary installs, I switched to Fedora Core 1 and used it on my desktop. Another friend showed me a new distribution called Ubuntu – similar to Debian, but more up to date. This was then installed on my laptop that I used for college. I switched completely to Ubuntu after the release of Fedora core 4 as I got frustrated with yum.<\/p>\n
After college, I started working in a help desk position. It was mainly servicing Windows desktops and a few OSX machines. I then received a task from my boss to create a simple lookup website. I got to choose the server OS, create the VM on a Hyper-V host, and use any tools I could muster to perform this simple task. The project was a success and I received another – parse a text file and output it to a standard CSV. At the time, I only knew PHP and none of the cool features of sed and awk. PHP turned out to be a good choice for this project as I was later informed a user would use my creation every day to convert a text file to this new format. I simply had to create a web front end, parse the uploaded file, and give the user an option to download this file.<\/p>\n
I began to develop more skills in Linux as my various work tasks involved more and more Enterprise level responsibility – such as LDAP authentication for websites, Active Directory maintenance, converting databases from Access to MySQL with a front end, Migration of Exchange 2003 to 2007, and introducing Google Apps for Education to about 700 students. <\/p>\n
When my boss left the organization, I assumed his role and provided oversight for network connectivity (switch\/router config), overseeing two, 6 figure technology budgets, and also my regular responsibilities. I was able to attend training events as well as attend online courses regarding Linux. At that time, I began reading more books on tech practices, management, and Linux. I felt I learned enough to prove my skills with certification – even though I was doing the work successfully without being certified. The Linux Foundation released their equivalent to Red Hat’s RHCSA – the Linux Foundation Certified SysAdmin (LFCS). The domains and competencies covered described all the tasks I have done since setting up my first Linux box – create users, partitions, edit text files, etc. I took the introduction to Linux course offered by the Linux Foundation on edx, and scheduled an exam for my LFCS. On my first try, I misconfigured RAID, and rebooted the server. (Whoops!) The Linux Foundation was gracious to allow a free retake which I passed. I kept going around to my co-workers (after being certified) and quoting my favorite Dilbert comic: “Step away from that network server… I AM CERTIFIED!”<\/p>\n
At this time, my skilled co-workers left (not all at once) and my team turned out to be just me for a period of eight months to cover 1,100 network attached devices and 1,300 users. It was about this time I researched CMEs (Chef, CFEngine, and Puppet) to help do tasks. I eventually picked puppet and successfully deployed RPi-wayfinding with it. A year and a half later, I passed the Puppet Certified Professional exam. With that out of the way, I turned my attention to the LFCE – especially since the Linux Foundation had a sale on the course and test for less than the test amount. <\/p>\n
The LFCE was the easiest certification test of all the ones I took. I scored an 88 out of 100, and I think the things I missed were saving the iptables rules :\/<\/p>\n
My next step is to take an AWS certificate test as I have been using AWS for nearly 2 years, but I will probably take an OpenStack cert first as I was given a discounted rate for the cert + course from the Linux Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I began my Linux hobby in 1999. I was given a CD of RedHat Linux which I installed on an old computer. At first use, it was slow and buggy and uninstalled in favor of Windows 98. I installed Debian a few months later and discovered I could install a different desktop environment – KDE […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[69,4],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":409,"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions\/409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewwippler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}