OT? Are they really teaching this?

[Michael Butash]

Comptia certs are pretty useless, unless your company pays you a bonus 
for every cert you get.  Then they're great as a shill for you 
exploiting your management's obvious lack clue that they *are* worth 
anything, and lack of better ways to incent you to learn something vs. 
gaming the system for more cash.  They've always been the low-hanging fruit.

Anymore, not knowing linux is a death knell to a career in networking, 
it immediately limits your ability to automate and troubleshoot, well 
anything.

Every Cisco, Arista, Juniper, whatever really box you'll see in a data 
center runs linux or like (juniper still loves bsd) underneath, although 
they don't of course market this any more than Google does for Android 
being linux underneath. Troubleshooting a nasty Cisco Nexus 7000 switch 
bug, they're likely to give you a "root patch" and ask you do do some 
stuff at a bash prompt (what linux?!).  Arista and some others don't 
hide bash from you, even (gasp!) documenting internal api's to 
replace/augment their software.

Although the hardware does a lot of the heavy lifting, all the 
control-plane  of the devices are done from a linux userlands in almost 
every network platform now.  Especially since most companies like Cisco 
and Arista don't even make their own chips anymore, rather just buying 
them from Broadcom now that again is highly invested in linux as the 
control-plane of their SoC's. Switch vendors really do nothing more than 
write an api layer for users to configure features now.

Furthermore, the "buzz" in networking is now about SDN, Software Defined 
Networking, which is something borne almost entirely of linux roots of 
some flavor, and you simply need to be able to manage or at least 
navigate under linux.  Linux kernel, advance ip routing features, 
namespace separation (ala routing vrf's), etc make that possible, 
regardless if Cisco, Oracle, or whoever puts a branded software layer 
over it and a pretty web or thick client (hopefully not java, eww).

As stated by James, there is always bias for what you know, especially 
what pays your bills.  If they're teaching windoze technologies, of 
course their rhetoric against linux will pervade every bit of training 
that sense of "value" in buying/learning their closed software with 
micro$ofts puppet hand in their back doing the real talking.  Same of 
Cisco telling you how much better they are than Juniper or Arista, 
thought they all use the same hardware now, really comes down to 
features and who is less buggy (read: they all suck now).

How often do you see a network class that *isn't* cisco-based? Not 
often, and if there were, I'd doubt it's value as you need something 
describing appliances or hardware use cases that come with having a 
cisco switch or other.  Having no love of Cisco these days myself, it's 
still the best documented, supported, and accepted (ie. respected) 
training avenues out there, buying a few $40 dollar switches on 
ebay/craigslist, and a library book to learn on can go a long way toward 
a career.

Better yet, if you want to learn networking, just use GNS3 software 
these days.  Not a perfect replacement for hardware, but it can teach 
you the hard things like bgp easily enough, and there are many pre-built 
labs out there to download and toy with.

-mb


On 05/24/2015 04:23 PM, parabellum7 at yahoo.com wrote:
> Yesterday, I met an individual going to ITT. We discussed our respective areas of study and goals. Personally, I have a strong interest in Open Source and Wireless. I'm also doing a CompTIA Network+ prep course through the Maricopa County Library. It's free if you have a library card and a wealth of info regardless if you're going to get that cert or not. He claims his instructors say any of the CompTIA certs are worthless. He also says he actually 'hates open source' and his instructors are telling him it's a 'dead-ender'. That pretty much left me speechless.
>
>
> I know I'm preaching to the choir on this part, but much of the web and cloud runs on 'nix and it seems to be the preferred services offered. I've read multiple articles that many big outfits are migrating to Open Source. Major manufacturers are selling machines with 'nix as an option and guess what Google uses in their data centers? Even consumer grade routers say 'Open Source Ready' on the box and the fine print says they're compatible with DD-WRT. Oh, and then there's that whole Android thing.
>
>
> Are they really teaching those attitudes? Or maybe this individual is confused. Is it even possible to get into the big-leagues of networking without needing to know Open Source OS & apps?
>
>
>
> -K
>
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