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Exam Anxiety

This past week was nice. I got to sit in a Windows Server 2003 class all week and get "taught to". The last class that I got to sit in as a student was for Windows NT 4. Needless to say, it was a long time ago. The instructor was quite good, and I later learned he had only been teaching for about a year. That made his delivery skills seem even more impressive.

Now that I have the class down, I need to rush to self study and get prepared to take the next exam towards my MCSE. It seems most people fail the 70-290 exam at least once, so I am not looking forward to it. I have a recent copy of the Testking questions for the exam, which tend to be pretty accurate in telling you whats on the test. And this test is a bastard! Some of these questions are way out in left field. I know that if I ran out and took the exam right now, I would fail it. So I am taking this next week to study on breaks, lunches, evenings, etc. Then I will plan to take the test in about two weeks from now. I am not looking forward to it.

Night and Day

After a long week of Windows Server 2003, I am going to teach a Linux+ class to a handful of people. What a change, eh? It's been a while since I taught Linux, so it will be a nice change in pace. I have 4 students for the class (the most ever for this course). I was a bit dissapointed when I got my instructor book. My employer is too cheap to purchase me an instructor manual, so they downloaded a PDF and printed it out. The problem is that "EVALUATION ONLY" is printed over top the text on every single page. I'm sure my employer doesn't mind, because they don't have to teach a class with it.

The setup for the class calls for "RedHat 7.0", which I REFUSE to install. First of all, RedHat is a big piece of shit. It's installation is kludgey and error prone. They spread a large collection of worthless packages over at least 3 discs (all of which are required for an installation). At this point, they are losing the war on the desktop market. Probably because their CEO came out and snubbed the user community by stating that their entire focus would be placed upon Enterprise users. Good luck with that, retards. So for the class I decided to use SuSe Linux. It's becoming the most popular distro' of Linux, and Netware recently adopted it as "the desktop OS" for the Novell Netware platform.

Problem is that you can't download the enterprise stuff for free. You CAN download a Personal Editiion which is only a single CD, and contains nearly everything you will ever need. Some of the more traditional linux tools aren't there, like "locate" for example. And I will have to go through my instructor manual this weekend and find out what packages I need to add to suport labs. I also ran myself into a corner late Friday afternoon trying to image the class. SuSe uses the "reiserfs" file system by default, which imaging software like Ghost does not support. After setting up a nice dual boot box, I realised, it was worthless. Rather than start over with my master PC, I just wiped the drive. I asked the setup guys to give me "Windows XP", and went on home. I figure our first lab can be "installing Linux". This will give the students a nice hands on lab, and give me a weekend without having to screw with classroom setups. *wink*

Speaking of which, my SuSe install that I started downstairs should be about ready for a trial! See you later, gang.