Are you certifiable?
- Article 9 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, January 2006
Novell is hoping to catch up with Red Hat and win more customers through its new certification scheme, says Rob Buckley
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“Quite a lot of people have been saying ‘We’re looking into Linux but we have no clue about this.’ That’s why I’m here,” says Peter Albrecht, manager of Linux certification and testing at Novell. “Linux training can be a driver for follow-up business. Companies can start with Linux training and if it goes well, start moving projects and applications to Linux.”
Already Novell’s Linux courses are a success. Compared with the previous SuSE Linux training, demand for the new courses has doubled over the past year. They are already the most popular training courses offered by Novell, easily beating NetWare training and notching up 120,000 training days worldwide. It’s being taught two to three hours a week in some US high schools and is proving popular in Asian markets such as Singapore and China, where it’s been adopted by 40 universities.
Novell’s own courses are, naturally enough, focused on its own distribution, although Albrecht says the syllabus includes virtually all the LPIC syllabus and the distribution-neutral parts of the Red Hat course, making it transferable to other distributions. It’s aiming the CLP exam at anyone who needs to administer a single server running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server or Open Enterprise Server and connect it to a network. The CLE9 course builds on top of CLP and is aimed at anyone who needs to know how to manage multiple Linux servers in an enterprise environment. Anyone taking the certificate already has to have passed the CLP.
The Novell courses are practicals – which is where they differ most from the LPIC and indeed the MCSE, which are mainly based on multiple-choice answers. In this, they follow Red Hat.
“Our exams are 100% performance-based,” says Jasmine Huxtable-Wright, EMEA manager for Red Hat Global Learning Services. “We’re testing skills in real world situations. You have a real piece of hardware, which you have to load and set up.”
The Novell and Red Hat certifications both differ in how these real-world practicals take place. Red Hat testing puts you in front of a PC, onto which you install the relevant software. You then have to configure it according to the instructions in the exam, using whatever means you can think of. When the exam is over, a Red Hat Linux expert will examine your configuration files and determine whether you’ve made the right changes or not.
By contrast, the Novell examination uses two VMWare images hosted on servers in Provo, Utah. Candidates access the images via a portal (https://practicum.novell.com/) and make their changes, again in whatever fashion they like. At the end of the exam, automated scripts study configuration files and check to see if the correct changes have been made. Candidates are able to appeal if they feel they’ve been too clever for the automated system, but Novell’s Albrecht says there’s only been incident where they’ve been correct and the system has been wrong.
Both approaches have their pros and cons. Novell’s can face problems with poor Internet connections or if candidates kill processes or log out of their machines. Red Hat’s system has none of those issues, but it does place greater investment requirements on testing centres and makes troubleshooting an option only in exams where the OS is pre-installed.
Red Hat has 10 training and testing centres in the UK. “You get training and testing in the same room and at the same machines,” says Huxtable-Wright. These centres are mostly in the South of the UK, but there is a Glasgow centre.
However, despite the virtual nature of Novell’s tests, requiring only a PC and an Internet connection, Novell has 16 training partners but only six testing partners. The latter are in Glasgow, Wokingham, Reading, London, Sheffield and Wakefield.
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