Re: [orca-list] Ot: does anyone have a certification from the Linux foundation?

[Willem van der Walt <wvdwalt csir co za>]

Hi,
Years ago, I did the Redhat certified engineer exam, and over the years 
have done a lot of sys admin work on unix and linux servers.
Here are a few comments.
1.  Do not expect to be able to work directly on the server with a screen 
reader, make sure you have a good understanding of all the remote access 
options available to you.
2.  As a blind person, make sure you understand how to do admin without a 
GUI.  In the case of Linux, you can do most things without a GUI and 
often, it is as simple as editing a configuration file with a text editor.
3.  There are some situations where you will need sighted assistance.
Once, one disk in a raid configuration on a machine with a hardware raid 
controller, went dead and although I could find some code indicating 
which disk it was, the only way of knowing which physical drive to take 
out of the machine was to look at the lights showing up at the server 
itself.
I found that obtaining sighted assistance was easy enough once you are 
trusted by your superiors to know what you are doing, as then, you do not 
need a sighted person with knowledge.  A secretary can tell you about the 
lights, or read you an error message just as well as one of your sysadmin 
buddies.
HTH, Willem

 On Tue, 8 Mar 2016, Alex Midence wrote:

> Hi.
>
> Wanted to chime in.  The posts on the mailing lists I have frequented over 
> the years from people who do sys admin work also say they use ssh a lot with 
> clients like Putty on Windows.  I'm sure there are similar gui products with 
> Orca on Linux that you can use to connect a laptop to a remote server. 
> There's always just plain old ssh itself running Speakup locally through 
> something like a Gnu-Screen session too.  I understand there are blind people 
> who also used Emacspeak to do server sysadmin work.  I bring up remoting 
> because so many servers have sound disabled and I also understand that they 
> may view Speakup as a security vulnerability somehow. (Not sure about how 
> that can be but, there you go.)  So, it's important to get to know tools that 
> let you access a server remotely.  To Conclude, it is entirely feasible for 
> you as a blind person to do this kind of job.  Others have done so before you 
> and, if they could, you can.  Nuff said.  Good luck and all the best!
>
> Alex M
>
>
> On 03/08/2016 04:51 PM, B. Henry wrote:
> > No I do not have any Linux certs, but I will say that there is no reason 
> > you cn not do a good job managing Linux servers using speakup mostly, but
> > sometimes Orca as well.
> > All of the standard tools and utils I can think of work with speakup, but 
> > some that stream realtime data are of course harder to use as data is
> > constantly being updated.
> > When one must work with a tool like that you usually need to either slow 
> > down refresh rates quite a bit, or take snapshots of the system and use 
> > those.
> > Often something can be piped to a filtering application, awk, sed, grep, 
> > etc to help by removing data one does not wish to her. Also speakup lets 
> > you
> > block out parts of the screen in its read window mode so you can get rid of 
> > some distrctions.
> > Of course to get a job and do it well you will need to be better than your 
> > sighted counterparts, but is this not usually the cse for anything we do?
> > We will be slower having to listen to things than a sighted person will be 
> > reading it, so beiing better, i.e. cutting to the heart of a problem, 
> > knowing
> > what to expect, etc. is of great importance when and where it is possible.
>
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