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

[Geoff Shang <geoff QuiteLikely com>]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2016, Willem van der Walt wrote:

> 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.

+1.  This is not just true for us, but for sysadmins in general. 
Nowadays, many servers are located either in data centres or in cloud 
providers like Amazon.

> 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.

Again +1, for general sysadmins, not just us.  GUIs take up lots of disk 
space and RAM, and if a business is paying for virtual machines by 
capacity, this is a big chunk of money. No self-respecting sysadmin or 
employer is going to take a person who can only work with the GUI 
seriously.  Employers often set sysadmin tests as part of the employment 
process, which will give you a chance to shine if you know this stuff.

> 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.

If you are working with hosted hardware, unless your company also has a 
camera with a feed employees can access, everyone will need sighted 
assistance at the hosting facility anyway, or to send someone out to the 
data centre to take a look.  No-one should make too much of a big deal 
about this.

I've just finished a 3.5 year stint working remotely for an American 
company, initially hosting our own boxes and then migrating to Amazon EC2. 
The only times I ran into accessibility issues were when machine BIOSes 
needed to be modified (these could be accessed but the cursor didn't track 
very well), and one instance when we were installing an appliance and the 
installer needed to be accessed via VNC.  In both instances, getting a 
fellow admin to do the graphical stuff was no problem.

Personally, I found my inability to read organisational charts, network 
diagrams and screenshots submitted with support tickets more of an issue 
than the actual admin work.

Certification will help you, but not as much as actual experience with 
specific software.  I'm currently looking for work, and although I don't 
have a computing-related degree (or any degree actually) and no industry 
certification, I've been able to land interviews on the basis of my work 
and software experience, even when disclosing my blindness.  I'm heading 
out in a couple of hours to a second interview with a subsiduary of IBM.

Here are my recommendations:

1.  First, figure out what exactly what you do know.  Tinkering around 
with Bash, Apache or Bind can be enough to teach you something about it.

2.  Take a look at job postings for the kinds of positions you think you'd 
like to secure.  Linux sysadmin positions are usually pretty specific 
about the kinds of software they'd like you to know about.   See how your 
skill set matches up, and learn up on some of the more commonly mentioned 
software if you have the time.

3.  Learn at least the basics of programming in at least one scripting 
language.  Sysadmins are usually expected to be able to cobble something 
together in shell script, Python or Perl, or sometimes Ruby.  You may need 
to write a script to cobble two pieces of software together, or to 
generate data that would be tedius to do by hand.

In a job interview this week, I was asked to write a program in my 
language of choice that would listen on a TCP port of my choosing and send 
back the IP address of the remote connection when connected to in Morse 
code.  I'd never programmed anything that listens on a port or that 
encodes to Morse, but I knew enough Python to allow me to Google my way to 
the info I needed, and I coded something up in about 40 minutes or so.

I have another interview process going with Amazon and they want me to 
take an online coding test as the first part of the hiring process. 
Hopefully there won't be any accessibility issues.

A real world example from my job was the fact that we wanted to import 
rate data from Level 3 into Freeswitch, but Level 3 sent out its rates in 
an Excell spreadsheet.  I wrote code that could read this and spit it out 
in the format we wanted for Freeswitch.  I don't think this ever got 
deployed but it was a good learning experience.

4.  If you can spare the cash, set yourself up a VPS and experiment with 
it.  Try configuring web servers, databases, whatever you want.  You can 
always reinstall it if you make a mess, and it will give you the feel of 
admining a remote production system.

5.  Join LinkedIn.  Fill out your profile as thoroughly as you can. 
Include a photo.  List all the skills you currently have.  Connect with 
people you know, especially people who already work.  Get people who know 
your abilities to endorse your skills.

Many sysadmin jobs are advertised on LinkedIn, and often you can simply 
apply through LinkedIn itself (using the iOS app is a breeze nowadays). 
Even if you need to apply on a company's website, you can use LinkedIn's 
Resume Builder at http://resume.LinkedInLabs.com to turn your profile into 
a lovely (and accessible) PDF document.  Finally, recruiters search 
LinkedIn looking for candidates.  I've been contacted three times about a 
job by recruiters who found me, two of them resulted in follow-up 
(including the Amazon gig).

6.  By all means get certified if you have the time and energy.  You can 
add it to your LinkedIn resume.

Finally, if you don't have much work or software experience, look for 
junior or entry-level jobs.   Employers are more concerned about you 
having the basics and an understanding of specific concepts, rather than 
necessarily being skilled up on the *specific* software they use.  For 
example, they may want you to be familiar with monitoring systems and list 
several of them, even though they only use one and it may not be the one 
you know.  They will expect you to learn at least some things on the job.

Just my thoughts.  Good luck!

Cheers,
Geoff.