[PLUG] Linux certifications

[Paul Heinlein]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2012, Rich Burroughs wrote:

> Some of you may remember me, I used to be pretty active in the group 
> years ago :)

Some of us remember! :-)

> I've been off in the Solaris world for the last few years but I'm 
> interested in working with Linux again more. I was thinking about 
> pursuing a certification and I wondered what recommendations people 
> have about that.
>
> [....] Part of the idea is for me to dig back into Linux, and I 
> think it could be useful from that perspective, regardless of how it 
> might help with employment.

I don't know about certifications, so this a more general observation 
about a fundamental change that's coming down the pike.

There's been a lot of work done to retire the System V-style init 
scripts and runlevels. The main goals, as I understand them, are to 
increase startup parallelization (for speed) and to provide better 
ways of spelling out dependencies (to avoid the brittle nature of the 
S?? and K?? symlink naming structure).

So while the current versions of Debian and RHEL (and its derivatives 
like CentOS) still pack init scripts into /etc/init.d/, bleeding-edge 
distributions like Fedora are starting to use "systemd," one post-SysV 
implementation:

  * http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd

A project with similar goals is called Upstart, but my reading of the 
literature suggests that systemd has a greater likelihood of future 
success than Upstart.

It'll probably be a couple years before any of the distributions 
marketed at the entrerprise ship with systemd as the default init 
system, but I'd suggest gaining at least a reasonable level of 
familiarity with it during your Quest for Learning(TM).

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/