'Til All Are One

I was hav­ing a dis­cus­sion at work, and it occurred to us that a simple way of improv­ing our data secur­ity is to turn machines off (or sus­pend, hibern­ate, etc.) when they aren’t required. Now this isn’t exactly rocket sci­ence, but what I found most inter­est­ing is how this ties into our energy con­ser­va­tion plans. Obvi­ously, it means we save money on elec­tri­city. How­ever, it also means that in redu­cing our net­work foot­print we also reduce our envir­on­mental footprint.

Con­vin­cing a com­pany to save energy can be dif­fi­cult, but know­ing that this also enhances secur­ity can be a win­ning argument.

I recently bought myself a Hua­wei e169 3G modem as part of a ser­vice with Exetel (based on the Optus net­work). There are a few guides online on how to get it to work with GNU/​Linux, but either they didn’t work as advert­ised or I wasn’t happy with the approach they took. Ubuntu 8.10 is due in three weeks, but since I usu­ally wait at least a month for a new release to settle, I was after a solu­tion that would tide me over for at min­imum the next couple of months. It had to be simple and not too messy.

Here’s the approach I took:

1. Install Net­work­Man­ager 0.7 from the PPA. You might need to reboot after­wards.
   
2. Install usb_​modeswitch. I got lazy and installed a DEB from here. Can someone con­firm that this is included by default in Ubuntu 8.10?
3. Right-​​click the Net­work­Man­ager panel applet and select Edit Con­nec­tions.
4. Select the Mobile Broad­band tab and click Add.
5. Fol­low the wiz­ard/​druid: select your coun­try and upstream pro­vider (I chose Optus 3G).
6. Once the druid is com­plete, return to the Mobile Broad­band tab, select your newly-​​created con­nec­tion, and click Edit.
7. The only set­ting I had to enter was my APN (exetel1). You may also wish to change the Type to Prefer 3G (3 cus­tom­ers can save $$$ by select­ing 3G — thanks Tel­stra! :p ).

Now when you plug in your 3G modem, two things will hap­pen (after a few seconds). Firstly, the ISO9660 filesys­tem on the USB stick will be auto­mat­ic­ally moun­ted and dis­played by Nautilus (you might want to turn this off in the Nautilus pref­er­ences if it gets too annoy­ing). Secondly, you should see an option to use your modem when you click on the Net­work­Manger panel applet. Once con­nec­ted, you can dis­con­nect in the same way.

There we go! Now all I need to do is plug in my modem and connect/​disconnect from the Net­work­Man­ager panel applet. My Eee PC 901 is truly mobile now

LotD: A Sysadmin’s Unix­ersal Trans­lator (ROSETTA STONE)

I have never placed much faith in the qual­ity of CompTIA cer­ti­fic­a­tions. Now that I have both an A+ and Net­work+, I must reit­er­ate that opin­ion. The exams aren’t designed to test your know­ledge, they are designed to trip you up.

The best way to study for a CompTIA exam is to com­plete as many prac­tice ques­tions as you can. There’s not much need for any real study or under­stand­ing of the issues at hand (although it can help). That is the view I took when study­ing for the Net­work+ exam. I began by read­ing the text­book which had been sup­plied to me, but I quickly gave up on it and turned to prac­tice ques­tions. After 400 ques­tions, I felt ready to take the exam. Mind you, I did have a lot of prior know­ledge and under­stand­ing, but I’m cer­tain that most people who take this approach do not. In fact, at least 10% of the ques­tions in my exam were identical to prac­tice ques­tions I had done earlier.

How skil­ful can you expect a CompTIA cer­ti­fic­a­tion holder to be if the test­ing method is so point­less? Will they be able to apply the ‘know­ledge’ gained from mem­or­ising mul­tiple choice answers to real-​​life situ­ations? Over­all, I don’t believe they can.

Case in point: for sev­eral months I have had trouble con­nect­ing to a couple of Web sites. I knew they were up, but my Web browser would time out whenever I tried to con­nect. I have known of the exist­ence of the traceroute tool for many years (and I even used it sev­eral times), and its use was covered in Net­work+. How­ever, I only put one and one together rel­at­ively recently. Prior to this, I never con­sidered using the tool to troubleshoot my con­nec­tion to those sites.

Of course, upon real­ising this I whacked myself on the fore­head for my ineptitude. I’m not nor­mally that slow. It got me think­ing, though. If I — who knew about the tool even before study­ing it for the exam — did not think of using it, what were the chances for the aver­age Net­work+ cer­ti­fic­a­tion holder? You know, the people who do the cert just to get a job and not because they have any real aptitude or interest?

I’m glad to be doing some­thing else now. Struc­tured pro­gram­ming is a chal­lenge, which is far more than I can say for the CompTIA certs.

Net­work+ is now mine! Mwahahahahaha!

*ahem*

The day after I com­pleted the A+ Hard­ware exam (Fri­day 1 April), I dove into the Net­work+ mater­ial. I’m now glad that I did the A+ mod­ules out of order. Net­work+ builds upon the net­work­ing por­tions of both mod­ules, but derives more from the Hard­ware sec­tion. Mak­ing the trans­ition from A+ Hard­ware to Net­work+ was easy.

By now I was quite accus­tomed to the CompTIA cer­ti­fic­a­tion style, so I planned to fin­ish rel­at­ively quickly. Com­puter Power alloc­ated four weeks to com­plete the cer­ti­fic­a­tion; I thought I should bump it off in two. I spent the first day dili­gently read­ing the first of two books they had given us (con­tain­ing over 600 pages in all). On the second day (the fol­low­ing Monday; I don’t study much on week­ends), a couple of friends gave me some extra mater­ial, includ­ing exam ques­tions and what amoun­ted to be an entire prin­tout of a book. There must have been close to a thou­sand pages in all (think of the trees!). I’m not sure how much of it they got through, but I cer­tainly wasn’t going to read it all. It’d drive me bonkers. I extrac­ted a small sliver (by com­par­ison) from the stack, which amoun­ted to about 360 exam ques­tions and some exam­in­a­tion cram notes. I decided to cast aside my book (which I had barely den­ted) and focus on those.

I spent that week going over that mater­ial: doing prac­tice ques­tions and tak­ing notes on the stuff that I didn’t know. Then dis­aster struck — I got sick over the week­end (I think it was influ­enza). My plans of doing the exam by the middle of the fol­low­ing week had to be thrown out the win­dow. One of the great things about Com­puter Power is that there are no classes and all learn­ing is self-​​paced. I was able to take some days off to reco­oper­ate, while still access­ing all my files (notes, etc.) over the Inter­net. I ended up doing next-​​to-​​nil study, though. I can never con­cen­trate at home.

After tak­ing Monday, Tues­day and Wed­nes­day off, I spent all of Thursday at a Per­sonal Effect­ive­ness work­shop which had been sched­uled for me prior. Although still some­what ill, I learnt a lot. I’m glad I went. Fri­day was the only day that week in which I did any real study.

By that point I had grown bored with the sub­ject mat­ter. I was going over the same ground over and over, and I felt no chal­lenge. Want­ing to get the sub­ject over and done with, I booked the exam for the next morn­ing. I’d gladly give up a Sat­urday if I could start the fol­low­ing week afresh. I was still ill, but by then I was over the worst of it and I didn’t care much any­more. Marks don’t mat­ter in CompTIA exams. They give a prin­tout at the end list­ing your score, but the actual cer­ti­fic­ate doesn’t say any­thing. All I was con­cerned about was the required 72% mark to pass, and the $400 fee I would incur if I failed.

I sat down in the exam­in­a­tion chair the fol­low­ing morn­ing. I felt a little fatigued, bleary-​​eyed and stuffy (sinuses and nose). The drugs didn’t seem to be work­ing effect­ively. At times I lost con­cen­tra­tion and I may have even dozed off a little. The CompTIA exams I’ve done alloc­ate far too much time for the volume and type of ques­tions posed, and Net­work+ is no excep­tion. Des­pite my ail­ments, I had enough time to care­fully com­plete every ques­tion and go over them after­wards. I exited the exam with twenty minutes left.

Less than a minute later I had my mark: 833 out of 900. Phwoar! That’s about 93%! I made some dumb errors which I prob­ably wouldn’t have made had I been fully alert, but I’m very happy with the res­ult non­ethe­less. Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that I only put in seven days of proper study (recom­men­ded time is thirty) and that I was ill for almost the entire time (includ­ing dur­ing the exam itself).

I did say I’d try to be more dili­gent in writ­ing journal entries last time, but I guess I failed. Well, no mat­ter. It’s not as if my life is a rich tapestry or any­thing. Suf­fice to say that I’ve had a few things take up my time over the past week, the most sig­ni­fic­ant being my stud­ies. I’m still get­ting into the rhythm of things (I still syn­co­pate too much), but I’m managing.

By the end of my first week, I had com­pleted two mod­ules and was 50 hours ahead. I have 25-​​hour weeks (5 hours per week­day), so that made me 2 weeks ahead. Mind you, it was easy stuff. PC Fun­da­ment­als is about learn­ing about basic hard­ware and MS-​​DOS com­mands. PC Advanced is about slightly more advanced MS-​​DOS com­mands and Batch files. Noth­ing I haven’t done before. I’m just glad it wasn’t as brain-​​dead as Oper­ate a Com­puter, which is about how to use Win­dows (yuck!) and basic GUI apps at a single-​​user level. For­tu­nately the Net­work Engin­eer­ing course doesn’t sink that low (although there are other courses which do).

I was sup­posed to move onto the CompTIA A+ cer­ti­fic­a­tion, but it appears that I was mov­ing too quickly and they didn’t have any of the mater­i­als in stock. Instead, I ended up skip­ping ahead a few top­ics and doing Help Desk Prob­lem Solv­ing Tech­niques. It wasn’t dif­fi­cult, but it was a lot of the­ory to mem­or­ise. Given that I was two weeks ahead, I thought I should slow down and learn that mod­ule prop­erly. Even then, I fin­ished (just yes­ter­day) with plenty of time to spare.

Now I’m 75 hours ahead. That’s three weeks! I should be gradu­at­ing well ahead of the date which was fore­cast at the begin­ning (12 December).

Finally, I’ve been able to start the A+ course. I was given the choice of doing either the A+ Hard­ware or A+ Oper­at­ing Sys­tem cer­ti­fic­a­tions first. I chose the lat­ter, being more famil­iar with soft­ware. Hav­ing only begun today, I can’t say much about it.

I’ve always had a pas­sion for com­put­ing and inform­a­tion tech­no­logy. I remem­ber as a kid mess­ing around with a Radio Shack com­puter (with 4KB RAM!!!) which my dad had bought. After this (around 1985), we pur­chased an IBM PC XT (with full specs as shown here, but minus the HDD). That machine proved to be an endur­ing source of edu­ca­tion and enter­tain­ment. It felt so cool back then to be able to use MS-​​DOS 2.1 and GW-​​BASIC!

Over the fol­low­ing years I played around with new ver­sions of DOS (by MS, IBM and even Cal­dera), Win­dows and even OS/​2 (which was awe­some but since it couldn’t detect my CD-​​ROM I was forced to use Win95). I was a nat­ural, and I quickly became the ‘com­puter guy’ in my circle of friends and fam­ily. I developed a pas­sion for tech­no­logy, and I would read and exper­i­ment as much as I could on the subject.

I only con­sidered con­vert­ing that into a career in high school, but once that had happened my motiv­a­tion became strong. I com­menced a com­puter sci­ence degree at The Uni­ver­sity of Sydney, but after a year I decided that I was ill-​​suited to cod­ing. By the end of the second year (dur­ing which I had delib­er­ately avoided CS sub­jects), I felt that my path lay in the human­it­ies, with inform­a­tion sys­tems and gov­ern­ment (which I was doing as a minor) look­ing awfully tempt­ing. For my third year I had trans­ferred to The Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales, doing a plain-​​old Sci­ence degree. This, I felt, suited my broad mind (I’m the kind of per­son who likes to know a little about everything) very well. After some false starts and changes, I gradu­ated with a Bach­elor of Sci­ence, major­ing in His­tory and Philo­sophy of Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy and minor­ing in Gov­ern­ment, Polit­ics and Inter­na­tional Relations.

What a change that was from com­puter sci­ence! It was truly fas­cin­at­ing stuff (I loved it), but unfor­tu­nately it meant that I had trouble find­ing decent employ­ment. In Aus­tralia, the human­it­ies have the highest unem­ploy­ment rate of all the gradu­ate dis­cip­lines. I didn’t want to be stuck in a dead-​​end office role, where most of my skills would go to waste.

For a while I had been toy­ing with the idea of find­ing employ­ment in the IT industry. Recently I con­cluded that it would be impossible to do this. I may have the skills (I spend most of my free time at one of my com­puters), but I have no formal recog­ni­tion (cer­ti­fic­a­tions, etc.) or exper­i­ence. After a couple of weeks of heavy pon­der­ing and sev­eral meet­ings, I decided to bite the bul­let and enrol in a train­ing col­lege to get the qual­i­fic­a­tions I need.

Today I com­pleted my enrol­ment at the Com­puter Power Insti­tute of Tech­no­logy, and within ten months (full time: 11am to 4pm Monday to Fri­day) I should have a Dip­loma of Inform­a­tion tech­no­logy (Net­work Engin­eer­ing). That’s right, I’m train­ing to be a net­work engin­eer! That’s some­thing I’ve dreamt about for years!

My ori­ent­a­tion is in Monday, and I offi­cially begin train­ing on Tues­day. I’m so excited! I’ll going to try to be dili­gent in report­ing my pro­gress in this journal. If you’re read­ing this (that means YOU!), stay tuned.