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9 System Administrator part I (SA310-14) |
Solaris
9 System Administrator, Part II (SA310-15) |
Solaris 10 System Administrator, part I | Solaris 10 System Administrator, part II | Solaris 9 Network Administrator Certification | Solaris 10 Network administrator | Solaris 9 Security Certification | Solaris 10 Security Certification |
| Certification Test Strategy | General Exam Preparation Strategy |
Solaris 10 Certification Learning Path |
Related Certifications | Tips | Humor | Etc |
Solaris certification from Sun is highly regarded in the industry, generally above HP and IBM certifications. Getting all three Solaris Certification serve as a badge of honor in many IT organizations. The reason is that it is not that easy to obtain, as it is includes a lot of Solaris specific topics with some of marginal practical use (for example native printing subsystem in Solaris is almost never used in large corporate environment). That means that the person who passed the exam prove not only some knowledge of practically important Solaris (like in most multiple choice question tests does not directly check the real experience of working with Solaris in production environment; they test some semi-artificial "test-related" knowledge base), but also the ability to learn new topics. The latter is as important if not more important in the quickly changing world of Unix administration.
Solaris Certification is administer by Thompson Prometric (Thomson Prometric, a part of The Thomson Corporation). Please note that they do not have a reliable Web site and WEB applications for scheduling/rescheduling of the exam can show your that exam was successfully rescheduled but still did not do it (in this case you do not receive a mail notification but that is easy to overlook or attribute to the spamfilter). If you are not careful you exam fee will be forfeited. There is no recourse. Always check for the confirmation letter after rescheduling.
The current set of Solaris certifications include both Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 sets.
Still Solaris 10 needs a couple of years to stabilize and certifications for Solaris 10 are slightly more difficult then Solaris 9 certifications both due to changes in operating system itself, availability of materials for the preparation to the exam and the structure of exam itself (imitation questions are added).
All Sun certification exams are closed book: you will not be permitted to take anything with you into the testing area other then one page gel pad that is almost impossible to write. See Candidate Pretest Agreement for details (formally disclosure of the content of the test within five years is a violation of this agreement). Solaris 9 administration exam are difficult, especially the second part because may topics are not even by administrators who do Solaris 100% of time on their jobs. It make sense to use some strategy both for preparation and, especially, the strategy for the exam itself.
Like for most such cases it make sense to arrive approximately one hour before the exam and review the most critical information (you should prepare you own summaries of major topics for this purpose). You also might need some time to adapt to the environment and to take an orientation, if any. As far as I know Prometrics actually does not give any special orientation: all the orientation, which actually consists of the tutorial for the examination software is included in the test itself and is structured as a prolog for the test.
You must both pass the Part I exam and the Part II exam to get Solaris 9 administrator certification. This is probably the most popular Sun certification ever. There are also related Solaris 9 Network Administrator and Solaris 9 Security Certification which are valued only as an addition to this certification.
Part I is rather regular certification exam; Part II is more difficult and can be challenging even for those who administer Solaris system on daily basis. Unless you are extraordinary gifted, very experienced or have a photographic memory you need some kind of strategy to increase your chances. Here are some details on both parts of the exam:
Exam 310-014 (Part 1) covers a dozen topics in basic system administration (installing the operating system, software package administration, patches, the boot process, system security and file permissions, account administration, disk and file system management, backup and recovery) Part I exam contain questions that only those people who regularly read man pages for fun can answer. And actually you need to print and read several times a man pages for each utility that is covered by part I. As for errors:
Expect to answer incorrectly 5-6 questions just because of intricate wording or obscure features they address; or because you did not understand or misread the question.
Expect 3-5 question to be answered incorrectly about printing unless you pay enough attention about this subject (most Solaris shops do not use Solaris printing subsystem those days, so this is just a torture ;-)/
Expect 3-5 question to be answered incorrectly about PROM.
That leaves only 10 questions that you can answer incorrectly on your own :-). That's not a lot.
Take the syllabus below extremely seriously: you do need to know each and every topic mentioned, and sometimes a little bit more.
Solaris 9 System Administrator Exam Cram book is well written
for the first exam with very few mistakes and really can help you
to prepare by providing summaries. It's not enough but it's good
and contain almost all major staff. No fuss, no filler. At the end
of the book, there are 2 prep tests (1 for each exam part) which
are reasonably good at measuring how well you know your stuff
(for 310-014 if you get 90% or more on the sample you have chances
of getting 70% or more on a real test (depends on you luck).
Exam 310-015 (Part 2) is more complex and covers approximately 15 topics out of 18 in the course SA-299 Advanced System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System including network environment and network clients; device administration; virtual disk management systems; Network File System (NFS), along with automounting; naming services such as DNS, NIS, and NIS+; Jumpstart. If there are probably administrators that uses all features covered in 310-014 but I doubt that there are administrators who are using all the features covered in 310-015. So this is partially a test of your ability to learn new staff.
Please be aware that Part II exam contain a half dozen topics that you probably never used in your daily sysadmin job but that Sun requires to understand in depth. Usually this include some of the following six topics: SVM, ACL, RBAC, NFS, NIS, Jumpstart and Webflash. Of course, your mileage can vary. If you use NFS on your daily job, then you are in better shape as a lot of questions are NFS related (and several are related to troubleshooting) but generally the questions are spread more evenly between the topics then in Part 1 which IMHO is definitely biased toward printing. Still it might be that Sun likes NIS and Jumpstart questions a little bit too much :-).
Expect no less then 15 questions to be on NFS, NIS, and Jumpstart.
Questions on those topics sometimes require in-depth knowledge and
good understanding of the architecture of the particular subsystem.
You need to pay special attention to each. Expect that you might fail
no less then half questions on those topics.
Solaris 9 System Administrator Exam Cram is clearly less useful
for the part II and half of the chapters are written badly (chapters
about RAID, RBAC, NIS and Jumpstart are too shallowl and are badly organized
. Here is one insightful review from Amazon that addresses the shortcoming
of the book:
 Do
not use this book for 310-016 SA 9 Upgrade Exam, April 9,
2003
This book was awful for preparing for the Solaris 9 Systems Admin Upgrade exam. The book has no info on debugging Jumpstart install issues; doesn't go into Flash Install in enough detail; missed the 1 question on LDAP client(I got it right by remembering the answer from my Solaris 8 books); has little useful info on SVM and RAID, I absolutely either had to guess or remember from years ago the answers to the SVM/RAID questions. What else? The book doesn't cover UFS snapshot enough to answer the questions asked on the exam. I managed to pass purely on luck. I cannot for a moment believe this book is ideal for the 014 and 015 tests either. |
Even if you are a reasonably knowledgeable Solaris administrator expect that preparation (if you are working full-time) needs approximately three months (double this time if you don't administer Solaris system on daily basis):
Approximately one month to learn topics related to part I (31
topics). Average person probably can master three-four topics a
week ( "2 hours a day" * "5 days a week" = 10 hours a week); most
topics can be learned in shorter timeframe, but details of such topics
as PROM, disk management and, of course, printing subsystem can take
longer to memorize.
Expect no less that two months for part II ( which is definitely more challenging). When preparing for part II don't be a scrooge and take a training Web test from Sun. You will see that it is different from tests that you can find in many Solaris certification books, for example Solaris 9 System Administrator Exam Cram
Official certification normally takes approximately a month to arrive. Once you get your certification there is no requirement to re-certify until Solaris 9 becomes obsolete. So expect the life span of Solaris 9 certification to be approximately five years before you need to start to work on the certification for the next version of Solaris.
The main source of useful information on Solaris 9 certification program is, of course, Sun's Web site. Sun provides a surprising amount of free high quality documentation free of charge. Even better documentation (or sta least more structured) in included into Sun student book for related courses. Some of them include in both classroom and WEB incarnation (for example Web-based Intermediate System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System (WSB-239)). The latter is much cheaper then instructor-based SA-239 class.
Also look for a Usenet forum with guidance and interaction from local experts and a community of learners who are taking the same certification.
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Sun is offering these options to its customers at no charge for a limited period of time. Please note that the courseware available from this evaluation site is not Section 508 compliant.
Solaris 9 OS
- WGS-PREX-S014B ePractice Certification Exam for the for Sun Certified System Administrator for the Solaris 9 OS, Part I
- WS-1190-90 Using Components of the Desktop System
- WS-1191-90 Managing Files and Directories
- WS-1192-90 Creating and Modifying Files
- WS-1193-90 Controlling the User Work Environment & Performing Remote Operations
- WS-1194-90 Archiving Files
The Solaris Interactive Installation -- chapter from the book that looks like a re-write of corresponding chapter of SA-299 manual. In this chapter:
something or another… » certification Neat idea of writing you own test generation scripts. Not that difficult is you know Perl, CGI and some shell programming.
One cool thing at work though was I was able to help solve a problem by reciting a command line from the Solaris 9 certification test. “coreadm -e log”. Enables coredump logging in Solaris, which is the default in FreeBSD.
... ... ...
Last night was a study night. I got home, and began scavenging resources for sample questions to take for my Solaris 9 exam on Friday. I managed to consolidate 137 questions from 5 different sources.
I’ve got another 50 or so to add before I’m happy, and need especially to generate questions on the RBAC section since I’m not familiar with it.
I’m going to be studying my tail off until then
[Jan 9, 2005]
[Jan 8, 2005] Solaris 9 System Administrator Exam Cram Review was updated today.
[Jan 7, 2005] Free Developer Workstation. Subscribe to a 3 year Sun Service Subscription program for only $29.95 per month and get an entry Sun Ultra 20 workstation for free.
[Dec 24, 2005] Sun Training Promotions 10% off the certification exam.
Passed 310-015 (Solaris 9 part II) today
Just passed the part 2 today and though I'd drop in a few notes here...
Whereas 310-014 was printing questions all over it (check my other review), questions were more evenly distributed amongst test objectives, with a little emphasis on NIS/Name Service and NFS. And installation methods (Jumpstart/Flash + NIS).
I've been a Solaris (2.6) admin for ~3 years, but only app servers (no nfs, printing, jumpstart, nis) so I was a rookie for much of the topics. I studied for about a month with 2 books, and did all the free tests I could find on the net.
I used CramSession's SCSA9 book (by Darrell Ambro) which covered almost all that was needed (the exam went into some details (ldap) that the book didn't cover that much).
I also used Osborne SCSA 9 book by Tim Gibbs but it's a piece of crap. I only read it to have another view of the topics. It's full of mistakes, bloathed with copy/pasted stuff from Solaris 8 that doesn't even exist in Solaris 9, etc...
Well that's about enough ... Good luck to everybody and happy holidaysAlex...
[Jan 6, 2005] Sun Opens Solaris 10 Cert Program
Though the company says that Solaris 10 won't ship until late in 2004 (by which I take to mean December, before Christmas), they've already posted a Solaris 10 Preview Web page. Likewise, the company's Certification home page includes a section on Solaris 10, with pointers to a free Web-based New Features of the Solaris 10 Operating System course, as well as instructor-led training on Solaris 10.
Even better, Sun has already posted a Solaris 10 System Administration Learning Path page, which includes specific mention of the two exams necessary to earn that credential and ePractice warm-up exams for each one, as well as the upgrade exam that individuals already certified on an earlier version of Solaris must take to validate their credential for Solaris 10. In the same vein, there's also a page for the Solaris 10 Network Management Learning Path, with mention of the related certification exam required to earn that credential. (This is promised for early 2005, as a follow-on to the System Administrator program.)
docs.sun.com man pages section 1M System Administration Commands You need to know how to take a ufs snapshot; know what it is, it's benefits, and how to do it. Also, understand how to restore a snapshot when restoring an OS disk after a failure. fssnap is a new utility:
fssnap- create temporary snapshots of a file system
/usr/sbin/fssnap [-F FSType]
[-V] -o special_options
[mount-point | special ]
/usr/sbin/fssnap -d [-F FSType]
[-V] -o special_options
[mount-point | special ]
/usr/sbin/fssnap -i [-F
FSType] [-V] -o
special_options [mount-point | special]
The fssnap command creates a stable, read-only snapshot of a file system when given either an active mount point or a special device containing a mounted file system, as in the first form of the synopsis. A snapshot is a temporary image of a file system intended for backup operations.
While the snapshot file system is stable and consistent, an application updating files when the snapshot is created might leave these files in an internally inconsistent, truncated, or otherwise unusable state. In such a case, the snapshot will contain these partially written or corrupted files. It is a good idea to ensure active applications are suspended or checkpointed and their associated files are also consistent during snapshot creation.
Note that file access times are not updated while the snapshot is being created.
A path to the virtual device that contains this snapshot is printed to standard output when a snapshot is created.
The following options are supported:
The following operands are supported:
See FSType-specific man pages for examples.
The following exit values are returned:
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
CertCities.com News Sun Announces Solaris 10 Cert Plans; May Include Simulation Questions
9/22/2004 -- As part of a larger Solaris 10 OS announcement yesterday, Sun Microsystems officially unveiled several Solaris 10 training offerings as well as its certification plans for the track.
Although Solaris 10 is not scheduled to be released until later this year, Sun has already launched a free, Web-based training course overviewing the features of 10. The company is also prepping an "early advantage" training program that will debut Oct 18. This program will feature a five-day course focused on new features as well as a two-day course devoted to Solaris 10's dynamic tracing capabilities.
According to Sun, this is the first time the company has offered training prior to a release of a Solaris operating system.
In a pre-briefing for the announcement Friday, Sun Certification Product Manager Jim Vonick told CertCities.com that the certification exams for Solaris 10 will debut in "late March" 2005, with betas coming in January.
The company currently has plans for four Solaris 10 exams:
- CX-310-200 Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 10 OS, Part I
- CX-310-202-Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 10 OS, Part II
- CX-310-302-Sun Certified Network Administrator for Solaris 10 OS
- CX-310-203-Sun Certified System Administrator for the Solaris 10 Operating System Upgrade Exam
Sun is considering adding exams for a Sun Certified Security Administrator for Solaris 10 title, but has yet to make a final decision on a new version of this credential, which debuted with Solaris 9 track.
Vonick told CertCities.com that the program is working on adding simulation questions to its Solaris 10 exams -- something not yet seen on any Sun exam. According to Vonick, if simulations are added, they will be mixed in with standard-format questions. Vonick said that the company is working with a vendor to develop these questions, but could not provide further details by press time.
Information on the Solaris 10 certification track will be posted on Sun's Web site in the coming months. In the meantime, for more information on upcoming Solaris 10 training opportunities from Sun, go here.
-Becky Nagel
[Oct 15, 2004] US Training - Solaris 10 System Administration Learning Path
Courses support system administrators tasked with performing essential system administration procedures on the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and technical application support staff responsible for administering a networked server running on the Solaris OS.
Solaris 9 Operating System Certification Learning Path
Solaris 10 Operating System Certification Learning Path
Jon's Custom Solaris System Administration Labs
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Last modified: August 21, 2009