This week I completed my SysAdmin1 and SysAdmin2 Solaris 10 Certification. I joined the wave of Solaris 10 Certifcation madness that is goin on within Sun and finally cleared the 2 exams with satisfactory results. The Exam really tested the skills of solaris.
What this means to me ? a lot. First time of this sort I achieved for a while. Sun Education provides lot of training resources for the employees for free. I took the opportunity to use it as much as I can and see what best I can achieve. Took all the Free Voucher opportunity provided by Sun as they gave 2 free vouchers per employee in April this year. + the study materials (details given below)
So here is the approach I took to complete the certification for those who are interested. Prepared for 2 months ( 1 month per exam ). As I work mostly on Solaris 10 so some of the topics are familiar to me and did not took much time to cover those. But few (ex., Volume Manager / Jumpstart / Printers )are challenging and I know nothing about those and took time to read it via the Webbased course first and then supplemented with the below said books. I took atleast 40+ hrs of study for each certification which comes to 80 hrs in total. I had to do this mostly while I am on travel and in between projects and late hours. But made sure that to achieve the goal I studied atleast 1 hour per day and 1 hour or regular workout ( ie., If I go for jogging/running/exercise I will reward myself with 1 hour of reading for the certification).
Certification is just the appreciation for the time & work that was put in. This time was worth spent considering that I am now knowledgable than what I was about 2 months ago. Still there are some grey areas which I need to work on but atleast I know the basics when someone talks about RAID , RAID 0+1.
I took mostly web based training and epractise exams which is available on Sun Learning site. The below is the link was put together by some of my colleague which helped me cross the line. Employees gets free :-)
Once again Thanks for Sun Learning people who provided all the resources for me to complete this certification. Hope this blog will help somebody else to achieve what I have achieved.
For CX-310-200, the corresponding online training is:(Equivalent web based courses for SA-200-S10)
1. WS-2000-S10 Managing File Systems
2. WS-2001-S10 Installing Software
3. WS-2002-S10 Performing System Boot Procedures
4. WS-2003-S10 Performing User and Security Administration
5. WS-2004-S10 Managing Network Printers and System Processes
6. WS-2005-S10 Archiving and Restoring the System
7. WS-240-S10 Intermediate System Administrator for the Solaris 10 OS x64/x86 Based Systems Differences
For CX-310-202 the corresponding online training is:(Equivalent web based courses for SA-202-S10)
1. WS-2020-S10 Networking Basic
2. WS-2021-S10 Virtual File Systems and Core Dump Management
3. WS-2022-S10 Storage Volume Management
4. WS-2023-S10 Access Control and System Messaging Configuration
5. WS-2024-S10 Naming Services Setup
6. WS-2025-S10 Advanced Installation Procedures
7. WS-242-S10 Advanced System Administration for the Solaris 10 )S x64/x86 Based Systems Differences
Study Guides
Two study guides are avaliable for online reading. One is available through the Safari Books Online and the other is through Boox24x7:
1. Solaris 10 System Adminstration Exam Prep* by Bill Calkins
2. Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 10 Study Guide* (Exams CX-310-200 and CX-310-202) by Paul Sanghera
ePractice exams list is in here
Exam for the Sun Certified System Administrator for the Solaris 10 OS, Part I WXI-S200A WXI-S200B WXI-S200C
WXI-S200A/B/C - 3 practice exams
Exam for Sun Certified System Admin for Solaris 10 OS, Part II WXI-S202A WXI-S202B WXI-S202C
WXI-S202/A/B/C - 3 practice exams