So the test was a lot harder than expected. I suppose that ought to have a been a basic assumption for how the test is spoken about online, I was expecting things to be a bit easier. Mind you, I was only a couple points off. Thankfully, I do have a free retake, so I’m hoping this attempt goes better.

My biggest struggle for sure in the test concerns networking. To be fair, that really is the central focus for systems administration, but seeing that I haven’t actually worked with things like NFS on my own home network, I just don’t have as much experience in it. For my home server, I mostly use sshfs for quickly sharing drive between devices and I use GUI tools for managing things like my firewall. It’s been a bit of a struggle to shift my thinking toward the command line for accomplishing it, especially when a number of videos on the subject are your typical corporate or quasi-educational piece: very hit or miss.

I’m still fairly confident about it though. It’s really meant directing my focus more towards systems despite having everything else on my plate like work. I think part of the issue for me was not having my typical workflow or configurations. I took a spare drive and installed Ubuntu on it because that was the exactly what was specified on the requirements, plus I’d rather not have something like a lockdown browser on my personal machine. Already though, that meant I didn’t have a lot of the basic things I expected like my keyboard configuration or even numlock on. I’m also just to looking up simple things.

For example, one of the things that I understand, but couldn’t quite figure out was concerning setting system time. I know how to adjust the /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf on a machine because I do that on my personal; however, when that file’s not there, I feel stumped. Of course, that’s on me. A sysadmin would know what to do in the circumstance, but it’s something trivial that I feel comes just from a lack of experience.

The good news, I suppose, is that I do have at least a grasp of things to a fairly confident level. I’ve been done well enough to have an Essentials distinction under my belt, so there is that at least. Now just comes time to apply that and see if the extra prep is what I need to have the certification under my belt.