04.07.07
Weekend Double-Feature: Day 6 & 7, The Malingering Gets Worst…
So I didn’t post yesterday, wow my fan base must be in total disarray, with my lack of content, moving along…
During the Nine Days of Nerdom, I realized adjustments had to be made. My first schedule was neat, but not terribly practical. It required liberal amounts of “Fu$k-Off Time”, which I had not scheduled in. As well my priorities changed as I progressed through the material. I found all it took was a simple omitted fact in the book or my lack of reading something correctly to dramatically change the time it took to complete an exercise. As well I found more resources at the Apple site to optimize my training regimen, and I scheduled my exam for next Thursday. Deciding I could try and do everything, and perhaps do it poorly, was not as appealing as doing one thing well. So I looked back at my initials goals and decided to focus on the OS X Server Certification (As well, it cost $$$, so I really don’t want to have to take it again). So in preparing for this, a couple mottos came to mind:
“Train Hard, Test Easy”: So I totally, stole this from the brittish army, but nonetheless it applies. So I decided to forgo the AppleScripting for the week and minimize my Terminal endeavor , although I did put up a page for it, which will be updated today.
“Know Your Enemy”: after mucking around on train.apple.com, I found a nice pdf outlining the exam including the break-down of the sections, along with how many questions will be from each section. Being the consummate economist I decided to min - max this set up:
- 4 Questions - Installation & Configuration
- 2 Questions - Network Services
- 3 Questions - Configuration Services
- 5 Questions - Authentication & Authorization
- 9 Questions - Open Directory
- 4 Questions - Print Services
- 13 Questions - File Services
- 11 Questions - Account Management
- 5 Questions - Deployment Solutions
As well, when you study econ, you start to develop a fetish for graphs, hence one ensues.
Basically, this says, take care of your customers (Account Management, File Services, Open Directory), and you can bluff the rest. Personally I thought this sold the potential of OS X Server a bit short, given all its other functionality, but cries out Apple’s market strategy.
“Must Replace Microsoft Server Products!”
This is also noticeable in the pricing structure of OS X Server.
Anyways here is the info from Days 6 & 7:
Day 6: Managing User Accounts and 420 Minutes of Solitude
So Chapter 9 Managing User Accounts was verrrrrrry looooong, and required that I rebooted the mr. computer about 15 times, and logged into accounts about 45 times. This was very time consuming and made it impossible to keep up with my email or chat, or listen to music on my computer. So it was very productive and way to quiet in the Apartment, especially with Haiete gone to Manhattan. I did run into one issue, and hopefully this saves someone else some time. I was running through the exercises no problem and then I was asked to login in as another networked account, and see if my preferences were saved. So I go to login and couldn’t get any account to login in except the local administrator and the one network account I was using in the previous example. I get a window about the AFP service being down or some such. and I looked around, every thing seemed fine. DHCP was up. DNS was resolving. I could get the AFP services in the other accounts. Tried restarting the services. Finally I figured it out.
You Can Have Only One Network User Logged Into a Machine at a Time!
There was no mention of this in the goofy little pop-up that sucked up about 40 minutes of my time. Maybe I this is something more basic that I should have known about, but it sure got me! Hopefully this saves somebody some time. The only other issue seemed to be a glitch. When ever I re-logged into an account with an auto-mounted share point would a get a fully functional duplicate of the item on the desk-top. Not the end of the world but something I can see end-users harping about already. So if anybody has a solution for this let me know (insert sound of crickets). After endless fast-user switching (my a$$ its fast, there really should a keyboard short-cut for that, besides logging out) I was done, and it was time for many drinks at Temperance Hall. I was about to ride over the, when I realized that I had left the Red Dragon in park ( leaves the map-light and brake-light on). So it was off to hoofing it down to the Metro, which wasn’t such a bad idea anyway.
Day 7: Deployment Solutions, but don’t try this a home kids
Chapter 10, was perhaps the most interesting material in this book, covering NetBooting, System Imaging, and Remote Software Installation and it was really only skimmed through, with only one exercise to be had. This is a shame because for sadmins this is a gold mine. While Apple has a pdf on the subject up on their site, it seems odd not to cover in-depth one of the most useful features for someone managing a large group of computers. Maybe when I have to get re-certified for 10.5 this will be included.
So when I got up nice and early for class, it had freakin’ snowed! WTF! My poor Duc has had a hard couple days. After getting back from class I went to remove the battery, and then the Gin & Tonic induced headache rear its ugly head from the night before, this was weird because in class I didn’t even notice.
Fortunately the fine peoples at Vespa Washington were kind enough to charge my battery. Everyone there is incredibly nice, I heart them alot. Please go buy lots of stuff from them!