Open Solaris and certification.

[Mike Chaffin]

I was recently turned down for a job for not having enough experience on Solaris so did a bit of research on it. Now I offered to take the Solaris certification in order to prove my worth as it were though I'm not yet sure quite how much is involved. Has anyone taken the Solaris 10 certifications?

I note though that as of earlier this year Solaris has been made open source so should start popping up all over the place in projects which would previously have ruled it out on cost grounds(�50k a licence so I believe previously). Certainly some of the articles on it get rather excited.

Is this a skill which people are taking up? As an operating system do people use it theselves for development / study at home in preference to Win / Linux etc? Now I havn't even done my SCJP yet so maybe I'm jumping the gun a little but just interested to see what peeps think of Solaris in general and specifically as a skillset / OS / career move.

[John Ewing]

Solaris is used where I work, in addition to Windows-based machines. Of the certifications I have, the Solaris Certified System Administrator one is actually most relevant to my current job task.

[Michael Ernest]

The primary use for Solaris certifications has been among Sun's IForce partners (resellers) and a few companies that require it as a standard for competence. These tests closely follow the guides for Sun's systems administration courses, so it's important to know those objectives if you won't be taking the classes.

The Solaris 10 certification exams include a healthy amount of testing on the x86 version as well as SPARC, so you have quite a bit more study to do. I wouldn't call the exams difficult, but the subject area is extensive and the balance of questions seems (to me) a bit odd.

If nothing else, being a fully certified Systems and Network Administrator will get you a job in the reseller channel, since those companies don't always care to train their pre-sales engineers from the ground up.

[Mike Chaffin]

Do you foresee Solaris being taken up more widely by firms in prefeence to the Linux flavours in the future now that it is open source? Sun's Suse based distro seemed to get a fairly lukewarm response from the posts I've seen on here and elsewhere so does Solaris have enough about it (Zones, DTrace etc) to recommend it above Linux or other Unix O/Ss amongst companies who were previously put off by the price tag?

Some of the posts seem rather sceptical due to the toolset offered though I assume that either the Nevada project or porting tools used in Linux distros would help this.

Solaris does seem intriguing in that it is a rare skillset which could give one a competitive advantage. Also the bootable JDS CD I've had a look at seemed to be rather a nice environment.

Question is I guess whether the lack of drivers and user base makes it a viable system for home development use and / or certification. Naturally I don't have access to a Sparc based machine so the questions on this architecture might be a real bummer.

There are books on Solaris certification, has anyone taken the trouble to certify themselves purely through this medium rather than through Sun's own internal courses or those of training agencies?

I've been out of the industry for a couple of years so obviously SCJP will come first and, as I mentioned, maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself but I am interested to see what peeps think.