* What other readers say about Novell training
Recent newsletters about Novell’s training and materials for introducing NetWare managers to SuSE continue to generate a lot of traffic to my inbox. I want to comment on a couple of those conversations today in the hopes that you all can benefit from them.
First, my old friend Jim Henderson (we served together as Novell Support Volunteer Sysops for 10 years – and almost wrote a book together) is currently working for Novell Education and so was naturally interested in what you, dear reader, and I had to say. He specifically referred to the comments about course 3015, which one reader reviewed.
The reader said: “The NNLS [Novell Nterprise Linux Services] course was disappointing in that everything was still based on [SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)] 8 and trying to do the exercises resulted in some very weird errors.”
Henderson pointed out that the current version of NNLS only runs on SLES 8, and that’s certainly a valid point. But as the reader further indicated: “After downgrading some of the PCs in the class to SLES 8, we still had issues in even getting Red Carpet [Red Carpet provides centralized and automated management and maintenance of Linux systems] to run correctly.”
The real problem here is that the Novell Training Partner – what we used to call a Novell Authorized Education Center (NAEC) – was trying to run NNLS on SLES 9! If the training site can’t get that part right, can you really trust it to get any of it right? I’ll be talking to Henderson in more depth in a couple of weeks as I try to get a true picture of where Novell is with training these days.
This also brings us to some comments that longtime reader Scott Turnbull brought up, which can be summarized as caveat emptor – let the buyer beware. It’s his contention that the original reader-reviewer should have done some more homework before choosing courses.
Another longtime reader and frequent commentator, Lance Groth, suggested a different way: “Due to budget constraints, we ordered the self-study kits for all of Novell’s Linux courses rather than taking the classroom courses. I can well believe that cramming these courses into a few days of classroom would be overwhelming. But we have found the self-study kits to be very useful resources. The books are well written and easy to understand, as have been all the Novell Press books I’ve ever read, and combined with one’s own test lab environment (which needn’t be elaborate, we’re running SuSE Enterprise on some old Dell P-III desktops) and the time to peruse at one’s own pace, they make great learning tools.
“I’ve not yet taken any of the classroom courses, but my thought is that once I’m satisfied with the self study, I might take one or two of the classroom courses as a way of tying it all together and getting any lingering questions answered by an instructor. So maybe the answer is self study, possibly followed by a little classroom instruction, rather than one or the other.”
That sounds like a good plan to me, but then I’ve always been more interested in DIY. But keep on sending in notes about your experiences.
