BSD Professional Certification Exam Objectives Wiki Now Available

Thanks to the efforts of Jeremy Reed, one of the members of the BSD Certification Group, there is now a wiki page to help create the exam objectives for the BSD Professional Certification Exam.

The exam objectives describe the knowledge domains that will be part of the exam. The list of domains came from the BSDP Job Task Analysis Survey we completed a few months ago (see previous blog posts).

The are 11 knowledge domains and approximately 180 topics. The domains are as follows:

1. INSTALLATION and SETUP
2. SECURITY
3. FILESYSTEMS and FILES
4. USERS
5. GENERAL ADMINISTRATION
6. COMMON SERVICES
7. GENERAL NETWORKING
8. BACKUP and RESTORE
9. VIRTUALIZATION
10. LOGGING and MONITORING
11. HIGH AVAILABILITY HIGH PERFORMANCE

You can web to http://bsdwiki.reedmedia.net/wiki/BSDP.html and and see progress on the objectives or create an account and login to help us write some of them yourself.

The objectives form the core of the exam material. Each of the domains listed above has several topic areas that need a 'Concept' paragraph, some 'Practical' elements such as man page references, and a time estimate. Here's an example:

Configure a log server according to a set of specifications.

Importance: 3.9, Frequency: 1.9

Concept:

Syslogd (sometimes known as newsyslogd) is capable of separating log facilities and
log levels into separate output channels. BSDP candidates must be able to configure
syslog to output, forward, or operate on log information according to a detailed
specification for log levels and facilities, and required actions.

Practical:

syslog(8), syslog.conf(5), logger(1)

Estimated Time:

15 minutes to set up a solution

Notice the 'Estimated Time' block. This is intended to help candidates prepare for the hands-on lab portion of the exam. Candidates should be able to perform the objective within the time limit (or less) to ensure that they will have sufficient time to complete the hands-on lab.

Please join us! We're looking for BSD admins, users, developers, and anyone who is familiar with BSD systems to help us get the exam objectives done. Send an email to info at bsdcertification.org or pop into #bsdcert on freenode to get an 'Account Creation Password' for the wiki. Then read through the guidelines and give it a go.