[BSDCert] Announcement: Task Analysis Survey Launched

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

"George R." <george at sddi.net> writes:
> But IMO, this effort for a BSD certification is aimed at sysadmins,
> not developers.

So what you are saying is that because I'm a professional software
developer, not sysadmin, my knowledge and experience with FreeBSD is
of no interest to the bsdcert team?

I started to fill out the survey, leaving question 1 blank, but gave
up on page 4 or 5.

First of all, the format is very awkward.  The checkboxes should
really be radio buttons.

Second, some of the questions don't seem very well thought out.  For
instance:

 - question 12 is irrelevant; there is no run-time linker cache on ELF
   systems, only a search path.

 - question 27 is equally irrelevant: you should never set MANPATH
   with modern versions of man(1), and they will emit a warning if you
   do.

 - question 46 is meaningless: none of the BSDs currently support
   dynamically resizable filesystems.  FreeBSD has an ill-maintained
   tool that lets you grow (but not shrink) cold UFS1 and UFS2 file
   systems.

 - question 51 is a duplicate of question 42

 - questions 58, 59 and 60 are not very meaningful because there is no
   significant difference between the skills they address (unless
   question 59 includes setting up the NFS server).

There are other questions where the answers will vary depending on
which BSD you are using:

 - question 26: on FreeBSD 5 and newer, you will never need to create
   device nodes.  An advanced admin will however need to know how to
   mount a devfs filesystem in a chroot or jail, and how to limit the
   devices it presents.

 - question 43: FreeBSD 4 and newer and DragonFly BSD do not have
   block devices.

 - question 62 is relevant only for FreeBSD 4 and newer and DragonFly
   BSD.

For many of the tasks, the correct frequency rating is "only once, at
install time"; but there is no indication of how often that is
expected to happen, until you come to question 58 and realize you're
supposed to figure that out on your own.  Some respondents may feel
that any BSD admin must start by learning the installation process,
while others may feel that a novice admin would only perform routine
maintenance on existing systems, and that only a junior or
intermediate admin would actually install new systems.

Perhaps you should consider this a beta test, and relaunch the survey
after it's been fixed up a bit?

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no