How I became the only RHCE in the paradise islands of Andaman and Nicobar
by Swapan Karmakar
It all started when I took an engineering class in Tamilnadu, India. In my native home, the Andaman islands, I had many friends who were experts in Windows. I, too, was a typical Windows user. But to tell you the truth, I hated Windows. It hanged. It crashed. It invited viruses and forever needed troubleshooting. To me, Windows continues to be a headache.
I always wanted to be the different, tech-savvy guy working on a better platform. When I was in my first year of engineering classes, I saw a guy holding a book about Unix shell and network programming. Out of curiosity, I asked him one day why he used Unix and Linux. He replied, “It’s a great OS. Try it. It will drive you crazy.”
Something in his words ignited a spark in me. But a few days later, I had to leave engineering school because I was in poor health. I returned to Andaman and searched for an IT training center where I could learn more about Linux. Initially, I found none. I went online so see where I could get the Linux operating system, and for the first time, I heard the words “open source software.”
When I visited a few Linux-related websites, I was impressed. I was really excited and wanted to learn more. Finally, TATA Infotech was launched here in our remote (but developing) islands. I took a course called “Unix and C,” but to my surprise, they were teaching all of the Unix classes on Linux. The more I learned, the more I was attracted to this secure and crash-proof operating system. The only problem was the lack of user friendliness. I decided that I would do something special; something that would make me different from others on this beautiful island.
I started working on PCQ-Linux, Fedora Core, and Red Hat 7.2, 8.0, and 9.0. To my surprise, many people who knew me were very curious about Linux. By that time, a few departments here had implemented Linux in small scale. By 2004, I was getting calls from friends and other people who had heard of my skills when they had problems. I even worked as a Red Hat trainer, part time.
At last, I decided to go for my dream and attend some official Red Hat Enterprise Linux training. In July 2004, I received my training in Chennai and I was certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) on April 29, 2005.
Although I was offered jobs with some good Linux-based organizations, I had faith in the interest of Linux back home. I decided to contribute to open source by being the only RHCE on these islands. People here are getting tired of Windows, but it is sometimes difficult to spread Linux because people have difficulty learning to use it, with different interfaces and graphics.
I now work for IIHT, an IT training center for RHCE, Unix, MCSA, and CCNA in Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar islands. I’ve trained more than 10 candidates for RHCE. I hope that one day, Red Hat will enter this island to see the prospects. I continue to contribute to that big boss, that great operating system, Linux.
February 20th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Hello Swapan….
A very Nice Article… You have a bright future to go.. All the Best.
Regards,
Dev.
February 20th, 2007 at 1:35 am
It’s great to read your story. I appreciate your eager on redhat .
Best of luck
February 20th, 2007 at 2:37 am
hello,
I am a LPIC from Taiwan.. Enjoy the wonderful world of linux….
February 20th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Hey Dada, Its great to have u here and wish u very best of luck in near future…… in the WORLD of LINUX
February 20th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Hi Guys,
Nice article by Swapan. Guys I don’t want to dishearten you. But what I am going to say is true. I am a RedHat Enterprise Linux admin since last 6yrs, I earn my bread & butter on RHEL. Given below are my comments on Swapan’s:
- “secure and crash-proof operating system” – I dont agree. We have around a thousand production servers running RHEL AS 2.1/3 and almost everyday some of them crash / reboot unexpectedly. We have involved redhat engineers, but they have absolutely no clues.
I finally have reached to a conclusion that RHEL/Linux is a desktop operating system, meant to run on desktop architecture (ix86) & is not at all suitable for enterprise environments. When you badly need tech support, redhat will first say that the third party modules you are running are culprit. Now tell me if you don’t run Oracle on the server then why the hell did you purchase it? Then redhat should bring out its own solutions for everything including hardware, also prove that they are the best, then nobody will look to thirdparty.
Anybody wants proof, let me know through this magazine. I can give you the redhat case numbers and names of engineers I had worked with.
February 21st, 2007 at 5:51 am
Nice determination!! For sure, you will be inspiration to few of your fellow aspirants, including me
February 21st, 2007 at 11:44 am
Anindra,
I’m interested in hearing more about your experience with us. The response from our engineers doesn’t surprise me, since our standard position on third party modules is quite restrictive. But that is changing, quite literally as we speak, and I’d like to hear more about your story so that I can be sure we’re solving for real world problems with our current policy.
Feel free to contact me directly at marty@redhat.com
Thanks,
Marty Messer
Director, Red Hat GSS (Support)
February 21st, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Hi Swapan,
Very good article, which inspires everyone and devolops urge to learn skills. I know Dev (Devashish das) your friend in Diploma. He use to tell me about you and your skills. Great job dude….
Regards,
Akhil.
February 21st, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Hey Swapan,
That’s a nice story. But I think the linux lacks the through-put required to create games. I create a small 3D game on OpenGL. I ran it on windows and then on linux. Linux was sluggish. Also many times it crashed the whole system and I had to reboot. Well! that’s just one example.
What I consider is Linux is an engineers o/s while windows is the desktop.
February 21st, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Marty,
Thanks for coming forward to help me keep my confidence in RedHat. Give me a days time, I will send you a few RedHat Service Request numbers, by going through them you should be able to understand the whole story which has been running since an year by now.
Thanks,
Anindra
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Hi Guys….
This is ashik here.im also a RedHat Certified Engineer.Currently working as a Linux Administrator.Really its a nice OS for security.
And huge support for Oracle Database…
Hope everybody can enjoy this……….
February 26th, 2007 at 2:17 am
hi Swapan,
very nice.
I am in Mauritius. Working as a Systems Engineers. me too want become a RHCE. Here Lack of Resources. Is any availbale.
Please Help???????????
February 28th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Dear Swapan,
Its nice to share your journey towards Linux. Do You knew many guys are here in kolkata they all are RHCE but they failed to install sound drivers, so my point is this do you suggest any book apart from
RHCE study materials to learn it in proper way .
I also appriciate the Linux as its secure and have many more to do with it.. I also love linux and want to learn PERL too.please mail me with your suggestion and remarks.
regards,
Sanjay Kr.
thanks & regards in Advance….
February 28th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Congratulations!
I am a ver old user of Linux. In fact the first linux installation that I did was in 1994 (slackware linux). Now ofcourse i use RHEL 4 and FC2/3/4/5. I am facing the following problem with RHEL 4. We have couple of network printers which is also configured for these RHEL 4 based serveres. Sometimes it takes few hours to get a page printed which was fired through some of these servers and these set of servers are fixed. Note that the network is not busy and no other print job is in queue.
Any clue?
February 28th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
indeed.
what a nice artilce…
February 28th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Hi Swapon,
Nice to see you here. Carry on with the good work.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Hi swapan,
Nice Article, Great work. it’ll boost everybody to achieve their goal. I am expecting moooooore from you like this. All the Best.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:08 am
Swapan,
This is an awesome story, and I am glad to hear that you have stayed in your native country to help foster the adoption of Linux. All due respect to Red Hat aside, I am curious if other distros are making inroads into your country? I have been an on-again off-again user of Linux for over a decade, I recently played a bit with Ubuntu and found it to be one of the most ‘Non-tech’ user friendly distros. That being said, I am sure that 80-90% of what I saw is in Fedora too.
Linux is getting there (to the desktop), especially in countries where buying windows and office make pc’s cost-prohibitive.
Good Luck.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:16 am
Like this story it reminds me of my self I am crazy over Linux. I unlike the others in here have found Red hat Support outstanding. I think that Anindra might have a hardware problem. Since I have run Red hat on many different servers and white boxed systems with out any problems.
Good Luck
March 15th, 2007 at 4:57 am
Redhat was my favourite OS and while I did my MCA from IGNOU, Visakhapatnam, I had done my project on that Os with PGSql as the backend and tcl/tk as the frontend.
But that was long ago, in 2002 and now I’m pathetically out of touch. I’m happy that Linux is doing well in the islands.
I’ve experience of staying at Port Blair for almost three years between 1995-1998 and I can really find it interesting.
By the by, I’ve written a Short story book, wholly devoted to Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Mr RUSKIN BOND has written foreword for it.
Please visit my site http://remixoforchid.blogspot.com to know more about my effort and comment on it.
Thanks.
Sincertely
Nanda
March 20th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Hey Swapan,
Awsome man. Can see the changes and growth in u. I swear you are gonna be one of the best in this world. Thanks for the service you do for Open Source. Great job. Carry on dude.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:37 am
midi-man,
I am part of a Sys Admin team, in a US based MNC. We support around 6000 server in various datacenters in the US alone. Out of them around 1000 are running RHEL. The only ones which are used to run some monitoring tools or testing etc are running fine. But all those running oracle databases, Veritas clusters etc. have hang/crash problems very frequently.
Hardware looks to be the primary culprit in such cases. We too had the same thought and had Hewlett Packard people do H/W diags on *all* of them. Some of them had issues with hardware, but they were very few and the H/W issues are rectified now. But almost everyday at least 2 RHEL servers we find in hung state. Even when we try to generate a netdump manually, it never works. The netdump configuration is checked thoroughly by redhat support and is perfect.
Bottomline: I am not against RedHat or Linux for that matter. I love RedHat linux. But, I have realised the below facts about it:
- It is not for the enterprise.
- The support is not good at all – especially for crash and hang issues. We have issues open with them since 6 months and still unresolved.
I am now planning to check if the same issue is there with all linux distros. If yes, then I have to think of switching to either Solaris or AIX.
April 16th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Anindra,
How many of the 5000 servers that are not running RHEL have crash and hang issues? Are they running Solaris or AIX? Are they on Hewlett Packard hardware?
June 21st, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Did you try suse?
July 1st, 2007 at 2:11 am
Great!! I too love linux and have a same kind of story.
Now working as system administrator.
December 15th, 2007 at 2:43 am
from which website. I can find RHCE syllabus
December 15th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
visit http://www.redhat.com/training or search site of “linuxlearning centre”..surely u will get it.
March 7th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Just to redress the balance we use Red Hat and HPUX in our datacenter and Red Hat is much more reliable.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Congratulations
August 12th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Great,really a good article.Thanks for sharing your journey to linux.Linux is good OS.
August 19th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
hey cn u tell me which are the good rhce training centres in kolkata?
September 30th, 2008 at 7:23 am
is that any boddy send me sylbus of RHCE plz on my id
thankz you plz help me
January 7th, 2009 at 7:18 am
search the below link for RHCE SYLBUS
http://www.redhat.com/training
Thanks
Jinu
January 31st, 2009 at 9:53 am
First to Swapan – A truly inspiring article … I passed my RHCE today and I know its not easy!
I was reading the issues raised by Anindra, and the subsequent responses. I work for a ‘HUGE’ MNC media company. My job is Outage management – not just targeted sysadmin work for Linux/Unix – but every kind of production outage, be it servers (*NIX flavors, Windows, AS400/Mainframes), Network, Web, Application, Power, Cyclone, Earthquake, anything. I’m the one who yells at people when things break – the one who talks about impact all the time and push for faster resolution – I am the archtypical *Bad Guy* of any large IT organization.
Count of servers run in tens of thousands worldwide, most are on the Unix/Linux platform (~70%) versus Windows (~30%). Almost all (90%) of the *NIX servers are running RHEL4.
If you rule out all the hardware, network, storage or 3rd party application (DB, App, and web) issues – I see more servers with Windows (2000/2003) crashing due to miriad reasons than servers running RHEL. RHEL OS itself is extremely stable compared to Windows (or even Solaris, AIX, HPUX – yeah we have those too).
When something OS related really breaks and our engineers can’t fix it, with RHEL, there is almost always a patch or a fix available if you get the support guys involved. Microsoft – not so easy.
Servers break and crash – that’s why people buy stuff and pay for support. Its a fact that everyone must accept – no server will run forever. Everything needs maintenance. No software is “bug free”.
RHEL is *NOT* a desktop OS. It does a great job of being an enterprise level *NIX Server OS. How good are other Linux flavors compared to RHEL? – I don’t know. But one thing I know is none of the others provide quality support which is very essential in any Enterprise environment.
Just my two cents. Thanks!
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:47 am
Congrats…. Nice opening with you
I am trying to learn Linux I have very much impressed to your article… try to help newbies….
feel free to contact
Muralitharan