Thinking About Brown Bag - What to Share / Not to Share

[Rilindo]

Now that I have passed the EX374 exam, I am thinking of doing a brown bag for my team to discuss what I learned from the DO374 course. 

NOTE: I am not going to do the following:

• Share course material.
• Share the contents of the exam.

Or anything similar. I am thinking of doing the following:

• Notes I made during my prep-work (that are not under NDA.
• The links at the end of each chapter that are publicly accessible.

Would this be acceptable, NDA-wise or is this still problematic?

[Chetan_Tiwary_ · Accepted solution]

@Rilindo As long as the post does not disclose about exam specific tasks, exam environment, any hint about possible exam scenarios or challenge - it should be ok. 

[Travis · Accepted solution]

@Rilindo -

There are no real restrictions on some of the notes or pointers, except for what @Chetan_Tiwary_ mentioned. You must be extremely careful not to discuss exam specific tasks or questions about the challenges. It is fine to work with theoreticals and fine to share pointers.

For example, you could state one thing to help if you have issues with SELinux and filesystem labelling is to do XX or YY. If you are wanting to change ports for SSH ... look at the SSHD config file and find the example there or look at XXX manpage and copy/paste/tweak/execute the modified command to save time.

https://github.com/tmichett/do374

https://github.com/tmichett/AnsiblePlaybooks

are some examples I would share when I was delivering the courses. This should help give you an idea. I would also do mapping of objectives to labs/lectures that were part of the course materials too. This made it easy to use scenarios and pointers and extend examples from the course.

[Amalrasheed]

Can you talk about the difficulty level of the exam? Also please let us know how you prepared for the exam. Also about you exam strategy, have you used the offline html/pdf docs?

[Travis]

@Amalrasheed -

It is fine to talk about the difficulty level of exams (as long as not giving specifics) as well as how you prepared and what you did.

For example, I find the EX374 exam much more difficult than the EX467 exam for some of the following reasons ...

EX374 you have a large range of objectives that you could be tested on ...

• Advanced Ansible playbooks using Filters, Lookups, etc.
• Creating custom collections and execution environments

Some of these when authoring playbooks and building collections can be very time consuming. When taking an exam, time can be one of the biggest hurdles when you know the content, but aren't necessarily the quickest at things.

Some strategies I use to prepare for an exam ...

• Have a plan and time limit on certain tasks
• Have "playbook templates" so unlike a course, sometimes you don't get starter playbooks. Create your playbook for the first task and then use it to copy/paste/tweak/execute for other tasks requiring playbooks
  • So you know you have the basic structure of a playbook, get that in there and it saves typing. If you can save a minute or 2 for each playbook, it adds up during an exam
• Create a VIMRC or something or use settings within VIM to give column colors. I do this for students so you can easily see YAML formatting issues. set cc=3,5,7,9,11 and can go out further, but that gives vertical column guides and you can see alignment.
• Leverage system documentation both from PDFs and ansible-navigator docs <module>. Sometimes I still use the ansible-doc command when available and collection can be installed locally, because I can search for /exam and it takes me to the examples section. Then you have sample tasks with the modules for copy/paste. I do this even for modules I know really well ... why, saves on typing. It is only a few seconds to copy/paste the example and then change the words, but it could be 2-3 minutes to type everything out (depending on the speed of typing).

Finally, general tips for the exam is I take the objectives and map them to sections and exercises in the book. Then I attempt to do those exercises as quickly as possible. I look at what takes mre more time to complete and then I check ... are there man pages, is this in the docs somewhere where I can copy/paste/tweak/execute? Finally I make up some of my own things and try to figure out ... how might I be tested on this and I do my own lab.