Monday, May 18, 2020

How I passed the Azure Administrator Associate exams

Hello Techies,

I am sure being a system administrator is not only about demonstrating technical skills but also keeping up to-date with the latest certifications and hence gaining more experience and knowledge.
I just wanted to share some of my practical methods I deployed in order to achieve success and also about my preparations for the Azure Administrator Associate Exams.
The steps involved:

1. Preparation time

I was working with Ylneo at that time and the company required me to have this certification. So, they provided me with all the materials and handouts so that I am well prepared. Each day, alongside with my workload, I had to plan for my study time.

I divided my time as follows over 1 month :

First 2 weeks including weekends :
- 4 hours reading time
- 4 hours lab practice

Last 2 weeks:
-4 hours questions and theory
-2 hours lab practice

2. Labs practice

In my experience with this type of certification, labs practice was of utmost importance. Of course, it will be beneficial in the working environment but also to my advantage in the exams room as their are at least a dozen questions coming from practicals. Therefore, my advice to any person wishing to succeed this exams is to keep practicing and understand concepts and scenarios before attempting questions.

3. Questions practice

Practicing questions and trying to remember details as answers quite resemble each other was the most tedious part of it all. So, I again divided the number of questions I attempted per day like a dozen questions in one day till I am done with all of them 3 days before the exams.
During the final three days, I attempted all the questions again but all in one go and tried to achieve maximum score.

4. Exams Day

Obviously, you will definitely not remember everything but if concepts are understood, it becomes easier to find the answer.I got like 20 new questions in my question pool.
However, the trick is to study the material, have a plan till exams day, revise well, practice labs (cannot stress on the fact that labs helped me a lot) and have a positive mindset.


To wrap up, I was really happy to obtain this certification as I learned a lot  and enjoyed being certified as an Azure Administrator Associate.




Monday, May 4, 2020

[Installation] Windows 10 on a 64-bit laptop with partition

Hello Techies,

I finally re-installed a fresh Windows10 OS on my new laptop - DELL - and I created a partition which I left to install Linux OS. So let's just dig in on the procedures. The process took me less than 1 hour.

1. Plug in the bootable USB flash drive - see post on how to make flash drive bootable
2. Power on the laptop and as soon as the brand logo appears, press on F12
Note: For DELL systems F12 key takes you to set up, depending on the brand model, different function keys are used.

 3.The system will boot from the USB and Windows10 installation begins.
4.Click on Install
5.Select 'Accept the licence terms' and click on Next
 6.Delete existing partitions
 7.Create new partitions and assign size to the partitions
 8.Windows Installation begins. It might take a few minutes
  

 Thank You!
  




Friday, May 1, 2020

[Linux Mint] Upgrading firefox 50.0.2 to firefox 75.0

Hello Techies,

I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon back in 2016 on one of my laptops. Since a few days I have restarted using it and enjoying all the features and rapidity that this free environment is offering. However, some of the software I was using back in 2016 obviously got outdated.
I had some free time, so I updated one of the my favourite browsers, Firefox.
This is a guide to upgrade  firefox 50.0.2 to firefox75.0 (the latest version as of date).

1. Current old version on my laptop

2. Download the latest firefox package at mozilla.org.
3. Unpack the files
$ cd ~/Downloads/
$ tar xjf firefox-75.0.tar.bz2

4.Move unpacked folder from Downloads to /opt/firefox75
$ sudo mv firefox /opt/firefox75

5.Backup the old firefox launcher
$ sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-old

6.Create a symlink pointing to the new Firefox version:
$ sudo ln -s /opt/firefox75/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

7.Launch firefox
$ firefox

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