cism

Observations of Instructor Led Training with Real Hardware

TechNow has heard many students talk about virtualized/remote training that TechNow Does Not Do. While training our most recent offering of PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack a student told his story of how he endend up in our course. His story we have heard for other technologies like Cisco, VMware, BlueCoat and other products.

A large percentage of training is moving to the virtualized/remote lab environments. Students are asked to use some variant of remote access software and remote into the training company's lab environment. Our student in our Palo Alto Networks Firewall course informed us that he went to a very costly offering of that course from the vendor and was not able to perform any labs. There were either network connectivity issues, or issues with the remote access software, or other problems. The whole training experience was very frustrating and not productive.

We keep our labs open to students if they would like after hours, or before hours access. Repeatedly going through a lab engrains that knowledge for later recall. Touching hardware is so critical in understanding the problems that arise when a cable comes loose, or a cable gets plugged in the wrong port. There are other scenarios such as just pulling the power cable, or turning off a power strip, or accidently overwriting a configuration. These disaster scenarious requires hands-on physical access to hardware. Preventing and recovering from disasters is what it's all about, and that requires hands-on, instructor led, real hardware.

Microsoft

The Microsoft platform is arguably the largest component in any IT architecture, and rate of change in this arena makes training in the Microsoft platform a must. TechNow can and does teach the entire gamut of Microsoft technologies, from Servers to application development.

Here is a list of all of our Microsoft courses:

L-395: Accelerated Linux Administration and Utilities

Course Overview:

This course is extremely fast paced and for students that have already had UNIX or Linux training, or have not worked with Linux in several months or years. This is NOT a course for students new to Linux and assumes the student requires a refresher before progressing through high end security courses that require dexterity on Linux. RedHat and Ubuntu, VMware Virtual Machines, and BackTrack are used for the instruction of this course. The student will acquire the skills to easily navigate the advanced VMware training environment and will be able to create scripts to manipulate and manage Linux. The ulimate goals of the skills of this course is to provide the student the ability to automate through scripting BackTrack tools for offensive security, forensics, and defense.

Attendees to L-395: Accelerated Linux Administration and Utilities will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 5 days

Course Objectives:

Day 1 and 2: Unix Review and Unix Utilities

Linux File System Archictecure and In-Depth discussion of Hard and Soft Links
Linux File, Directory, and Permissions Management
Linux archives using tar and zip
Interacting with BASH
Review of Common Linux commands
Sorting files by line or field
Regular Expressions (meta character) with grep commands to locate specific lines in files
Grep, egrep extended metacharacters, combinations-lab advanced combinations- lab Sed
Basic commands- Lab, Advanced commands- Lab, Advanced scripting -Lab
Miscellaneous commands Tr, sort, cut, past, pr -Lab
Performing non-interactive editing tasks with the sed command
Writing simple sed scripts to perform complex editing tasks
Using awk variables & arrays to sort data
Employing awk programs to manipulate numeric & textual data
Performing formatted printing in awk
Writing simple awk programs to write reports from data files
Using built-in awk functions & defining new functions
Write awk programs that make decisions based on numeric or string comparisons (branches & loops)

Day 3 – Intro to Programming / Shell Scripting

Shell Review
Shell Interpretation of Quotes & Backslash
The Bash Shell
Shell's combined with UNIX utilities
Programming Basics
Data Constructs
Programming Looping
Your Environment
More on Parameters

Day 4 and 5 – Security Fundamentals, Linux Administration

System Configuration / Kernel overview
System Maintenance / Disk and file admin
Using utilities for process control, locating files & automating maintenance tasks
System Startup / Boot Process – LILO & GRUB Configuration
Managing the Linux file system
Customization of setup files
Run Levels
Network Services / Configuration
User Management Monitoring, accessing & restricting root system access
Administration Tools
Process Control
Client side components of NFS, Samba, NTP, NIS
Server side components such as DHCP, Samba, NIS, LDAP, inet, telnet, ftp, DNS, etc.

Prerequisites:

Prior UNIX/Linux experience or training

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User: mikenaya

Instructor comments: As usual, Dave was excellent and the content was very relevant to our line of work.

Facilities comments: The hotel facilities met our basic needs but it was awkward having a bathroom so close. I can't wait for the new facility to open.

User: fquinene

Instructor comments: Instructor was super knowledgeable and helped me tie in a lot of information from other OS and processes.

Facilities comments: Facility was fine

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AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Course Overview:

This two-day course will provide foundational level knowledge on cloud concepts; core Azure services; security, privacy, compliance, and trust; and Azure pricing and support.

NOTE: This course provides an Azure pass and time for you to participate in hands-on labs. The content for this course aligns to AZ-900 exam objective domain

TechNow has worked worldwide enterprise infrastructures for over 20 years and has developed demos and labs to exemplify the techniques required to demonstrate cloud technologies and to effectively manage security in the cloud environment

Attendees to AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

Date/Time	Event
04/07/2026 - 04/08/2026 08:00 -16:00	AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
08/03/2026 - 08/04/2026 08:00 -16:00	AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
11/09/2026 - 11/10/2026 08:00 -16:00	AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX

Course Duration: 3 days

Course Outline:

Cloud Concepts
Core Azure Services
Security, Privacy, Compliance, And Trust
Azure Pricing and Support

Lab Objectives:

- Create a virtual machine
- Deploy Azure container instances
- Create a virtual network
- Create blob storage
- Create a SQL database
- Implement an Azure IoT Hub
- Implement Azure Functions
- Create a web app
- Create a VM with a Template
- Create a VM with PowerShell
- Create a VM with CLI
- Secure network traffic
- Implement Azure key vault
- Create an Azure Policy
- Manage access with RBAC
- Manage resource locks
- Implement resource tagging
- Exploring the Trust Center
- Use the Azure Pricing Calculator
- Use the Azure TCO Calculator
- Open a Support request
- Calculate composite SLAs
- Access Azure Preview features

Prerequisites :

- - There are no prerequisites for taking this course. Technical IT experience is not required however some general IT knowledge or experience would be beneficial.
  - This course is suitable for IT personnel who are just beginning to work with Azure.
  - This course primarily uses the Azure portal to create services and does not require scripting skills.
  - Students in this course will gain confidence to take other role-based courses and certifications, such as Azure Administrator.
  - This course provides an Azure pass and optional lab environment.

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