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.

TN-223: Advanced Shell Programming

 

Course Overview:

The course teaches students to use the sort, grep, sed, & awk utilities within Unix. Systems administrators, Unix users, & programmers benefit from the course showing them how to use the command line applications of sort, grep, sed, & awk commands as well as using sed & awk scripts that develop the users skills with the full power of these utilities.

Attendees to TN-223: Advanced Shell Programming will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Dates/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 3 Days

Course Objectives:

  • Sorting files by line or field
  • Regular Expressions (meta character) with grep commands to locate specific lines in files
  • 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)
  • Grep, egrep extended metacharacters, combinations-lab advanced combinations- lab Sed
  • Basic commands- Lab, Advanced commands- Lab, Advanced scripting -Lab
  • Miscellaneous commands Tr, sort, cut, paste, pr -Lab

Prerequisites:

  • TN-125: Introduction to UNIX & Linux
  • TN 215: Shell Programming.
  • Students should have a basic knowledge of UNIX commands including rm, cp, man, cat, & mkdir. Navigating directory structure using commands such as ls, cp, & pwd. Creating and editing files with the vi editor or text editor. Use of basic programming constructs, & commands such as variables & loops & how to write a simple program in a programming language.

Comments

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TechNow Security Courses

Here are the security courses specific to TechNow:

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CT-210: Project+

Course Overview:

This course is a project management certification that provides validation of fundamental project management skills. This course will confirm a project manager’s knowledge of the project life cycle, from initiation and planning, through execution, acceptance, support and closure. Students will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to complete projects on time and within budget, and learn common project management terminology used throughout the industry.

Attendees to CT-210: Project+ will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Dates/Locations:

Date/Time Event
02/03/2025 - 02/06/2025
08:00 -16:00 		CT-210: Project+
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
04/28/2025 - 05/01/2025
08:00 -16:00 		CT-210: Project+
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
07/21/2025 - 07/24/2025
08:00 -16:00 		CT-210: Project+
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
10/27/2025 - 10/30/2025
08:00 -16:00 		CT-210: Project+
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX

Duration: 4 Days

Course Objectives:

  • Project Initiation
  • Project planning, estimating and scheduling.
  • Creating project plans
  • Managing people
  • Managing cost and evaluating project performance
  • Project closure

Prerequisites:

  • Basic understanding of project management

Comments

Latest comments from students

User: ChiefsLeo94

Instructor comments: Mr. Moore was very knowledgeable in the subject area and kept us on target and interested in subject area by inputting relevant stories from his project management experience.

Facilities comments: Room was adequate for the training environment just big enough for the class size and still not feel like a broom closet.

User: trosale8

Instructor comments: very knowledgeable and very supportive and empathetic. Taught us not only the content but the test-taking techniques. Instructor talks during lab/practice tests which is harder to concentrate.

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DO-375: Automation with Ansible and Ansible Tower

 

Course Overview:

Through hands-on labs, you will learn to automate system administration tasks on managed hosts with Ansible, learn how to write Ansible playbooks to standardize task execution, and manage encryption for Ansible with Ansible Vault. This course will also teach you how to deploy and use Red Hat® Ansible Tower to centrally manage existing Ansible projects, playbooks, and roles; perform basic maintenance and administration of the Ansible Tower installation; and configure users and teams and use them to control access to systems, projects, and other resources through role-based access controls. You will learn to use Ansible Tower’s visual dashboard to launch, control, and monitor Ansible jobs; use the Ansible Tower application programming interface (API) to launch jobs from existing templates; automatically schedule Ansible jobs; and dynamically update host inventories.

Course Objectives:

  • Install and troubleshoot Ansible on central nodes and managed hosts
  • Automate administration tasks with Ansible playbooks and ad hoc commands
  • Write effective Ansible playbooks
  • Protect sensitive data used by tasks with Ansible Vault.
  • Install and configure Ansible Tower for enterprise Ansible management
  • Use Ansible Tower to control access to inventories and machine credentials by users and teams
  • Create job templates in Ansible Tower to standardize playbook execution.
  • Centrally launch playbooks and monitor and review job results with Ansible Tower

 

Course Outline:

  • Introduce Ansible
  • Deploy Ansible
  • Implement playbooks
  • Manage variables and inclusions
  • Implement task control
  • Implement Jinja2 templates
  • Implement roles
  • Configure complex playbooks
  • Implement Ansible Vault
  • Troubleshoot Ansible
  • Install Ansible Tower and describe Ansible Tower’s architecture
  • Create users and teams for role-based access control
  • Create and manage inventories and credentials
  • Manage projects for provisioning with Ansible Tower
  • Construct advanced job workflows
  • Update inventories dynamically and compare inventory members
  • Maintenance and administration of Ansible Tower

 
Dates/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 5 Days

Prerequisites:

  • Become a Red Hat Certified System Administrator, or demonstrate equivalent experience

Target Audience:

This course is designed for Linux system administrators, cloud administrators, and network administrators needing to automate configuration management, application deployment, and intraservice orchestration at an enterprise scale.