I did CKA today. except the abrupt end i faced right at the start of the exam ( . . .

Kubernetes-Slack Discussions
#1

Imthiyas Mohamed:
I did CKA today. except the abrupt end i faced right at the start of the exam ( it showed me Thank you message right after the demo/info tour completed. i hadn’t even clicked anywhere :slightly_smiling_face: ) i had somewhat good experience for rest of the exam. lost some time for tech support to connect and troubleshoot ( he took AnyDesk access to my PC just to start Secure browser as Admin. If informed I would have done myself and not wasted time :disappointed: . and i had to redo the room scan process again ) once started again my time counter had moved already and i believe i lost 15 - 20 minutes. because of which i couldn’t attend 4 - 5 questions which i could have otherwise (simple tasks which we can complete just by using k and basic editing). don’t have much hope on passing . but as we have two attempts i wil wait for a week and schedule second attempt. below is what i did or noticed about new platform and exam

  1. exam provides RemoteDesktop access to a linux machine to complete our tasks. Open terminal from Application menu.
  2. Firefox available in machine. along with questions they do provide link to possible relevant sections. clicking on this will take us to the remote VM and open link in Firefox (somewhat similar to what users where doing with bookmarks before)
  3. for ease of working better to maximize both Firefox and terminal windows. Ctrl+F works in Firefox but search box opens in bottom left corner. try to use the section links available in http://kubernetes.io/docs|kubernetes.io/docs pages to avoid scrolling manually
  4. i used copy/paste via mouse right click. limit the use to copy from website and use imperative commands to the max to generate yaml files.
  5. use :set paste in vim to retain the structure while copy/paste. with this we don’t have to manually correct alignment/indentation. better map :set paste to keys ( i was typing. haven’t tried key mapping option)
  6. while pasting to terminal a warning msg appears and we can edit the command in that window. it was useful for me as i used it to edit the commands if required. i didn’t use notepad. am not sure if that warning can be disabled. i think its standard linux desktop feature. as it was useful for me i didn’t bother to look further into it.
  7. also towards the end I noticed there is an icon on top right which shows our previous commands. i didn’t bother to explore further and i may be wrong. ctrl-r was good enough for me.
  8. my connection was 40 - 50 Mbps Fiber. i used early morning to avoid issue of bandwidth utilization.
  9. i was using a wide screen monitor (i did exam from desktop). i believe the screen real estate also helped in having a better experience.
  10. as i had a spare PC . i did setup a fresh installation of Windows OS 11 just to attend the exam. made sure the points they mentioned in FAQ - nvidia, yourphone, onedrive etc were not running and disabled. this also allowed me to grant AnyDesk to support agent without second thoughts. even if not on a spare machine i suggest to setup a dual boot to attend the exam only.
  11. yesterday itself i made sure the room was setup as per their requirements - no wall hangings/pictures, neat desk, removed the extra monitors (not just unplug) etc. this helps to avoid the last minute rush before starting the exam.
    and few points on exam
  12. follow the instruction provided as is. they are not trying to trick us :slightly_smiling_face: objective is to test our knowledge. they will test our knowledge on completing the task by giving all needed details. i felt the instructions were written in a way so that candidate has no way to make mistake.
  13. try to use additional info in question as hint if having doubt where to execute or if some needed info is missing (its not actually missing. they are not providing it because its obvious)
  14. if they have provided steps for testing - it should work. if not working we missed something eventhough we did everything correct we might have missed a small point.
  15. good grip on vim , bash filtering, json would really help in reducing the time needed for completing tasks.
    sorry for the long post. might be helpful for someone.
#2

Vitalii:
@Imthiyas Mohamed thanks for sharing all of the above. If only we had this information before attending…
and tbh, from my point of view, old exam environment was way much better and was made by people who really care

I believe that it should be made to run on any machine (Cross-platform) without any additional preparations, scalable for comfort view on any monitor/resolution. I agree on preparing the room etc but apart from that things like setting up special VM to attend is really too much.

To me it looks like an alpha/early access product which went to production for testing on live exams… ok you can do it like this, but warn people about that, remember they are paying ~$300 for the attempt and spending lot of time to prepare.

Instead this can be made like a promo, something like, “hey do you wanna be first and try our new environment for the 50% discount?”
Hope that makes sense.

#3

jdubeau:
Thank you for the insight.

#4

Imthiyas Mohamed:
thanks kodekloud team and @Mumshad Mannambeth. completed CKA. a big shoutout to all the fellow members who shared their experience on new platform which helped me to be prepared. wishing you all the best in completing successfully and hopefully LF would solve the issue related to latencies as they have started acknowledging the issues for few users and reset their attempt. whoever didn’t open ticket after their exam i suggest to do immediately to get retake as well as for LF to gauge the issue. @Alistair Mackay is doing a great job in compiling all the issues, so please provide your feedbacks to him as well.

#5

unnivkn:
Congratulations @Imthiyas Mohamed great job!

#6

Venkat:
Congratulations @Imthiyas Mohamed Cracking the exam inspite of all the challenges with the exam environment.

#7

ck:
Hi @Imthiyas Mohamed , Congratulations on completing CKA succesfully. As you mentioned you took exam trough desktop. how do you manage room scan with desktop.

#8

Imthiyas Mohamed:
am using a webcam… Logitech . USB model. so was able to show around.

#9

external monitor is allowed if the laptop screen is shut and external camera is used. I was able to use ubuntu text editor in killer shell but I could not find that option during the exam.
I really conflicted with the use of alias or variable

I could not figure out how to concatenate alias or variables to following suffix in text. Example
export $kep="get evets --field-selector involvedObject.name=’ and tried to use it for $ked podname -n namespace.

Also, is better to use set paste set sw=2 and set nu in a ~/.vimric or use it alternatively in the interface. having set to vimrc could sometime be counter productive as it copies the line when we need to copy container commands from one block to a new block?

#10

You can use the graphic editor in the exam’s remote desktop but I don’t recommend it: I think it operates as the student user ,and not as root, so you can’t in practice edit files that will be available in the terminal. vim really is the way to go, and as you saw, you can be at a disadvantage if you’re not using it.

As for you’re alias: if you did that, that would be invalid. You’d want

export kep="kubectl get events --field-selector involvedObject.name="

In practice, that won’t even work, since that won’t parse right as $kep PODNAME; you’d need to write a function instead that took an argument. And I’m not sure why it’s worth your time in the exam to write a command like that up front. Not a great use of time in my opinion.

As for settings for vim during the exam. The default settings are reasonable; if you need line numbers during a vim session, you can do : set nu and that will do it for you. Again, doing up front during the exam takes time, and time is a limited resource during the exam.

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