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 ) 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
. 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
- exam provides RemoteDesktop access to a linux machine to complete our tasks. Open terminal from Application menu.
- 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)
- 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
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- my connection was 40 - 50 Mbps Fiber. i used early morning to avoid issue of bandwidth utilization.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 - follow the instruction provided as is. they are not trying to trick us
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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.