
Way back in 2010, I took the Total Linux course under Sir Engels Antonio.
During that time, I was only expecting to learn Linux. However, this course offers more!
To be transparent and direct, technology will always be the same regardless of the operating system (that is, it helps make our life more productive), but the difference here is on how in-depth and passionate the instructor (in this case, Sir Engels) is in conveying the technical information to all his students.
Up to this date, the concepts I learned from this course are still applicable (past 8 years already!) and the passion and dedication I experienced and learned from Sir Engels is greatly appreciated.
I am looking forward to Bluepoint creating more competitive IT professionals, especially in the Open Source arena!
All the best!
Carlo IsidroMCP, MCSA, MCSA: Security, MCSE, MCSE: Security, VCP5-DCV, MCPS, CEH, MCSA: Office 365, MCSE: Productivity, CEH Master, MCT, CompTIA Linux+
How I got to know Bluepoint was a stroke of luck, I happen to stumble upon an email sent out to ISP operators in the Philippines by Bluepoint. In the email contained an invitation to check out Bluepoint's Linux courses. I was looking for ways to fast track my knowledge in this cool operating system and didn't know where to turn to, so the email was just what I needed to get started.
I took my Total Linux class at Bluepoint in 2000, I believe we were Total Linux Class 3. That same year I left for the United States to try my luck on greener pastures. The training I got from Bluepoint helped me land my first job edging other candidates with the Linux skills I have on my resume. Back then Windows NT was the OS of choice for the uninitiated. The company's network was Microsoft based. The Internet was really getting popular and I was presented with challenges to get the company up to speed with internet commerce. Cost was not so much of a concern but stability and security was.
I started migrating DNS services to Bind since the NT servers were needing a reboot every week. This was due to DNS service on NT just stops responding for unknown reasons. Then we took on the challenge of migrating our ecommerce site which was written on Cold Fusion with the CF Server running on top of IIS. When I got on board with the company a Cold Fusion site was already under heavy development and in fact I was hired together with two other Filipinos that were Cold Fusion developers as well. Fortunately Cold Fusion had a port to run under Linux and Apache. The only Microsoft product that had to remain was MS SQL server 7 which was running on a Quad Processor HP LXr8000 with Xeon 400 MHz processors. After successfully migrating DNS and Web servers the company saw the stability and performance of Linux and recommended that the Email servers be migrated as well. For this service I had deployed a Qmail + Courrier Imap + MySQL + SquirrelMail combo, that gave me a complete email server package with Webmail access, IMAP, POP3, SMTP with ClamAV antivirus scanning and more.
Since then we had upgraded our Linux installs to the latest kernels and disto versions. Our hardware platforms have also been upgraded to the latest and greatest. Currently we are evaluating Asterisk to add on to our list of Linux Centric services.
The company is happy with our network performance and they have been grateful for my Linux skills which I never would have been confident to implement have I not had the best training. My greatest appreciation to the men and women of Bluepoint Foundation for their dedication to higher education for without them I would have been just another one of those (so so) system administrators.