u/tcpip1978

Hey community, I have just over three years as a generalist in Help Desk doing L1 and L2 stuff. Almost everything I did in my previous job was pretty surface level, except for some L2 tickets where I had to go deeper than front line techs usually do but in general I would say I'm really not that experienced. I got my CCNA last year and tomorrow I start a job as a technician doing network support on the network team at a bigger company. I'm not really sure what they're going to have me actually doing, but I'm intimidated because I know that simply having the CCNA is one thing, but learning a company's real network environment and being able to effectively support it is another thing altogether. Hoping for pointers and tips from anyone who has ever made the jump from help desk to junior role on a network team. Thank you!

Capitalism has plunged the world into its deepest crisis in living memory. Billions face skyrocketing costs and austerity, while the ruling class crowns its first trillionaire. The so-called “rules-based international order” is dead: the imperialist vultures arm to the teeth, fighting bitter battles over markets, unconcerned by the bloody destruction left in their wake. Meanwhile, the relentless pursuit of profit is destroying the environment—and putting the very existence of humanity itself into question.

But the billionaires won't get the last word. In just a few years, mass movements have erupted in more than a dozen countries: from Nepal to Kenya, from Serbia to Bangladesh, from France to Italy. Even the US—the belly of the beast of world capitalism—isn't safe, as the Minneapolis uprising shows.

The pattern is clear: we have entered an epoch of revolutions. Millions of ordinary people have begun to question the system and are striving to take their fate into their own hands.

And yet, these revolutions have failed to solve any of the fundamental problems of society. That's because, heroic and inspiring as they are, they have failed to destroy the root cause: capitalism itself.

As the crisis deepens, broader and more powerful revolutionary movements are inevitable—even in Canada. This raises burning questions: How can the working class end capitalism? What ideas and organizations are necessary? What role should communists play?

Join us at the inaugural Toronto School of Communism for answers to these questions. This year's theme is revolutions—we'll study key revolutions from history, the richest source of lessons for revolutionaries today.

No revolutionary movement can succeed without a firm grounding in theory. This school exists to train up a new generation with the ideas needed to win. If you want to end capitalism—you must be there!

The idea that multipolarity is what socialists should strive for is not a Marxist idea, but a bourgeois liberal one. There is no such thing as peaceful imperialism. Workers of every country, unite!

Hoping to save people their hard-earned money. If you're thinking of taking either of Dan Mill's Ultimate System Administrator or Ultimate Network Administrator courses on Udemy, I advise against it. He has a lot of other courses as well. I can't speak to those, but I would imagine they're probably the same.

I purchased both these courses last winter because I was hoping to fill in some gaps and prepare myself to move from 2nd line IT support to an administrator role. What I found was that these courses are extremely basic and leave out important topics. For instance, the Network Admin course spends only about 13 minutes on subnetting and never touches on VLSM at all. It's the same for every section of each course. Each topic is glossed over with almost zero detail, leaving you saying to yourself "really, that's it?"

The instructor himself is also maybe not the greatest dude. I gave a bad review for his Ultimate System Administrator course because of the extreme lack of depth of the material and the fact that you're definitely not going to be able to get hired as a sysadmin on the basis of that course. He was miffed and started replying to me accusing me of basically being a lazy learner. I responded by lowering my rating even further, so he messaged me privately and told me he thinks I'm "not a good fit" for his course and suddenly I was booted out. He reported me for abuse. I logged a complaint with Udemy and after an investigation they admitted I shouldn't have been removed and agreed to refund me for the course.

TL;DR - if you want to get into sysadmin or network admin stuff, Dan Mill Training isn't it. His courses are way too basic, and god help you if you point it out in a review because he doesn't take criticism well. Instead if you're trying to get into sysadmin or network admin stuff I recommend the following course creators:

• Jeremy's IT Lab (networking)
• Neil Anderson (networking)
• John Christopher (sysadmin)

https://preview.redd.it/gjabfa7jwgfh1.png?width=3440&format=png&auto=webp&s=0d540c4e79cab1a4bbf2e1951ff3f9bac7f7a9eb

Simple is beautiful. Recently refreshed my system with some hardware maintenance and a larger SSD. Reinstalled Arch and ran my usual battery of scripts to get everything back in place fast, but decided to switch from Alacritty to Kitty for a change.

No, it cannot. But it's rarely explained why capitalism cannot be reformed. This is a point of serious confusion for many progressives and people of good will who go on living under false consciousness because they have a fundamental misunderstanding.

What is reform?

Reform implies changing a system or institution to bring it [back] into alignment with how it is intended or supposed to function. Examples of non-political reform are: fixing code bugs or poor design in a software application; replacing a malfunctioning electronic component in a computer; fixing your vehicle's carburetor. Fixing what has become broken.

The Protestant Reformation is a good example of a reform movement in the sphere of human ideology. In the 16th century, some Christian leaders became acutely aware of the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy and the effects of this corruption on doctrine. The Protestant Reformation sought to bring the church back into alignment with it's original intended doctrines and ideas. They believed that over time, the Church had strayed as a result of human failings and needed to be put back onto a correct path. (Whether or not they succeeded is immaterial here)

Today reformists in the NDP and Greens argue that capitalism can be reformed through incremental changes. Today an NDP supporter informed me that socialism is 'subjective' and can take the form of incremental reforms that are 'palatable' to the public. This reform project implies that capitalism has strayed from it's intended purpose and must be set aright through policy measures; or stated differently, that capitalism works for society on a fundamental level, but because of the folly or misjudgements of people, it has accumulated solvable problems that can be redressed by getting the right people elected who are up to the task.

Why (Left-wing) Reformism is Dead

Revolutionary socialists argue that there is no reforming capitalism, but the reason is rarely articulated well or at all. The reason capitalism cannot be reformed is because it has not strayed along from it's path, it has not accumulated problems as a consequence of human error or misjudgement.

Take the housing crisis, for instance. This crisis is not the net consequence of a series of mistakes made by politicians. It is the result of financialization and the consequence of property being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands over time. Financialization and the concentration of capital were predicted and observed by Marx and Lenin over 100 years ago. Not because they could predict the future mistakes of politicians, but because they understood how the capitalist system works and were therefore able to make fairly accurate predictions of where it was going. Housing isn't so expensive because somewhere along the way we made a mistake. It's so expensive because building more would devalue existing stock, and with so much investment tied up in real estate it would result in unacceptable losses for investors and affluent home owners.

Reformism is dead, but in a more accurate sense it was never alive. It is not possible to reform capitalism because it is already doing what it is intended to do. Attempting to modify the system to produce outcomes which run contrary to it's own internal logic only exacerbates other contradictions of the system and reduces the reformist project to a glorified game of Whack-a-Mole.

In sum, you can't fix what isn't broken; you can't reform what hasn't strayed. The horrors of our modern day existence - war, austerity, falling standard of living, increasing homelessness and drug addiction, the mental health pandemic, social decay - these are all the result of the normal, intended function of the capitalist system.

Right-wing Reformism

It's worth noting that from the point of view of the ruling class, capitalism does accumulate faults as a consequence of human mistakes and misjudgements. Left reformist parties and politicians seek to redress the symptoms of capitalism's contradictions through policy changes that cause, from the point of view of those with capital, distortions and aberrant outcomes in the system. To take a simple example, increases to the minimum wage that make it more difficult for service sector employers to profit, forcing the increase of prices. Right-reformists see this as a mistake in need of reform. The minimum wage hike must be curtailed, either through a tax break or some other tweak of the system that allows the employer to recoup their losses; otherwise a freeze of the minimum wage for a period of time to allow it to fall back below the rate of inflation. The right-wing reformist is the true reformist, attempting to bring government policy back into alignment with the true purpose of capitalism: to enrich a few at the expense of the many.

Revolution and Reform

The solution to the horrors of capitalism is socialism. Socialism does not negate the importance of struggling for improvements to rights and the living standards of people under the current system, but recognizes that the mere struggle for improvements will not result in a better world by itself. A public company created by a progressive government today is sabotaged by bourgeois leadership and privatized by a reactionary government tomorrow. An increase to the minimum wage is signed into law today and frozen by a reactionary government tomorrow. A union contract is won today, while the next strike is criminalized by the state. The solution is to harness the struggle for improvements to workers lives and not to back away from them, but to lean into them and use them as a means of achieving working class power. With power in our hands, we can expropriate the companies and industries that our labour - and increasingly our public capital - make possible and run them for ourselves.

There is no contradiction between the struggle for incremental improvements and the struggle for revolution. Both require each other. Revolution cannot happen without a struggle for people over profit; improvements are never safe unless we secure state power for ourselves. We must have both.

Capitalism can't solve the housing crisis. Politicians talk about increasing supply to lower prices, but what will be the consequence? The value of real estate will go down, and given how high it currently is, a market correction could generate a crisis similar to 2008. At the World Economic Forum, Trump - as he so often does - said the quiet part out loud that the rest of the wealthy are privately thinking:

>And I have to say one thing about housing, because nobody ever says this. I am very protective of people that already own a house, of which we have millions and millions and millions. And because we have had a—such a good run, the house values have gone up tremendously, and these people have become wealthy. They weren’t wealthy. They’ve become wealthy because of their house.

>And every time you make it more and more and more affordable for somebody to buy a house cheaply, you are actually hurting the value of those houses, obviously, because the one thing works in tandem with the other. And I don’t want to do anything that’s going to hurt the value of people that own a house, who, for the first time in their lives, are walking around the streets of whatever city they’re in, very proud that their house is worth $500-, $600-, $700,000.

>Now, if I want to really crush the housing market, I could do that so fast and people could buy houses, but you would destroy a lot of people that already have houses. In some cases, they’ve mortgaged their house. And the mortgage would be very low, and all of a sudden the mortgage, without any changes, becomes very high and they end up losing the house.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Trump is absolutely correct, much as we hate to admit it. The market is incapable of allocating housing fairly. Only his solution is to favour the privileged and let the rest eat cake. The real solution is socialism. We must expropriate the banks and consolidate them into one national public bank and use the massive profits to forgive mortgages; and expropriate the big corporate landlords and convert their holdings to social and cooperative housing distributed on the basis of need while legislating a cap on rents at 10% of personal or household income. It's never been more possible to build a better world. We only need to stand up and take action.

I passed the CCNA at the end of June 2025 and was working in IT support as a generalist/T2 engineer at the time. I used my CCNA knowledge a bit at work but mainly the achievement gave me a greater sense of understanding how things work under the hood without being directly applicable.

Yesterday I was offered a junior role on the network team at another company. I'm finally leaving the help desk. I think having the CCNA was important but not critical to getting this job.

Tips:

• Network (socially). Having a referral was helpful for me. It helped my resume get seen when it otherwise may not have
• Invest at least as much time in developing people skills as you do in your home lab, if not more. The hiring managers for this job assumed technical knowledge. It's just a given if you have the CCNA and a couple years of experience. What they really wanted was a good fit with their team socially. For better or worse, you need to be "one of the guys" - sorry for the gendered language, woman work in IT too. If you're a woman, same thing goes. They want someone who jives well. Tech skills are necessary but not sufficient
• Be open to on-site work. This job is really hands on with the tech and they want me on-site 5 days a week at least for the first 6 months to a year. This was really important to them, if they thought I might start wanting to work from home they wouldn't have made the offer. I'm seeing more companies go in this direction
• Your first/next job doesn't have to be network-specific. Anything that exposes you to more infrastructure will help you progress in your career. If you land a network job great, but also apply to jobs where they want someone to get hands on with the hardware, work in the company data center, etc even if the job title doesn't have 'network' in it. I guess stated another way, pursue roles not job titles.

EDIT: Thought of something that has helped me a lot in my short career so far. I read the famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People. This book some times gets made fun of and people throw shade on it, and there are some valid criticisms of it. It's also dated, having been written in the 1930s. Still, a lot of the really useful people skills I have that have allowed me to be extremely well-liked and effective at my job I got from that book. Those skills are also directly applicable when interacting with HR recruiters and hiring managers. Cheers

We are living through capitalism's death agony. Imperialism is the terminal, irreversible decline in which the capitalist system spirals downward, new investment slows and innovation stops. The ruling class becomes a parasite on the state, plundering the public's wealth in it's desperate search for more avenues for accumulation. This is why Circus Carney and Daniel Smith want Canadians to pay for pipelines. The capitalist class wasn't willing to invest, they want us to pay for it so they can reap the profits!

It's not the nicest dark mode, but it is far easier on the eyes than the horrific bright white interface of previous versions. The newest version also comes with support for new devices and protocols. https://tutorials.ptnetacad.net/help/default/whatsNew.htm

I'm looking for peoples' experiences working with Socialist Alternative, or opinions about them. Where are they concentrated geographically and how do they work? I have a sense of their politics from reading some of their literature. I'm interested not so much in what they think but what they do. Thank you

Long story short, I procrastinated on taking my ITIL4 Foundation exam for quite a while, and about a week before it was going to expire I decided I finally need to get this done. I went online to book the exam and it said my voucher code was invalid. I called and after about an hour of trying finally got a person on the phone. They took my voucher code but couldn't help me immediately. A few days later they emailed me to say the voucher is invalid because I already used it. I did not use it, that is 1000% an error. I tried to reach out to them a couple more times and haven't had a reply, and now at this point it's past the date where my voucher would have expired.

Do I have any options other than to purchase another voucher? If that's all I can do, does anyone have a suggestion for the best place to buy another voucher? Passion IT Group is selling them for 500 USD which is absolutely absurd for a 40 question foundation exam.

Thanks in advance.

https://preview.redd.it/jn3agz7r7x7h1.png?width=1658&format=png&auto=webp&s=3582039a9d29c5e77a2a1eb5a6027d5abbeba7aa

Why is it that each time I go onto the CBC website I'm inundated with shorts, American news and celebrity gossip? What's the point of having a Canadian public broadcaster if the editorial perspective is no different from American-owned media? The deep integration of the Canadian bourgeoisie with American imperialism is reflected back at us everywhere you look. This is a big reason why public ownership on it's own simply isn't enough. Mere reform can't get us to where we need to be. We actually need democratic management by everyday people and their representatives. A public broadcaster owned by a worker's government would prioritize what workers are interested in, not American politics or Hollywood celebrities.

I have three years of IT experience and a handful of certifications, including the CCNA. I'm in a generalist IT support role currently, I wear a lot of hats, have done a lot of things and learned a lot but I honestly can't remember half the stuff I've learned and rely on notes a lot. I got invited by a friend to apply for a network technician role and I have an interview scheduled for next week. I'm very interested in networking and I'm reviewing all my CCNA notes and flashcards in preparation. But aside from making sure I can speak intelligently about all the basics, is there anything else specific I should do to prepare? This job is the perfect next step in my career, gets me out of help desk and onto an infrastructure path that could eventually lead to really high paying roles if I can get the job and manage to do well. Thanks in advance.