Subject: RHCE 302 exam
From: James Bagley Jr. (james@thelostnet.net)
Date: Fri Mar 22 2002 - 16:50:46 AKST
I just took the RH302 red hat certification exam and what follows is my
opinion of the exam itself and the certification for those that are
interested.
The exam itself is broken into three parts; troubleshooting lab, written
exam, objective lab. It is instructor led classroom environment. You
take the test with 10 - 15 other people. For people that take the full
course, this is their last day.
The troubleshooting lab is a novel idea, they give you four scenarios
where you have to figure out what's wrong, but it could have been made
more challenging. It worked like this; you would kickstart the machine
against the classroom server and it would pick a random scenario from a
pool, when the installation finnished and the system rebooted you would
get a description of what the machine *should* be able to do (this is
usually very vague like "boot into runlevel 3 and login as root"). The
only really evil thing they threw at me was a pam problem (i don't like
pam). You get 2.5 hours to complete all four scenarious. I did it in a
little over an hour.
The written exam is 50 multiple choice, single answer questions. They
give you an hour to complete this. This part was much easier than I
thought it would be. Most people can get this nailed down with a little
studying on the red hat specific stuff. Most of the class was done in
less than 40 minutes.
The last part is definately the most difficult. You get to do a bare
metal installation and configuration of various services to meet some
objectives they give you. They give you 2.5 hours. Nobody in the class
finnished in under 2 hours and most were still working when the instructor
called time (it's amazing how much faster people type after the 5 minute
warning). By the time I was done I had installed and configured all of
the following:
ftp
apache
pop3
sendmail
ssh
linux kernel
iptables
nfs
samba
When time was called I was still finnishing up my last objective (I don't
take nearly enough LSD to understand the sendmail.cf syntax!).
Overall I think the exam should have been a little harder, but I really
like the hands-on stuff. It makes for a very interesting test. As for
credibility, I don't think it deserves much more than any of the other
certifications. It is more expensive so someone would have to be somewhat
dedicated to get this certification over other alternatives. The RHCE is
also pretty widely recognized. I can easily say this is more difficult
than any microsoft exam i've ever taken.
-- DON'T PANIC
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