The Central Ohio Linux User Group

RHCE – Red Hat Certified Engineer

Well, I was going to talk about RedHat’s RH300 class and give you all this information about it…I even printed up 30-40 pages off RedHat’s web site when I realized, you can go there and read it yourselves. And it’s really quite accurate.

So I thought to myself, “What can I really tell you about becoming an RHCE that you can’t read about on the web site?”

After wrangling with the wording, my answer boiled down to this: The experience. So, let me tell you what it was like for me…

First, I actually went to RedHat’s headquarters in Durham, NC twice. The first time was September 1999. If you don’t remember, that was when the last big hurricane went through that region. By Wednesday, they were telling us all to go home. Which was fine for me since I only live a few states away, but I felt bad for some of the people there.

See, this is one of the things you can’t really get from the web page. I was amazed at the reach of this thing. While I was there, I met other students from Japan, South Africa, and Holland. On my second trip, I met a guy from Texas who works for Dell, a salesman from Boston whose area of specialty is storage systems (works with EMC a lot), and a sixteen-year-old “kid” from Alabama. I was amazed at the range of people that were drawn into this.

At any rate, I left halfway through the first class and RedHat was nice enough to let me reschedule and come back down at my leisure. I went back in February of this year.

There is a DoubleTree Guest Suites hotel near the RedHat offices and that is where I stayed. It was a very nice hotel, cost $99/night. My room was huge. I would recommend staying there for anyone who goes to Durham for certification.

The RedHat building was nice, as one would expect, and kind of different from the typical office…there were video games in one room, all the soda machines were free (“just push a button”) and there was all the microwave popcorn you could eat, as well as other goodies.

The classroom was laid out well enough, with plenty of visibility of the overheads being displayed on the front wall. Each seat had a generic PC with a 17” monitor for easy viewing. The class was networked together, but there was no access to the Internet. This was a let down. I would have liked being able to check my e-mail during breaks.

Additionally, I was not particularly pleased with the fact that the classroom was inaccessible before 7:30am and after 5:30pm. This was one concern that most of the class shared. We all wanted to stay later and work on labs or just play around with stuff we didn’t quite understand as well as we’d have liked…but RedHat wouldn’t allow it. Hopefully, this will change, if it hasn’t already.

One thing to keep in mind if you decide to pursue the RHCE is this: hook up with some of the other members of your class. Several of us went out each evening for dinner and a couple of us went back to our rooms and hooked up our laptops and whatnot together for testing. At one point, I had my laptop dialed up to the Internet using squid to feed another guy’s laptop over a crossover cable. We set up NFS and Samba, and played around with displaying X sessions on each other’s screens. Since there is no after-hours lab available, you kind of have to make up your own. And the Doubletree’s rooms are big enough.

The classroom experience is greatly dependant on who is leading your class. My first trip down, we were being led by a mathematician who happened to know a few things about Linux. I don’t think he knew enough. He consistently wrote questions down and said, “I don’t know…I’ll find out.” By Wednesday, I was wondering what he did know.

My second trip down went better. A more knowledgeable instructor led our class. He still wrote several questions down and had to get back to us, but not as frequently. And this I didn’t mind.

The depth of items covered in class is … well, lacking. The web site says you should already know a lot of this stuff. This is true. The class is wide, not deep. It is intended as a touch up, a reminder, an overview of those things you probably already know, but might not be using every day so may be a little rusty.

The training materials were probably the biggest letdown. They are full of inaccuracies. And the maddening part of it is that our instructor knew it. He kept pointing to things in the books saying, “Cross that out…it’s wrong. It should say…”

And I just kept thinking, these are not specially printed class notes here. Why couldn’t they just fix these errors and reprint those pages? For the amount of money people are laying down to get this certification, I can’t imagine not being more diligent about this type of thing. It was the biggest drawback to the whole process.

The content was slightly RedHat-centric as is to be expected. We covered the use of KickStart and a few other RedHat specific items. But in general, there was a lot of coverage of more generic Linux-related topics, like NFS, Samba, Apache, FTP, tcp-wrappers, etc. The one thing we didn’t cover that I wish we had would be shell scripting. There was virtually no mention of it and I find that as an Administrator and/or Engineer, it is something one needs to have a grasp of.

But, the food was good. They catered lunch in every day and this was no crappy meat-tray-and-wonder-bread lunch. They were truly catered meals. Mmmm…Mmmm… And they had bagels and donuts every morning for breakfast.

The last day is a daylong test. It is broken into three parts, and it is the last part that I found difficult. It is not so difficult in the tasks you have to complete, but the time you have to complete them in. In 2.5 hours, I had to completely install and configure a system to match several pages of requirements. There were various network services, user environment, account management, security and development requirements...and more.

All of these things are easily do-able in the allotted time, but if you get hung up on any one piece and have to troubleshoot why it isn't working, you'll never finish everything. I got stuck on what amounted to a rights issue even though I didn't know it at the time. I finally went on and barely completed the test in time.

I prefer the “do it” approach to testing over the simple, “answer questions about it” approach. Frankly, I’m sure we’ve all seen too many people get other certifications without knowing a thing about what they are doing. I think Red Hat has done a good job at ensuring the people they certify really can do the job.