The Road to Elysium

Right, first off let me start by saying that I can’t tell you the contents of the RHCT/RHCE exam. At the beginning of each exam you have to sign a contract that legally binds you to keep silent about it. I can however tell you the methods I used to prepare myself for the exam.

The main book I used for studying, for both RHCT and RHCE, was RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide, by Michael Jang. This book is actually quite good, which some test-questions after each chapter, and two sample-exams at the end of the book. I tried doing the last test-exam without looking at the answers first, and once I was done, I compared my results to the answers in the book. There’s nothing like hands-on experience when it comes to this test.

If you’re wondering what things you should be studying, this list from Red Hat should always be up to date, as far as I know. So this is, or should be, your only reliable source when it comes to finding out exactly what you need to prepare for.

Attending a Red Hat course is brilliant. Even experienced Linux system administrators can learn something new there. I myself attended RH133 (Red Hat Linux System Administration) and RH253 (Red Hat Linux Networking and Security), and there are a lot of things there that will prepare you properly for the exam, IF you pay attention. These courses give you some studymaterial as well, so I used those books for studying also.

I can’t emphasize this enough, there is NOTHING like hands-on training. You can read and read all you want, but unless you experience it first-hand, it just won’t sink in. As far as I know, the operating system that’s most similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is CentOS, which means that you can use that for training (and the test-exams!). How to do this, you ask? Easy. Use VirtualBox, or some other software that’s similar, VMWare, Qemu, Paralell if you’re on a mac. You can install a virtual machine and just play around there. That’s what I did. I set up both a client and a server, and from there I tested everything from NFS, NIS, Samba, DNS, HTTP, Squid, and so on. It really helps, believe me.

The following point is particularly important. Read the exam properly. That’s right. Out of 8 people in total taking the exam on Friday, including myself, one failed right at the start because he wasn’t properly prepared, and another one failed because she didn’t go through the exam task-list properly, thus made a mistake that just couldn’t be reversed. So take your time, go through the list of tasks you are given, and make some mental notes, or even better, scribble them down on the sheet of paper you are given. It helps to systematically cross out the tasks you’ve done, so keep a clear overview of how much left there is to do. And remember to spend your time wisely. If a task seems too difficult, try another easier task, and get back to the more difficult one when you have time. At least that way you’ll get some things completed, rather than getting stuck on that particular problem, and not really gaining anything.

If there’s something you feel confident about, read about it again, and again, and again. You might think you know a lot, or everything, about something, but you don’t. Simple as that. Better to be over-prepared if you ask me.

If this sounds like hard work, you’re damn skippy that it is. RHCE isn’t meant to be simple, but I can tell you that the satisfaction of passing is greater than you think. And if you think “I can’t possibly do this”, you can! I myself knew close to nothing about Red Hat-systems a month ago. So what they say is true, if there’s a will, there’s a way.

Good luck to you future RHCT/RHCE’s!

I’ve intentionally been waiting to write this post, as I’ve not been so sure of what to write. I guess it all depended on the outcome of my RHCE-exam that I had yesterday. The results? Well, see for yourself.

SECTION I:    TROUBLESHOOTING AND SYSTEM MAINTENANCE
RHCE requirements:  completion of compulsory items (50 points)
overall section score of 80 or higher
RHCT requirements:  completion of compulsory items (50 points)

Compulsory Section I score:                        50.0
Non-compulsory Section I score:                    50.0
Overall Section I score:                           100

SECTION II:  INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION
RHCE requirements: score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)
score of 70 or higher on RHCE components (100 points)

RHCT requirement:  score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)

RHCT components score:                             100.0
RHCE components score:                             100.0

RHCE Certification:                                PASS

I just can’t believe that I aced the test! 100% correct, god! I have to tell you, I never ever thought this was possible, but the countless hours I spent studying and practicing for the test was well worth it. :)

You can validate my certificate here.

I’ll be posting some tips and tricks concerning the RHCE-exam soon, so stay tuned.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m quite fond of VirtualBox, and thus we write some more about it! A default installation will give every virtual machine you create an ip of 10.0.2.15, but what if you’d like to enable your virtual machines to be able to interact with each other, each of them having their own ip? Here’s where bridging comes into play. As I’m using Fedora 8, this little section is for – that’s right – Fedora 8 (works in Fedora 9 as well). I’ll be assuming that your host-machine is getting its ip from a DHCP-server.

Add the following line to the bottom of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

BRIDGE=br0

Then create the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-br0, and add the following:

DEVICE=br0
TYPE=Bridge
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes

Once you’ve done that, restart the network:

# service network restart

Now that we have that finished, you can create a virtual ethernet interface for VirtualBox like this:

# VBoxAddIF vbox0 USERNAME br0

Replace USERNAME with the username of the user you’ll be running VirtualBox as (the user michael would have put the username michael there).

Give all users write access to the device used by VirtualBox to communicate with the host network (/dev/net/tun in this case).

# chmod 0666 /dev/net/tun

Now, start VirtualBox and select your virtual machine, then go to Settings.

Then change Attached to to Host Interface, and type vbox0 into the field Interface Name.

And that’s basically it! If you’d like to create another virtual interface for VirtualBox, just run the line above again, only replace vbox0 with vbox1, vbox2, and so on. All depends on how many virtual machines you’re planning on running simultaneously.

Oh, if your virtual machine seems to stop at boot, when trying to get hold of the network information, it might be your firewall that’s causing the problem. So on the host-machine, disabling the firewall might do the trick:

# service iptables stop

Good luck!