Today I earned the Red Hat Certified Engineer certification. It was the result of about six months of study, many set backs, and hours of lab work.
If you read my previous post about the RHCSA exam, most of it holds true for the RHCE exam. I used the same resources as before along with LiseNet, and CertDepot.
The exam was pretty difficult and I ran in several problems that took a lot of time to troubleshoot and resolve. At one point I thought I was going to fail but ended up passing with a 243 out of 300. I got the results two hours after completing the exam while it had taken around two days to get the results for the RHCSA. I wrote the kiosk version of the exam (EX300K) rather than the classroom exam, so I was in a room by myself with someone watching me via camera.
My advise for this exam is to learn how to do everything from the command-line. You should still install the GUI to make things easier for testing and cut and pasting from terminals. However you should know how to configure everything using the command-line tools and not have to rely upon the GUI or TUI tools as they do not always work. Make sure you know the major topics well and go through multiple practice tests and labs (LiseNet has a very good practice test which will help a lot).
Like I mentioned in the RHCSA post, use more than one source for study, this is even more important for the RHCE exam. If you rely upon one source you will not cover all of the material that's required. Every source covers all of the topics but do not cover every configuration scenario that is presented on the exam. I was asked to do things that I've never covered specifically even though I'd done labs based on the topic.
Another tip is to know every topic in depth and don't just gloss over something and just learn the basics or solely what the study material you are using covers. I fell into this trap and it cost me a lot of time and marks on the exam.
It took me the full 3.5 hours to complete the exam even though I didn't get everything working. It's the only exam I've ever broken a sweat writing. I'm glad it's over though.
If you read my previous post about the RHCSA exam, most of it holds true for the RHCE exam. I used the same resources as before along with LiseNet, and CertDepot.
The exam was pretty difficult and I ran in several problems that took a lot of time to troubleshoot and resolve. At one point I thought I was going to fail but ended up passing with a 243 out of 300. I got the results two hours after completing the exam while it had taken around two days to get the results for the RHCSA. I wrote the kiosk version of the exam (EX300K) rather than the classroom exam, so I was in a room by myself with someone watching me via camera.
My advise for this exam is to learn how to do everything from the command-line. You should still install the GUI to make things easier for testing and cut and pasting from terminals. However you should know how to configure everything using the command-line tools and not have to rely upon the GUI or TUI tools as they do not always work. Make sure you know the major topics well and go through multiple practice tests and labs (LiseNet has a very good practice test which will help a lot).
Like I mentioned in the RHCSA post, use more than one source for study, this is even more important for the RHCE exam. If you rely upon one source you will not cover all of the material that's required. Every source covers all of the topics but do not cover every configuration scenario that is presented on the exam. I was asked to do things that I've never covered specifically even though I'd done labs based on the topic.
Another tip is to know every topic in depth and don't just gloss over something and just learn the basics or solely what the study material you are using covers. I fell into this trap and it cost me a lot of time and marks on the exam.
It took me the full 3.5 hours to complete the exam even though I didn't get everything working. It's the only exam I've ever broken a sweat writing. I'm glad it's over though.
