Getting an RHCE Certification for RHEL6
If you received an RHCE certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or earlier, that cert expired when RHEL 6 was released in November, 2010. If you are thinking about re-upping your RHCE cert (or getting one for the first time), I wanted to start a discussion here about tips for doing that.
A bit about me: I recently became a writer for the Red Hat customer portal. Just before that, I spent almost three years as a trainer for Red Hat, focusing particularly on Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA, formerly RHCT) training and certification. Before that I spent about a decade writing a few dozen Linux books, including the Red Hat Linux Bible, Linux Toolbox series, Linux Toys series, and Fedora Bible.
Although we are not allowed to speak directly of what is on the RHCE exam, or train people specifically to take the exam, there is public information I can point you to that can help you pursue your RHCE certification:
• RHCE Prep Guide: Go here http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/objectives to get information on the format and objectives of the exam. For RHCSA, go here: http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhcsa/objectives.
• Notice topics no longer covered: If you took the exam before RHEL 6, notice that several previous topics are no longer on the exam, including: Software RAID, user quotas, IMAP (IMAPs, POP3s), DNS slave server, and using rescue media.
• Notice new topics: Actually, there's kind of a lot of new stuff.
If you are rusty or unfamiliar with some of the topics here, Red Hat training (http://training.redhat.com) is the best way to prepare for the exams. However, if you want to try to take the exams cold, I'd be glad to discuss some of the new topics on the prep guides within this group. They include:
New RHCSA Level Skills:
• Identify CPU/memory intensive processes, adjust process priority with renice, and kill processes
• Virtualization: Configure virtual host, install/launch/start/stop virtual guests
• Create and configure LUKS-encrypted partitions
• Configure systems to mount file systems at boot by Universally Unique ID (UUID) or label
• Mount and unmount CIFS and NFS network file systems
• Configure a physical machine to host virtual guests
• Configure system to run default HTTP and FTP server
• Firewalls and SELinux
New RHCE Level Skills:
• Network Address Translation (NAT) via iptables
• Configure system to authenticate using Kerberos
• Build a simple RPM package
• Use shell scripts to automate system maintenance tasks
• Configure a system to accept logging from a remote system
• Configure an MTA (mail server) to forward (relay) email through a smart host
As we get our new Online User Groups off and running, I'd like to invite you to discuss this and other topics related to RHCSA and RHCE certification for RHEL 6.
-- Chris Negus
Red Hat GSS Customer Portal
RHCE, RHCX, RHCI, RHCVA
