On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Jamie Ostrowski wrote: > > > I was thinking about studying for the RHCE test. Has anyone here thought > about studying, or have taken the test? > I must admit I was shocked by the price to take the test. $749! I wonder > how they justify charging so much to administer an exam. That seems > somewhat ludicrous. I have been eating Maruchan Raman noodles for months > now. That certification sounds good, but may take me several years to save > up for that test! > Jamie, I took the RHCE test quite recently. It definitely is not like the MSCE stuff. You take not only a tough multiple-choice test, but also an installation test and a troubleshooting test. Here is the deal: The multiple-choice test includes around 50-75 questions or so (I don't remember the exact amount), but many of them are not as simple as they may appear to be. I thought it would be the easiest part of the test, and it ended up being the hardest... or at least the one where my score was the lowest anyway. I checked with the other guys who took the test with me, and their experience was roughly the same. You should especially distrust the questions that look really simple. The troubleshooting part of the test is really interesting. Basically, you boot into a broken system via a kickstart floppy. By broken I mean that there is something malfunctioning. Sometimes the system totally fails to boot. Some other times, it does boot but there is a partition missing, or you cannot log in, or... anything! You get four of these, and they are obviously worth 25% each. Finally, the installation part of the test consists of a list of requirements that is given to you. The list does not only include the requirement to install the OS, but also a given set of conditions: account so and so should not have a shell, you also need to configure Apache with two virtual hosts, need to set up TCP_WRAPPERS in a given way, configure anonymous FTP access, user whatever likes Gnome as the default desktop environment but user whomever prefers KDE, etc. As far as I remember, each part of the test was worth 100 points and in order to pass you need to get at least an average of 80 points. However, you cannot pass if you obtained less than 50 points in any of the three parts. All in all, I liked the experience. It's a hands-n exam, as opposed to the MSCE tests. You learn quite a bit while preparing for it. In general, I think Red Hat tried to avoid the "paper MSCE illness" and they pretty much achieved their goal. I mean, getting the RHCE does not mean by any means that you're a Red Hat Linux guru (I can testify of that myself), but it certainly guarantess that you do know how to do some basic troubleshooting and install the OS according to some specifications (and therefore, how to configure some basic services). ------------------------------------------------------ Nitebirdz ------------------------------------------------------ Thus spake the master programmer: "You can demonstrate a program for a corporate executive, but you can't make him computer literate."