What I did to pass the RHCE exam

I took the RHCE exam this past week, and was fortunate to pass both the RHCT and RHCE sections with a score of 100%. While I can’t discuss what was on the test, I figured I would share the process I used to prepare for the test. When I decided to take the exam, I picked up a copy of the Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide and read it from cover-to-cover. Michael Jang did a great job with the book, and it shed some light on things I never use (e.g., Linux printing).

Once I finished reading Michael’s book I printed the RHCE objectives. For each objective I did the following:

1. Researched which packages are needed to support each objective.
2. Installed the software from a local yum repository I created.
3. Read through the configuration files for each service and looked up each directive to see what it did.
4. Configured the service and integrated it with my home network.
5. Broke the service various ways and tried to figure out what I needed to do to fix it.
6. Figured out how SELinux integrated with each service. Also did a lot of SELinux debugging!

I used two virtual machines to study with, one acting as a server and the other a client. The items listed above took quite a bit of time to master, but I can definitely say I’m a better admin because of it. I learned a bunch of new things about RHEL/CentOS, and can definitely troubleshoot things faster now. Best of luck if you decide to take the exam!

This article was posted by Matty on 2010-11-13 09:14:00 -0400 -0400