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:
- Researched which packages are needed to support each objective.
- Installed the software from a local yum repository I created.
- Read through the configuration files for each service and looked up each directive to see what it did.
- Configured the service and integrated it with my home network.
- Broke the service various ways and tried to figure out what I needed to do to fix it.
- 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!