Sitting for the RHCE

By Ken Barber on April 06, 2004 (8:00:00 AM)

I've taken some pretty tough tests in my life, and passed every one of them on the first try. And since I'm teaching Linux system administration at my local community college, I thought I would be hot stuff when I signed up to take the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam. I don't think that way anymore.

I've always done well on tests. Mensa once offered me a membership in their organization because of my SAT scores. In a former life I was a refrigeration mechanic and earned the coveted CM certification from the Refrigeration Service Engineers Society -- a cert well known in that industry for requiring multiple attempts to pass -- on the first try. I even passed the written exam for a private pilot's license on my first try.

Then I started a new career in IT. I breezed through my MCSE a few years ago, including the notoriously difficult Exchange Server exam. Then I earned a GSEC security certification from the SANS Institute, requiring two open-book exams. I took the first one closed-book, and passed both. When I learned that the Linux Professional Institute was offering its exams for free at Linuxworld last year, I walked in late to one of them on a lark, totally unprepared. I barely squeaked through, but I passed.

RHCE was different. It was the second-toughest exam I've ever taken.

Red Hat vs. other certifications

The day after I earned my MCSE the Dilbert comic strip featured a character in tights and a cape saying, "Step away from that network server! I'm certified!", but he couldn't fix anything when he sat down in front of it. My friends and co-workers thought it was really funny, and made sure I had clippings of it coming in from all over for the next few days.

But the problem of people holding "paper" certifications is not a laughing matter to employers, and the number of "paper CNEs" and "paper MCSEs" has become the stuff of legends. I do not believe there is any such thing as a "paper RHCE."

To my knowledge, there are only two IT industry certifications that require a candidate to set up and repair an actual running system. Red Hat's is one of them; the other is a Cisco exam. There are no multiple-choice questions to answer; you spend the entire session repairing a broken system and then building a new one from scratch. At the end of the day, the things you've been asked to do either work, or they do not -- and you pass or fail on that basis alone.

It's not as easy as it sounds. The failure rate hovers around 40%.

Fortunately, all is not necessarily lost for those unlucky 40% who fail to meet the lofty requirements for an RHCE. For a little more than a year now, Red Hat has been issuing a Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) certificate to those who demonstrate competence in the portions of the test that deal with workstation (as opposed to server) administration.

Preparing for the exam

What's on the test? I'm not allowed to tell you, but Red Hat provides a list of everything you need to know. It is safe to assume that you will be tested on every item in that list; if you're weak in two or three of the list's items, don't take the exam until you've done some more preparation.

The choices for "more preparation" are somewhat limited: you can take a class from Red Hat, or you can take a different class from Red Hat! Red Hat does provide a very nice set of online pre-assessment tests (free, but registration required) to help you choose which class is right for you. The exam prep guides being sold by various booksellers can help you prepare for a class, but are useless in preparing for the exam itself. Believe me -- I own two of them.

The main value of the classes is to learn how do the exam's tasks quickly, the way Red Hat wants them done. But I can tell you from experience that even Red Hat's classes are not enough to fully prepare you. If you want to have any hope of passing, you will have to have been installing, repairing, and configuring Linux, in all of the areas mentioned in the list above, often enough and long enough to do most of it without referring to a man page. Yes, you're allowed to use man pages during the exam, but if your system won't even boot when you walk into the room, you had better know your stuff cold.

I took the RH 300 course, the one for people who supposedly already know what they're doing. It runs for the four days prior to test day.

Exam day

On a recent Friday morning eight of us filed into the classroom we'd been calling home for the last week to find our systems re-imaged. After signing non-disclosure agreements, we were given a list of 10 things that weren't working and 2-½ hours to fix them. Five of the items had to be fixed in the first hour.

You must get at least eight of the 10 items fixed to earn an RHCE. If you get only the first five items, in the first hour, you can earn an RHCT.

One of our number didn't make it through the first hour. No one gloated when he shook the proctor's hand and left early. The pervasive feeling in the room was that any of us could have met the same fate. The mood afterward, as we ate our catered lunch, was somber. One of us had already been eliminated. How many more of us wouldn't make it through the three hours to come?

We returned to the test room to find that our hard drives had been erased. We were given a boot CD with instructions to build a server with an unbelievably huge list of requirements. As I looked over the list, my heart sank. "There is easily two days' worth of work here," I said to myself, "and I have to have it all done in three hours?"

The list was divided into RHCT tasks and RHCE tasks. You must score at least 70% in each area to earn an RHCE, and a high score in one won't help in the other.

A few of the items on the list were easy, but many were not. So I set myself to the task, starting with the things that I already knew how to do and plugged along at my usual snail's pace. For the things that I'd never done before taking the class, the man pages and online guides weren't enough help. There is simply not enough time to read them, and doing a task once in a class exercise isn't enough to remember how to do it cold.

I actually got through the entire list of items about five minutes before the time was up. Only one other candidate had finished; from the sound of feverish key-tapping in the rest of the room I guessed that most were still trying desperately to get as much done as possible before the bell. All of the things I had tested worked, but I didn't test everything. And there were enough of those to sink my boat if they didn't actually work.

I decided there was no use trying to test any more stuff because if they didn't work there wouldn't be time to fix them anyway. So I rebooted to make sure the system came back up with the services running that were needed, and then just shut the thing down and leaned back in my chair. "I'm done," I said to no one in particular. "Either I passed or I didn't, but I'm not doing any more to this machine." I shook the proctor's hand and left about two minutes before the bell rang.

The next morning my head still hurt, and the pain went down into my shoulders. My sweetheart tried to massage my neck, but said that my muscles there were so tight that they felt like bones. In the end, I had to take a muscle relaxer to calm down. Still, I was cautiously optimistic. While I knew I hadn't aced the exam, I thought I had a good shot at getting the double 70%.

A few days later, I received my scores:

SECTION I: TROUBLESHOOTING AND SYSTEM MAINTENANCE
Overall Section I score: 100%

SECTION II: INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION
RHCT components score: 100.0%
RHCE components score: 67.9%

RHCT Certification: PASS
RHCE Certification: NO PASS

It's a brutal exam.