RHCE exam experience
Written by A.Jesin Wednesday, 27 April 2011 10:06
In this article I’ll be sharing my experience of going through RHCE exam and a few tips on how to crack the one-of -the-kind performance based exams. Before I proceed let me tell you that I will NOT be sharing any exam questions because I’ve agreed to the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement). For those who haven’t heard RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) is a certification offered by Red Hat Inc. for which you have to pass two “performance” based exams, RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) and RHCE. Performance based means you have to practically configure everything on the system they provide no objective type questions or theoretical ones where you can practice a couple of “dumps” and breeze through it.
The exam was scheduled on 26th April 2011 and I had two whole weeks to practice after my college semester exams where over. I had the Red Hat official books but they were for RHEL5 but the exam was on RHEL6 so I had to google many things like creating LUKS encrypted filesystems. Certain things like pam_tally.so had changed to pam_tally2.so. The exam centre also offered special “exam” training at an additional cost but I preferred learning things alone, so the two weeks I practiced all the exam objectives for RHCSA and RHCE which was specified in the official redhat website.
Finally the D-Day (examination day) arrived and I was determined to score 100% on arriving to the examination centre I found that all my co-exammates were employed people who wanted to earn an RHCE for a promotion. I was the youngest one there and they had all attended the exam training which made them familiar with the setup RHEL in the exam hall. After the examiner announced everything was ready we entered the exam hall. A couple of minutes were spent filling the forms and reading the terms and conditions, then the exam started. I hurried towards the first question but ended up messing damaging an important partition! ouch and I’m sorry I can’t reveal that question :-( the rest of the exam went smoothly until I banged my head on the last question. I knew the command but I didn’t know the correct parameter to be used with it. I though of peeking into the man (manual) pages, but there were rumors that a question would not be valued if I solved it by looking into the man pages. Finally after much struggling I solved it and left the exam hall satisfied that I completed most of it correctly.
Outside the hall an hour passed discussing how to crack the next (RHCE) exam, some were regretting for not configuring “something” properly which lead to “some” other problem (sorry again, I can’t reveal any question). So the second and final exam started, all questions were straight forward and easy except one about which I was clueless. I configured 90% of it within 1.5 hours including the firewall rules but one network service refused to work when accessed through the network so I started inserting new firewall rules till there was only 15 minutes left, I lost hope and rebooted my machine to check finally whether everything else worked. To my horror nothing worked over the network because I had messed with the firewall rules and saved them too ! gasp. My fingers ran impatiently over the keyboard deleting the existing rules and add new ones trying to make things work. Suddenly the system rebooted, the examiner go up from his place announcing that the time was over. I left the examination centre with a heavy heart not knowing how the results would turn up. Because redhat’s official website says “The unintended result of this rigorous testing method is that many candidates do not pass Red Hat certification exams the first time they take them. In fact, for some of Red Hat’s exams, the pass rate is less then 50% for first-time test takers.”
I wasn’t sure on which side of the 50% I stand. On reaching home I check my email to find the results of the first exam (RHCSA) as follows
Dear A.Jesin:
The results of your EX200 Exam
are reported below.
Passing score for the exam: 210.0
Your score: 211
Result: PASS
Congratulations — you have earned the EX200
Certificate.
I had passed RHCSA by 1 mark !!! The certificate was also attached with the mail.
My RHCSA certificate
I thought I did the RHCSA exam well but if I only score 211/300 what would be the situation for RHCE ? I waited for another email from redhat till 11.30PM refreshing my inbox but nothing came. The next day morning I went to check my emailbox right after waking up and I got good no GREAT news. The email read
Dear A.Jesin:
The results of your EX300 Exam
are reported below.
Passing score for the exam: 210.0
Your score: 273
Result: PASS
Congratulations — you have earned the EX300
Certificate.
Wow 273/300 means I’ve scored 91% in RHCE. The prestigious RHCE certificate was also attached
I am an RHCE hurray!!!
RHCE exam tips
What is the whole point of writing an article if I can’t say something informative so here are some tips from an RHCE (that’s me)
- Be thorough with each and every one of the RHCSA objectives and RHCE objectives specified in redhat’s official website
- Be an expert with “iptables” commands don’t expect to configure it through the GUI or TUI
- While preforming the RHCE exam reboot your system after configuring each service to check whether firewall rules are persistent
- After configuring firewall rules for each service check whether you’re able to access the previously configured services THROUGH THE NETWORK
- Never spend more than 15 minutes configuring anything just skip it and come back later after you’re done with the other questions
- If any installation or disk operation takes time switch over to another terminal and continue with the other questions
- Most importantly when you practice on your computer first run “yum remove man” to remove all man pages else you’ll get addicted to it and you may want to do the same during the examination
Before closing this article I’d like to express my heartiest thanks to the following websites/blogs for providing valuable and priceless content
- http://www.cyberciti.biz/
- http://linuxtopia.org/
- http://rhce.co/rhel6/Main_Page
- http://edgoad.blogspot.com/
My best wishes to all people out there who are planning to take up the RHCE exam. :-)
Is there a GUI in the RHCSA/RHCE exam ?
A lot of people are googling around this question so here I am to answer it. YES the GUI has also been installed, you can opt for the command-line method or the GUI method for completing tasks.
Congratulations and thanks for the detailed post.
If it doesn’t come under NDA< will you be able to share many questions(or configuration tasks) will be there for RHCSA and RHCE exams and do they all carry equal weightage(marks)? Will there be any mandatory questions which must be done right in order to pass the exam?
Also, are you stopping with RHCE or are you planning to pursue other Specialist RedHat ceritifications?
Good Luck & Thanks again.
Yes of course if there was no NDA everyone would be able to share the questions and there would be no secrecy (which is the reason why the NDA exists)
And redhat doesn’t reveal any information about the marking scheme of individual questions and all questions are mandatory but all of them don’t have to be done right to pass the exam. I telling this from my experience because I completely omitted a question in RHCE and still managed to get 273/300.
I’ve heard from people that if you perform a question incorrectly again and again, even if you finally get it right you won’t get full marks for it. I don’t know how far its true.
As for your last question. No I’m not stopping with RHCE, I plan to do RHCVA but not in the near future atleast after 6 months.
Thanks for your comments
Just a couple of questions, if the NDA permits:
- can you use man pages ?
- if you use man pages, does this count against you ?
- yum package manager works? (to install packages, etc)
Thank you
I’m not sure about man pages, but a faculty (not examiner) said if you look at the man pages for a command the question relating to that command will be devalued. It might be true because I viewed the “–help” for a couple of commands in RHCSA, even though I completed all questions I scored only 211/300 it MIGHT be because of this but I’m not too sure. Its always better if you don’t depend on the man pages.
As for yum yes it will and it should work and its a part of the exam
Did a little digging and found that:
Format of the RHCE Exam: The RHCE exam is a hands-on, practical exam that lasts 2.0 hours. Internet access is not provided during the exam. Outside materials are not permitted. Documentation that ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available during the exam. Red Hat reserves the right to make changes to format, including timing and the policies above.
source: http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/objectives/
so man pages, –help should be allowed without being devalued.
Sorry Jesin, I checked my comment again and realized I missed a word “how” in my first question which gave wrong meaning to it. I did not mean to ask you to reveal the actual questions, which I know you cannot.
I meant to ask, if NDA does not apply, will you be able to tell us how many questions will be there in the exam and how many we need to get right to pass the exam. I hope I put my question right this time :-)
Thanks for your response. Good luck in your pursuit of other exams.
That is great news Catalin. I would definitely utilize man pages and –help in the Red Hat exams I’ll be performing in the future. :-)
Thanks for the info.
I can’t reveal the number of questions but all of them were mandatory. I don’t know what is the minimum number of questions to be performed to pass, the pass percentage is 70% (210/300).
But I can tell you this, if you’re well prepared you’d be able to finish all questions in 60% of the allotted time ;-)
So you only studied for 2 weeks? Did you had previous experience with RHEL based systems?
I did not study from scratch during those two weeks I only prepared for the exam. Yes I had previous experience with RHEL. I signed up for a course on RHEL in a computer training institute months ago, I decided to attend the RHCE exam after my college exams were over, during those two weeks I prepared for the exam by solving all RHCSA and RHCE objectives.
Congrats! They don’t send “paper” certificates any more?
Thanks Russell! I’ve never heard about RedHat giving paper certificates. In fact you don’t need a certificate at all, just by providing your certificate number anyone can verify the certificate at https://www.redhat.com/wapps/training/certification/verify.html
Self study will be the hardest part since you will go deeper in every topic. But when you attend the RH300 training 99 percent of the topic will be used in the exam. of course 1% remaining is the skill you’ve earned in using Linux in general. Exam scenario would be your challenge(i mean not the actual question but how REDHAT performs the testing).
Dear friend. Here in Ecuador, Latin America, the Red Hat partner told me that I will need to wait for some other three people interested in take the exam (EX100 or EX200) for me to be able to take it. Could you confirm this. Is there a minimum for the exam to be taken??
Thank you very much!!!
According to Red Hat there is no minimum number of candidates. It seems the exam center doesn’t want to conduct an exam for just one candidate. You can wait or take up the exam in another center.
First, Congratulation to you to pass the RHCSA/RHCE exam. I am from in China, and I want to take this exam, too. But I didnot how to enroll for it, is there have any related manual about it ?
Thanks …..
Congratulations on this achievement. I enjoyed reading how you kept refreshing your mailbox, waiting for the RHCE result to come through.
I passed the RHCSA exam a couple of weeks ago and will be taking the RHCE in a little over a week’s time. Is the RHCE much harder than the RHCSA? I don’t like it being 30 minutes shorter! Also, which topic did you find the hardest, and which did you find the easiest? Personally, ACLs and SELinux were my biggest problems.
Thanks for the write-up.
Hi Bicko congratulations on passing RHCSA. Don’t worry about RHCE its much much easier than RHCSA because it mainly focuses on network services, so everything goes in the same manner like installing the service, editing its configuration files, starting it and setting the correct firewall rules. Just be careful with the firewall rules, make sure one rule doesn’t affect another one.
The toughest topic was NFS, I configured it perfectly but couldn’t make it work through the firewall. Everything else was easy which is why I got 273/300 in RHCE. Is ACL difficult for you ? OK I’ll write an article about ACL:to make things simpler. As for SELinux, its mainly file contexts which might get into your way while configuring something, to get it done correctly just see what context a correctly working file has, example if a file in your Apache DocumentRoot shows a 403 error take a look at the file context of a properly displaying file using the “ls -Z” command then apply the same context to that file also.
And all the best for your RHCE exam.
Hi, thanks for your quick reply – I really appreciate it. I hope you are correct about RHCE being much easier than RHCSA! It sounds like I’d better go and set up some NFS servers and try to access them through a firewall. Regarding you writing an article about ACLs; thank you, but I think that’s a done deal now. I learned enough to pass the RHCSA and I’m thinking that subjects tested on the RHCSA exam ought not to be tested on RHCE also – is that a fair assumption?
Thanks.
Hi Bicko, yes you’re right RHCSA and RHCE do NOT have any similar questions. You can confirm this by verifying the RHCSA objectives and RHCE objectives.
Hi, here’s an update for you…. I failed my RHCE, however I booked another exam for the following week and passed. My problem was the speed that you have to work in the exam. I like to test things fully and extensively before moving on to the next step but, with only two hours allowed, this just isn’t possible. I spent the week between the exams configuring services against the clock, to make sure I could do things quickly. I finished the exam with twenty minutes to spare, so I’d definitely improved my speed!
Hi Jason,
First of all my Heartiest Congratulations of being certified. Jason, how much time Redhat takes to provide the exam results? and is there any expiration date of the RHCE certification? like CCNA has 3 yrs. of validation.