The biggest issue with the RHCE test is time. From the moment you start in the morning until the end of the afternoon you're behind the 8-ball. I didn't understand this when I wrote it the first time and got blown out of the water (got my RHCT though).
I did get my RHCE eventually, and I think much of it had to do with time management. Without breaking the NDA, here's what I can tell you:
Redhat tells you everything you need to know for the test at
http://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/examprep.html . When I saw the list I though "Great - that's everyting I could possibly need to do on a system. They must ask a subset of these tasks." Nope. You need to know all of those tasks, and in enough detail to be able to do them without documentation.
For eample, Redhat lists the following Troubleshooting tasks as Technician-level
RHCTs should be able to:
boot systems into different run levels for troubleshooting and system maintenance
diagnose and correct misconfigured networking
diagnose and correct hostname resolution problems
configure the X Window System and a desktop environment
add new partitions, filesystems, and swap to existing systems
use standard command-line tools to analyze problems and configure system
Can you fix 5 bugs from this list in less than an hour, most of it without online documentation? If not then your test day will be very short. If you do not complete the first 5 compulsory (RHCT-level) questions in the first hour you fail the day.
Similarly, look at the Install requirements. If you consider that the initial OS load will take about 20 min, you have 160 minutes in the afternoon to accomplish all those tasks. Do the math - if it takes you more than 10 min to install, configure and test squid then you're going too slow. Same for Apache. Same for vsftpd. Same for email, NFS, SAMBA, creating users & groups, cron jobs, etc..
You have NO TIME to read the online documentation or man pages for more than one or two items.
I have written with 25 others in the times I took the test and nobody left early (even the hotshots who finished their 5 compulsory bugs in 12 minues).
Oh, and don't forget to implement access rules - if the services are running and they can't be accessed from the network you don't get credit!
Speed drills are your friend. Make up task lists to perform, based upon the Redhat study guide web page. For example:
add new partitions, filesystems, and swap to existing systems
add and manage users, groups, and quotas
configure filesystem permissions for collaboration (from the Redhat guide)
Maybe you could make a task list that looks like the following:
"Create users huey, dewey, louie and donald. All users should have password of "disney". huey dewey and louie should belong to user group "ducklings". Create an ext3 partition of 250MB and mount it on /shareddata/ducklings to hold shared group data. /shareddata/ducklings should be read-write accessable by group members only and files created by group members should be owned by group "ducklings". "
Can you do that in under 10-15 min (including su to one if the ducklings id's and testing access by touching a file in /home/ducklings)? Practice it until you can. You should get to the point that you know where most config files live, what the files look like when you vi them and how to most quickly accomplish the task at hand - e.g. I find the GUI easiest to use to configure SAMBA but for Apache I vi the /etc/httpd/config/httpd.conf file by hand.
Practice the stuff you hate (for me it was postfix). You'll get fast at it and you won't hate it anymore. Guess what? You'll end up learnng some stuff about Linux you never knew before, too.
In the end you'll end up prepared for the tempo of the exam. You won't panic and you'll have time to check your work and maybe deal with some unknown curveballs.
One last thing - after all of this, if you can afford to take the accellerated prep course RH300 you will be well prepared for the test (but not without the speed drills first - the pace of the class is so fast that if you fall behind you may not recover).
I hope this helps anyone preparing to take this cert. It is a test not to be taken lightly but if I could pass it you can too.
Derek
Good luck on writing your RHCE.
