On Friday 23 Oct 2009, Ramang G wrote:
I plan to do RHCE certification, I have familiarity with Linux servers worked for one year. Is it advisable to install Linux (RHE 4) at home PC and learn on own and do a certification.
RHEL 4 is old - get a copy of CentOS 5.4 which is binary compatible with RHEL 5.4.
Strongly advise above method v/s attending special classes with the objective of clearing the certification exam (see Vivek Cherian's post).
In the long run your own hands on experience will pay off much more than your 90% @ the certification exam [1].
With virtualization, you can simulate a small network on your machine and observe the behaviour of applications ...
At the end of the day, 90% means diddle squat when you cannot execute basic server administration; believe me your competency will be apparent within a day or two if not sooner.
are there any CBT nuggets available?
Join the CentOS/openSUSE/Debian mailing lists/forums and also go through the respective archives. Although the S/N ratio can be low sometimes, you will come across real life issues faced by admins across the world and you will definitely pick up nuggets.
Besides looking @ RHCE also go through the LPI (www.lpi.org) curriculum - it is distribution agnostic and tests admin skills at the CLI level.
kindly advice
IMO, those who are really into open source solutions seldom give much credence to the certification stamps that job candidates present. I do not. I have crafted my own 45 questions quiz based on RH033 module plus basic networking fundas. Out of the ~60 candidates (some with > 80% in their cert. exam) whom I have interviewed, the best is 16 correct answers (only 2 persons). The average is a pathetic 10/45.
[1] I had one engineer working for me (passed a very popular Linux cert with 90%) who did not know the basics of server administration. I had asked him to complete the setup of an openLDAP server that a previous engineer had left half complete. For an entire day he kept trying to connect to the server w/o success until I asked him "have you checked if the openldap server is running?"
There are no short cuts if you truly desire to be the one of the best in your chosen profession.
HTH