[TriLUG] Certifications

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 12:05, jsevans at nc.rr.com wrote:
> I am finally seriously looking into getting a Linux certification.  So
> for, I have identified four certifications out there.
> 
> 1.  Red Hat Certified Engineer
> 2.  Red Hat Certified Technician
> 3.  CompTIA Linux+
> 4.  LPI Certification
> 
> From what I have read online, the Linux+ is the simplest of them all,
> and they move on up from LPI, to the RHCT, to the RHCE in difficulty. 
> Also, I can not afford classroom time for any of these, and will
> probably end up studying independatly.  I would appreciate anyone
> comments on these certifications, and your experiences with them.  

Hi Jason,

I would probably agree with you in your assessment of the difficulty of
the various certifications, though I don't know much about the LPI.  I
at one point studied a Linux+ practice test (in the bookstore without
paying for the book -- my favorite way of studying!) and decided it was
so simple, it wasn't worth paying for the certification.

I then obtained my RHCT and subsequently the RHCE.  I self-studied for
both using materials available on the web, such as the Red Hat manuals
(coupled with the test outlines they publish), and with a test machine. 
For the RHCE, I participated in a study group run by TriLUG members on
the http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/rhce/ mailing list.  I really
enjoyed this study group; we had a lot of experienced people presenting
and discussing, I learned a lot and hopefully helped some other folks
too.  There is another iteration of this study group going on now; they
are going a little more slowly than we did and are being a little more
"distro agnostic" instead of focusing on Red Hat.

I can't comment much on the details of the RHCT and RHCE due to the NDA,
but I might suggest that you skip the RHCT and go straight for the
RHCE.  The E test is a superset of the T, and if you pass the T
portions, but not the E portions, you'll receive get the RHCT cert. 
(You do still end up paying the whole $750 however.)  I do recommend the
Michael Jang RHCE study book... it's not perfect (indeed it refers to
"Red Hat Linux 10" in some places and other similar gaffes), but it's
very useful.

Incidentally, I also have my CompTIA A+ certification; I felt that test
was a joke.  I did study some for the hardware portion but not for the
Windows section. I haven't administered Windows in YEARS and feel I
would be fairly incompetent as a Windows sysadmin.  Yet I managed to
pass it even so, just by figuring out which answers were obviously
wrong.  Multiple choice exams are really pretty a pretty weak way of
testing this kind of stuff.  And indeed Red Hat has recently removed the
multiple choice section of the RHCE for this kind of reason.

Does anyone have more info about the LPI certs and how they compare with
the RHC[TE] ?

--Jeremy

P.S. Note that the RHC[TE] are now based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. 
Unless you are a student, faculty, or staff at an educational
institution, you won't be able to get this at a very good price.  So I
recommend installing CentOS or WBEL, which are rebuilt from the RHEL 3
source RPMS.  See this list's archives for more discussion of these RHEL
clones.

-- 
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| Jeremy Portzer        jeremyp at pobox.com      trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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