This last week has been damn busy studying for the RHCE Exam. I don't remember being so concentrated on a single goal because usually before an exam I get into all sorts of different activities and find anything interesting but this time I was 100% concentrated on a single aim. I didn't blog, didn't browse, didn't love my tiny devils (kittens) and did dozens of stupid mistakes because my mind was not on the tasks at hand. At least the people around me realized that I was under pressure and coped with my state of mind - thanks for understanding.

Overall the exam was not as difficult as I thought it would be, but this does not imply that it was easy in any way. I followed the course book RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux and basically the exam contained material covered in the book. The amount of work was astounding considering that the actual course was only 4 days long and my experience with Linux was rather limited. The first day I sat down in class everybody introduced himself and basically everyone was a seasoned Linux System Administrator with me having almost the least experience of the lot. This though turned in my favor because it made me work much harder to be able to cope and gain ground with the rest of the group. I think by the end of the 4 days I managed to do some huge improvements.

The exam consisted of 2 papers; a troubleshooting session and an installation session. In the troubleshooting section we had 5 compulsory problems that had to be completed within 1 hour and an additional 5 problems. The first 8 problems were really easy and in fact I completed them in less than 30 minutes but the last 2 problems boggled me down a bit and I spent some time working on them but I managed to complete them all successfully. The afternoon session required us to install a server machine and with local services and a network services. I went pretty well in the local installation but I found some problems in the second party mainly because of the lack of experience in certain subjects. Anyhow we'll wait and see what happens.