Last friday I took two exams – EX200 and EX300.  I didn`t take any courses as I was preparing by myself at home. I must say that it was more challenging that 4 years earlier when I had taken my previous RHCE exam. First of all RHEL6 gained new features compared to RHEL4. Second thing is that they added pretty much more tasks and objectives in exam requirements. You can find them in prep guides available here (for RHCSA) and here (for RHCE).

And this is my first tip – use these guides and follow all of objectives. For example if there`s a task about iSCSI initiator then learn and make some exercises. You have to follow all of these objectives. It`s especially important to people like me who didn`t take any course before, because it`s harder to make yourself some excercises. I was using two virtual machines for this purpose – one of them was a server with some services (nfs, ldap, iscsi target, etc..) and one was a client.

Second thing – don`t forget about SELinux. All of services must be SELinux enabled. Do not turn this off during your study. If you`re not familiar with SELinux then read this documentation – it`s really good and helpful. I recommend reading it at least twice and check all of described commands/tools.

Documentation. I think that Red Hat guys did a really good job creating a bunch of nice docs available on their site.  I recommend reading all of them as they describe most of exam objectives with nice examples. Unfortunately it`s not available during the exam and you must also know how to use manual pages (e.g. man httpd_selinux – describes options on selinux configuration of httpd service) and use it. Also config examples in /usr/shared/doc/* are pretty useful. That`s a very nice thing in Red Hat exams – when you forgot some detail you can always use built-in documentation. They don`t require you to remember all of options although you must know how particular services work. So my tip is this – learn how to find info on something using documentation available in you system rather than just ask google like you (probably) always do

And last but not least tip – get yourself a good sleep night before exam. I didn`t take any notes nor my laptop – try to relax and think positive. If you learn  and practice then everything will go smoothly.

Of course I have passed both exams and got both RHCSA and RHCE certificates In my personal opinion I consider RHCSA to be more challenging than RHCE – just look at exam objectives. RHCE adds SElinux and some basic configuration of network services while RHCSA covers a lot of other things. I recommend taking two exams on one day – it`s not that scary as you think.

Good luck to all of you preparing and studying! I`m starting preparation for RHCA exams. I`ll try to write some tips on them too. Stay tuned.