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Red Hat Announces Certified Architect Curriculum
Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat announced a new advanced certification today, Red Hat Certified Architect. One training expert, however, cautions that Red Hat certifications can lock administrators in to Red Hat-specific skills."
It used to mean something over here too, but it got sufficiently diluted (Sanitation Engineer?). Now the only thing that matters is if you are a "Professional Engineer" which is far from a trivial accomplishment.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Stay in my shell and bash? I prefer ksh. :-)
You have no idea what you are talking about. I passed the RHCE with a 100% without using a single Red Hat tool. They don't care HOW you do it, as long as it works when you are done.
This nonsense about being locked in to "Red Hat's way of doing things" is silly.
The RHCE is a GREAT certification test. I've done others (in particular Oracle). There is no comparison. In the RHCE test I took only 2 of 10 people passed. Five failed before the end of the first section. One guy left 10 minutes into the test. He was certified on all the other major Unix flavors. He thought he could pass the test by studying the course guide for the RH300 course. Two guys, who both failed, worked for IBM in their Linux development for Notes.
The LPI tests you on memorizing a bunch of command-line switches. RHCE tests you on doing real work. I'll take the hands-on test any day.
Well, they do provide trainig. They just don't give out certificates on those. :)
Leonid Mamtchenkov
That said, searching microsoft.com for MSCE reveals a disturbing number of hits. Looks like someone's not doing their job of protecting the brand images properly!
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The company uses MS as an abbreviation for itself all the time. MSN, MS-DOS, and MSDN are the first three examples that spring to mind.
I've passed both the RHCE and the LPI certifications, and I have to say the RHCE was by _far_ a much more robust and difficult test of my Linux knowledge than the LPI exam.
As has been stated, the RHCE is given by Red Hat for individuals to use Red Hat products, so it's not surprising that they teach the "Red Hat" way. But there's two things to consider there:
On the whole, I think that any certification is a good thing to have -- it gives you a test of your knowledge, it looks good on your resume, and who said that you can't do more than one? (and who said you have to stop learning?)
BOGUS, I use Debian on my workstation and have tried Gentoo on my laptop. I have a half dozen HP systems and a score of solaris systems in the corporate data center. I even have a few XP boxes. The only UNIX related Cert I have is RHCE. I loved the RedHat certification test because the exams are not multiple choice or even excersise based. They are performance based. The exam didn't ask you "which redhat tool" to use to solve a particular problem, they just presented you with goals (like "set up a mail server with user accounts and firewalling") how you setup the firewalling and mail server is up to you... If you use the redhat config tools or even the redhat specified configuration practices was beside the point. They just examined your system to see that it worked as specified to see if you "passed". There was no "lock in" related to it.
Yeah but that is what I like about SuSE's Certification. They basically took the LPI Certification and added one SuSE specific test to each level.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Maybe slightly off-topic, but after I RTFA'd, I was astounded by the position Brunson has taken with the Novell CLE. Having studied the material and scheduled a test in about two weeks, I can honestly say that:
1) You don't need to have the LPIC 1 to sign up for the test. They recommend that you have the level of skills equivalent to the LPIC 1 because they might ask you to write a cron job that backs up critical files for eDirectory. You can go in cold with no LPI experience, but don't complain if something in there wasn't on a study sheet.
2) You don't have to go to any classes to sign up for the test. Sure, Novell offers 5-day boot camps, but then again, so do Microsoft, Cisco, and (gasp!) RedHat. You can purchase a self-study kit and take as long as you want to get comfortable with the CLE content. Novell just makes it easy to block out all the distractions and spend a week with a bunch of geeks. I'd take one if I had the time.
3) Cost isn't prohibive for the CLE. You can take the test for as little as $200. Sure, you can spend upwards of $2,000 if you want to buy every piece of literature that Novell has on the subject and go to every boot camp, but it is possible to pass the test on just the guidelines alone. Just don't think it'll be a pushover.
I get the feeling the Mr. Brunson is all for Linux training, just as long as the money is flowing his way. I like the idea of practical tests like the RHCE and the Novell CLE because people that really know the field understand what it took to get through them. The know that you didn't spend a month a technical store learning exactly what questions might be on the MCSA/MCSE. You should appreciate all Linux vendors for what they are trying to accomplish, not try and break everybody down to make you look good.
"Luck is what others call skill when they have none." --Phelan Kell
I am a Red Hat trainer working in the UK. There is no vendor lock-in.
:-)
This morning I have been teaching system V services. I have taught how to initialize these services on Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake and Solaris.
This afternoon I am working my way through Squid. For Apache, Samba, NFS and all other services we recommend not using the GUI tools but vi (or emacs). All of these work the same way on all Linux as we deal with the application not the Distro. Where there are differences such as 'service httpd restart I also teach that you can use the full path to the script etc. etc.
The RHCE tests your abilities for applications - not RedHat thingys. Such as set up apache to do such and such, set up a mail server to receive mail. I tell my students that I do not care how they do it - use Postfix, sendmail or write a MTA that can do the job in the time allowed. We test the results not the method.
Red Hat do not modify their software so that it does not work with other software and we strongly believe in the GPL; hence our open sourcing GFS, the Global File System created by Sistina, allowing SuSE, Debian or anyone to use it to work with Red Hat systems.
In other news I thought I would also mention that I was very happy to see SuSE/Novell release the Ximian connector under an Open Source licence.
Have fun
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