Anxious abut taking RHCE Ex294

· 3 min read

Overwhelming doubts

I’ll take the Red Hat’s EX294 on three days, and I’ve to recognize I’m a bit anxious about it, may be, “a bit” is not the correct expression, I’ve a full cargo train of anxiousness. And I’m not anxious about what are they going to ask me, I’m anxious about hoy are they going to evaluate my work.

I know nothing about how are they going to do it.

I’ve been preparing myself doing a lot of ansible exercises, I’ve bought, and read and following their exercises, two books, at work I try to use ansible at every opportunity, and I’m sure our productivity has increased since some colleagues introduced us to the ansible way. But not knowing how are they going to grade my work still terrifies my.

For instance, on every mock exam I’ve found on internet there are some common tasks, as they are defined on the exam’s objectives: setting up the control node and distributing ssh keys.

On the exam format explanation, we can read this paragraph:

You will be required to create Ansible Playbooks and use those playbooks to configure systems for specific roles and behaviors. Your work will be evaluated by applying the playbooks created during the exam against freshly installed systems and verifying that those systems and services work as specified.

But, If they will apply my work to a newly created set of hosts:

  • What would happen with the SSH host keys?
  • Would my remote user creation script executed as root or as they used they requested me to create?
  • Are they going to use my ansible.cfg file or are they going to use their own?

I’m worried because failing those tasks will prevent any other playbook to be run, and then I would get a score of zero.

And there are some extra things that add up to my worries:

  • My RHCSA is expiring in three weeks.
  • My employer, S2 Grupo, paid the exam fee and the train tickets to the examination centre.
  • I don’t have a beard on my ID’s photo, will it be a problem?

Being rational

I’m writing these lines in order to help myself to calm down, so after being complaining about the lack of details about the grading procedure, it’s time to look for some facts:

  • I searched on linkedin for “RHCE” and it returned more than 52,000 results (but none among my first level contacts 0_0), so people are passing the certification, some of them are even “Junior System Administrator”.

  • I’ve been using ansible at work for real, in production systems, I even wrote and executed a playbook during a hands on meeting while I was sharing my screen.

  • On every practice exam I attempted, I had plenty of time left to check my work, except the ones on Sander Van Vugt’s book Red Hat RHCE 8 (EX294) Cert Guide, but I consider those ones harder than the real exam, I hope I’m right.

  • The exam objectives are clear and linked to real sysadmin tasks, so understanding what they ask for and checking if it’s working as expected, is not a hassle.