RHCE Certification

[The JoJo]

I'm preparing myself for the above mentioned exam.

I just learned that the RedHat courses and the exam are available in Finland now, or have been for a few months now.
The company I work for have agreed to pay for the exam.

Has anyone here done the exam? What is your impression of the exam, regardless of if you have done it or not?

Any comments about it?

Thanks!

PS Got permission to go on the basic Lotus Domino/Notes certification, exam 510 I think it was, yesterday. Any comments about this one?

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not sure there is suffient value in the RedHat exam at this point to consider it. It is expensive, and as I understand it, fairly rigorous, but there also seems to be next-to-zero demand for it, at least in the US. I've studied for the RedHat exam. I'm sure I could pass it, even the hands-on section, without much difficulty. But then I ask myself: "Why spend all that money?"

Here in the US, "linux certification" is diluted because there are four or five certifying agencies - SAIR, CompTIA, RedHat et al. At the worst, there was once a .com that basically made the offer to hire ANYONE who passed their Linux cert, which promptly went belly-up, leaving a lot of "linux certified" folks out of a job.

I think the better option is a Sun certification. Things probably ARE different in Finland, but Sun's cert has no dilution by multiple agencies for certification, actually carries a demand and implies credibility across platforms.

Notes is a good thing to certify in, at least from the standpoint of getting a good job. I've never heard a notes admin (you're talking about the admin test, not the developer?) complain about his pay.

 

[The JoJo]

Here in Finland the situation is perhaps a bit different.

I'm only aware of the RedHat cert being available at the moment. I think the situation here might be similar to your in the way that not many places ask for a linux cert, but I think it is because there hasn't been any certifications available.
Sure there has been/are a lot of courses about linux, but no "real" certifications.

Then again, a lot of firms are hiring people that know linux, and it seems to be a growing trend. This is one of the reasons it interests me. But still, I'm very interested in Linux, which is the main reason why I would like to take the test and see how it goes. I did ask to go on the Rapid Track something course, but the four day course was too expensive for me to persuade my employer to pay for it.

As long as the company I work for pays for it, I'm happy. It is very expensive, something like 500 euros (=500 dollars).

As for the Notes cert, I'll have to check that out. I haven't had time yet to check out how their different certifications go, and how the developer/admin parts go.

Any comments on specific parts of these courses?

Thanks Mercutio!

 

[James]

JoJo,

I think you need to decide if you want to do courses for fun or profit.

If it's the former, then by all means do the RedHat course.

If it's for profit, your list would look quite different. As Merc says, it would include things like Solaris Administrator (which actually would help you with Linux to some extent too, and be particularly good if you wanted to get into FreeBSD), the various Cisco certifications (the Cisco Academy is hosted by C&W, BTW), and possibly Notes, although that seems to be a dying breed in Australia, Merc thinks it's useful in the US so I'll trust him on that.

An MCSE of some variety plus a Solaris Admin certification would be extremely strong, since it goes some way to convince people you're not a paper MCSE. If you then add something like CCDA you have a very strong portfolio of knowledge for which you can charge appropriately.

 

[Mercutio]

I've seen a lot of environments with Notes and Exchange running side-by-side, actually. What ends up happening is that so much useful stuff ends up in the Notes databases that it becomes far too costly to get rid of it.

CCDA doesn't seem to be a diluted certification. A Network+ might be a good step in that direction, too.

According to the people I talk to about jobs, there are way, way too many people out there with all sorts of Microsoft certifications and far too many CCNAs in the world, but very few have any "product specialist" certs, and it's those people who are easier to place.

At the moment, in this country, there are a preponderance of folks with high-level certifications of all sorts who aren't working at all, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

 

[The JoJo]

What better ways are there to enjoy life than mixing business and pleasure ?

James, I totally agree with what you said, and I've been talking to Mercutio about this earlier and he gave me similar advice.

The thing to remember at the moment is that the company I work for agrees to certain things, like the Notes course, because it is part of what we do. Things like the cisco certs is probably out, because we are a software firm. Not many cisco boxes to configure at work.
But I have understood from Mercutio that taking a cisco course/cert would mean getting a much better insight into TCP/IP also.

As for the Solaris admin cert, I would need to use/learn/read/go on courses about solaris a lot more than Linux to be able to pass that. Linux has been part of my life for the past 4 years, while Solaris has merely been a once in a while aquaintance. But don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you that the Solaris cert would be valuable. These OS certs/courses on the other hand (compared to cisco) are things that relate to what I do for a living, as I do a lot of multiplatform testing, and are therefore something the firm might agree to pay for.

MCSE, I'll try to get myself into one of these sometimes later.

So for the moment it's the RHCE and Notes certs that I'm aiming for, hopefully you all understand why.

The thing that I like to use and learn more about linux is something I consider to only be a positive thing. As for the profit part, I see companies searching a lot more for Linux professionals than I do for Solaris professionals, perhaps the situation is the other way around in Australia? Is linux making it's way into companies more than before now?

I've also seen some very big companies running Exchange and Notes side by side, Mercutio. And now way were they going to get rid of Notes!

Enough rambling from me . Great responses fellas! More!

 

[Prof.Wizard]

If I find some time I'll go for the ECDL next year. I know this ISN'T for you JoJo, you should targer higher, but for the non-professional is just OK...

OT, I know... :roll:

 

[The JoJo]

Good luck PW, go for it!

 

[James]

JoJo,

It depends what part of the marketplace you're aiming at. Where I work we don't really even deal with companies unless they have more than ~USD20M a year to spend on their network with us, so my view is biased in that direction.

These sorts of companies are only going to consider Solaris certification seriously, Linux is something that gets deployed in the back room for specific tasks that there isn't budget for. They also assume (rightly) that if you can admin a Sun box you can admin a Linux one with no problems.

As I intimated above, FreeBSD is a good, free introduction to Solaris in many ways. Solaris 2 and later is still closer to its SunOS/BSD roots than it is to the SVR4 system it is supposed to be (and Linux is). Solaris x86 itself is also free, of course, but it needs very specific hardware to run on. If you have that hardware, then great. If not...

 

[Mercutio]

I think perhaps market conditions in Finland might be different enough in .fi that our comments are less relevant to The JoJo. Linus is, after all, a local boy.

Since my resume has far more Linux/BSD experience than it does Sun, I get a lot of "Why are you applying for this Unix admin job" comments from employers, which is a large part of my bias against Linux certs. If the guys with the jobs don't see value in my Linux experience, then it must be considered as less valuable than some of my other skills.

 

[The JoJo]

Mercutio, sorry to hear about that attitude against linux from those employers. I seem to rate Linux a lot higher than those people, unfortunately. I don't think I'm that wrong .
As I also test software on HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, Tru64, Linux and Windows, I don't see the leap from Linux to the other *nix flavours as big as others.

James, I see the same thing with large/very large companies that you describe. They seem to stick to the big *nix variants with, dare I say, custom hardware. That is perhaps also one of the reasons I see more and more companies swinging away from the big *nix types, because the hardware tends to be more expensive. These companies are smaller for sure, but with a little more time I predict we will see bigger and bigger companies following this trend. What do you think?

James, you also say that if one can admin a Sun box one can admin a Linux box with no problems, what do you think about the reverse situation? Mercutio?

 

[James]

Darn, lost a post. Quick summary :

Hardware cost is a relatively small component of overall software project cost. The last software build team I ran had a capex budget of $40M; I only spent $7-8M of that on hardware. Things like SAP rollouts, even more so.

I believe that Sun will continue to be the vendor of choice for mission critical applications like ERP and big databases for at least the next while. x86 boxes don't scale as far, don't (at the moment) have the same I/O capability, and often rely on software rather than hardware failover.

There isn't really a big difference in cost between a Sun box and an equivalent x86 box - if you're talking high end Sun they compete with people like Tandem (now HP I guess), Stratus, Himalaya (also HP), IBM SP-series, etc. Those boxes ain't cheap either and tend to be just as proprietary. Besides, storage is often a sizeable part of the hardware budget and you'd be up for that anyway if you went Sun or x86.

Finally, my point was not that Solaris training makes you a general *nix guru - I'm sure you'd eventually be able to admin a Sun box by learning via Linux. My point was that big companies are hiring people to run Solaris boxes, and you're not going to get in that door with just Linux qualifications.

 

[The JoJo]

Thank you very much for the information James! Appreciated!
You too Mercutio!

Anyone else have anything to add?

 

[Fushigi]

James is correct. A company I used to work for was in the middle of implementing SAP. $30 mil for the Oracle license, IIRC. $20 mil for SAP, and like $15 mil for hardware (Sun). Something like that, anyway. But the bulk of the implementation costs, of course, went to pay the consultants.

I would say, however, that IBM's pSeries boxes are gaining on Sun. Sun seems to be flat of late while IBM has been slowly growing.

The iSeries boxes I manage are perfect for ERPs. The database is built in (record reading is a microcode instruction; indexing is an OS function) and there is no more secure platform around. The iSeries traditional niche has been SMB but they scale beyond many mainframes now that the 32-way Power4 is out. Can you say 536MB of combined L1/L2/L3 cache? I knew you could. See the 2nd paragraph of http://www.midrangeserver.com/tfh/tfh042902-story01.html for a little detail.

- Fushigi