I’ve spent this week taking the second course towards getting my RHCE. It not very often I get to go to any training at all (3 times in 9 years) so it’s nice to get out of the office. The Redhat training is great though and both instructors I’ve had were have been really good.
I started out with linux a few years ago when I started using ClarkConnect as a firewall due to some limitations of my crappy Linksys router. Between normal system maintenance and adding new features I learned quite a bit.
Then I inherited our linux servers at work when one of the other guys left. I had the most linux experience but that certainly didn’t add up to much. I started spending more time playing with the newly released Fedora core. I never really could get into using a linux box on a daily basis though.
Then several months ago I took the first Redhat class on the newly released RHEL5. The class filled in quite a few gaps in knowledge for me and I started poking around and playing with some different distributions. Somehow I stumbled across Ubuntu and it’s really changed how I use linux.
Now a few months later almost all my workstations run Ubuntu. Normally if I need to do anything in windows at all I do it inside a virtual machine. It’s been nice getting some daily exposure to working in linux even though RHEL5 and Ubuntu are pretty different animals.
I’ve got 2 more days of this Redhat class then one more to go. Hopefully I can get that one scheduled fairly soon. The test to get certified is going to be a killer since it’s a hands on thing not just memorization. There are a few areas I don’t use very often that I need to brush up on but I’m pretty confident I’ll pass.
Good Luck!