2020-12-23 23:06:00
As I mentioned earlier this week, I've been studying for RedHat's EX407 exam. Looking back at my CPE records / bookkeeping I've been at it an embarassingly long time: I started studying back in March of 2019. Almost two years ago! Just too many fun and interesting things kept coming in the way!
Between teaching Linux+ to a group of students, with passing CTT+, Linux+, CySA+ and CRTP, as well as classes on DFIR and PKI it was just tooooo tempting! And Ansible was just a little too boring! So as I said before: "booo!" to my lack of discipline! Dragging my feet on EX407 caused me to almost lose my RHCSA/RHCE certifications, because they needed to be renewed.
But enough about that! Let's talk some interesting points!
All those study materials I linked to, especially Tomas' practice exam, proved to be absolute gold. Without them I wouldn't have passed, because pass I did! Out of a max of 300 (I think?) and with a passing grade of 210 I scored 239 points.
I dropped points mostly due to inexperience with Jinja2 templating and its logic (tests, loops) and with Ansible Galaxy and requirements-files. Out of 16 tasks I knew up front that I'd fail 3 of them because I couldn't get the playbooks to work correctly. Lessons learned and I'll definitely try to practice more in my homelab!
Finally, after being one of the first 100 people to take a Red Hat Kiosk exam, I'll also weigh in on Red Hat's remote, at-home exams. RH had fallen behind to its competitors in that regard, still forcing students to come in to testing centers. What with Covid-19, that strategy needed to change, fast. So they did, in September of this year.
All in all I very much appreciate Red Hat's remote, at-home testing. To sum it up: you flash a RH-provided Linux image to a USB drive, plug that into your PC and boot it up. This turns your private PC into a RH Kiosk system, exactly like they use in their official testing centers! The only vexing part of the setup is that you need TWO functioning web cams, one of which MUST be cabled and pointed at you from the side.
Overall, the bootable Kiosk Linux is great. It provides pre-exam setup testing to ensure you can actually take the exam. From there on out things work exactly like, or actually better than, the Kiosk at the testing center. Testing from home is absolutely great! After my bad experiences with EX413 I'd been turned off of RH's exams, but this has turned me around a bit.
I'm happy to have passed EX407! Time to go over my plan for the next few months! I have a few pen-testing classes lined up and will also need to prepare for teaching my next group of students!
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