Last week I sat and passed by Novell Certified Linux Professional exam. It was a very tough test of lots of random Linux topics. My exam covered Samba, remote logging, logrotate and xinetd in two and a half hours. Given the variety of different tasks you had to perform the two and a half hours went very quickly. A lot of the later parts of the questions required a good read of quite a few man records in order to get just the right syntax for the respective command. Fortunately Novell helped out in a few occasions with some nice little hints for those who were a little stuck (or did not know where to start).
The test was quite unique in that whilst it was held at Novell in Wellington the actual test environment (two independent servers) were in Utah and accessed via VNC in a web browser. This made things a little tricky because there was a large amount of lag. This made typing commands really tricky sometimes as a single typo would result in a thirty second delay whilst you painstakingly fixed the error. Just to add injury to insult the tab key on the laptop supplied did not perform any tab actions within the VNC terminals. This meant that any ncurses based interfaces were out (like terminal based Yast). Everything had to be done by key commands or through the slow KDE interface. The funny thing was I had read the book that was meant to build you up for the exam but the subject matter covered in the exam compared to example questions and content in the book had almost no relation. Consequently I ended up learning quite a bit during the exam (probably a first) which in retrospect was actually pretty cool.
Apparently I was the first person in New Zealand to pass the exam on their first attempt. I am not surprised at this given the difficulty of the questions (especially compared to exam preparation material), the client/server delays and the pass mark being set at a very high 85%. I did really well on the logging and xinetd sections but had a bit of a nightmare on the Samba section. The server lag made Samba testing in the limited time span almost impossible plus I think my decision to use the binary tbdsam backend rather than sticking with the default (but insecure, slow and poorly extensible) smbpasswd file. I still ended up with a low 90% score which given the circumstances I was pretty happy with. The ultimate irony that I had never used SUSE Enterprize 9 before my exam (and probably never will). All my past and future experience has been with SUSE Pro and OpenSUSE.
So over Christmas I will begin preparations for the Novell Certified Linux Engineer exam which covers the services Linux provides rather than the operating system itself. In some respects this will be a little bit easier given my past experience with Apache, Tomcat, DHCP and LDAP on Linux (especially SUSE).