How I got Into Red Hat, Part 3
As I got home from taking the RHCT exam, I remember opening the email from Red Hat Certification Central:
The results of your RHCT Certification Exam are reported below. The
RHCT Certification Exam allows candidates to qualify for the Red Hat
Certified Technician (RHCT) certificate.SECTION I: TROUBLESHOOTING
RHCT requirements: completion of compulsory items (50 points)Compulsory troubleshooting score: 50.0
SECTION II: INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION
RHCT minimum requirements: 70 percent on RHCT componentsInstallation and Configuration score: 70.4%
RHCT Certification: PASS
It was a very, very close call. I had managed to pass and I cannot stress enough how relieved I was to read it. I sat there with the email up for a few minutes, soaking it in when I finally noticed the attachment on the email. A printable certificate. I remember looking the certificate and thinking to myself that I’m not done. I’m so far from being done. I don’t know what else I didn’t get correct aside from the task I had skipped but I wasn’t happy with barely squeaking by.
This is the part of the story where I got completely reckless. I should have been happy with my RHCT and off to find a job but I wasn’t content. I had studied so much other stuff for the RHCT that wasn’t in it, I thought I could get the RHCE too. And to get it, I was going to max out a credit card.
The plan was instead of going to an RHCE class, I was going to buy whatever I could afford to stuff a few gigs of RAM into and call it a hypervisor. I’ve heard the phrase “going for broke” used many times before in my life. I’ve been there, working bad jobs with no real future. Unable to make any kind of meaningful progress serving on the other side of the counter, wondering how I can change my path in life. Now, on the edge of going broke, fired, no job, no savings, I had my first win and I was already doubling down to do it again.
A shopping spree on Newegg secured me a fine Tyan Toledo motherboard capable of holding 8G of RAM. I did not have the skills to do virtualization on Linux at the time, but ESXi was just made free to use. Having the ability to run a lot of VMs at once opened up a whole world to me. Studying for the RHCE grew into bash scripting, building file servers to host RPM repositories, BIND DNS servers, NIS servers, NFS servers, Windows Domain Controllers and all manor of projects. I was building my own little infrastructure, one VM at a time.
Everything seemed to be going fine, until I had a new problem. There was supposed to be an RHCE exam in Boston during May to coincide with the RHCE class but not enough people signed up, so they cancelled it. The next one on the schedule for Boston was 6 months out. I couldn’t afford to wait that long.
I spent hours scouring the schedule for possible exams to take. In the end I would have to wait until the start of July to take the RHCE and I would have to do it in NYC. I could barely fit the cost of the exam onto my already bursting credit card but I managed to squeeze in a hotel room at The Wallstreet Inn as well. I was officially maxed out.
The day I was supposed to travel to NYC was like no other. Severe thunderstorms opened up over the sky and flooded the roadways. I was supposed to travel to NYC by bus, but that plan was cancelled for me. On the news they showed traffic stuck to a standstill on the highway, submerged underpasses, and advised that flights were being cancelled at Logan Airport. I panicked. I couldn’t afford to loose this money without even taking a shot at the exam.
The weather wasn’t going anywhere and it seemed, neither was I. I had no clue what to do because I was so panicked. All I could think about was how unfair this was, how easily my efforts were swept away by a thunderstorm. So I did what anyone else would do in my shoes, call someone to complain about it all! In the first 5 minutes of me rambling about my misfortune, I was reminded there were other ways to get to NYC like Amtrak. I had to borrow money for the ticket, but I dragged myself through the rain to the subway and then to South Station where I was able to board an Acela Amtrak train to Penn Station in NYC. When the train departed, I breathed a sigh of relief. I couldn’t believe how I went from so panicked I couldn’t think straight to being completely exhausted. Outside the train car the storm raged on, pounding everything below as we sped on towards Penn Station. Inside, I was fast asleep in my seat.
I woke up in my hotel room at the Wallstreet Inn the next morning. Unlike the thunderstorm of yesterday, the sun was out casting giants beams of glare across the many skyscrapers of Manhattan. The testing center was only 5 minutes away so I got ready to hit the street. When I arrived in the testing room, unlike before when I took the RHCT, there was at least a dozen people already there. I took one of the few remaining seats next to someone who was still pouring over their RHCE study book. Once I sat down, the person next to me looked up from their study and asked “Do you know if we should use iptables or tcpwrappers?”. I could see they were nervous and unprepared. I could hear it in their voice. And I said maybe the dumbest thing I could have said back. “I think it might be a little too late for that”. Now I felt nervous, as if this persons worry had infected me. I no longer felt so confident.
The test began and I was off to a great start. I tried to just push that nervousness and doubt deep down and move forward. The problem with that is it’s like trying to hold an inflatable ball under water. You can’t keep the ball under water forever. As I made my way through the exam, I made a small mistake. I had resized a volume to be too large. I thought it was a simple enough thing to fix, I could shrink it. Attempting to shrink it destroyed my testing workstation. We were more than halfway though the exam and everything I did was now gone. Just like when I got fired, I sat there looking at the screen wanting to cry. For the second time in a row, I destroyed a machine by accident when it counted. The ball was back above the water.
I must have made a racket, slamming the keyboard, banging the mouse in frustration because the exam proctor appeared before me asking what was wrong. I told him what had happened and he just replied “Thats not good”. He lazily looked over his shoulder at the clock and said “We only have a little less than an hour and a half left. I’ll reimage your workstation but you’re not going to make it.” I said the only thing I could get out of my mouth: “I’ll fucking take it”
As my machine rebooted and began its installation process I could do nothing other than stare at the clock. The second hand seemed to make no progress across the dial, like time was stretched out to forever. I was already hammering on the keyboard by the time the prompt appeared on the screen. I furiously recreated all the work I had done before, got the volume sizing right, and proceeded on as a man possessed. All of a sudden I came to the end with 15 minutes left. There were no more tasks I could complete, no more things to double check or triple check. Only one person had finished so far and they didn’t have their machine wiped in the middle of the test. I felt sheepish, even foolish to tell the proctor I was done but it was all I could do. I was emotionally drained. Everything I had in me, I poured it out in that test and left nothing behind in the tank.
I wandered the streets aimlessly trying to enjoy what was left of my unexpected visit to NYC but I couldn’t lift my eyes from my feet to take it in. As I stumbled into Battery Park and began looking for the Statue of Liberty, I got a notification on my phone. It was my exam results. So soon? This couldn’t be good. I must have failed so badly it was easy to grade.
