My thoughts on RedHat's EX403 exam

March 20, 2017 by Paweł Biernacki

I’ve recently gained the Certificate of Expertise in Enterprise Deployment and Systems Management after passing EX403 . I took the exam in the City of London as an individual session - this time on KOALA - Kiosk On A Laptop. On the RedHat’s site the exam is advertised to take three hours but after starting the exam I found that the clock shows four hours.

The proctor was very restrictive, I couldn’t drink any water even from a bottle without any stickers or leave for the toilet within the first two hours of the exam. I never have to go during the session, but mind to use the toilet before taking the exam if you’re unsure ;-) Also, I was told to adjust the laptop screen before starting and not to touch or readjust it during the exam. The chair wasn’t the best one you would like to have on a four-hour exam though.

The exam is based on Satellite 6.2 - that may be important if you have experience with older versions of 6.x as there were some significant UI changes. Task list is quite sufficient for a 3+ hours exam, especially because certain tasks take time. As with other RedHat exams I’d recommend starting by reading every question and making a plan, because you can save some time and make the whole exam a bit easier without repeating some steps few times.

I found the questions to be somewhat uneven. Some of them have a lot of tips in description, while others are only described on a high level, and you need to figure out yourself how to connect the dots to fulfil them. Overall I found the exam to not be very difficult, but you need to be prepared to have a very broad knowledge of how the Satellite platform works and how all the components are connected together.

Posted in: Linux

Tags: certification