Passed EX294 (285/300)
This was the RHEL 10 version.
It was a doozy, mainly due to the exam environment. I took this one a couple months after EX200. It’s mainly a test of endurance due to how much the environment rage-baits you. This is probably the most frustrated I have ever been taking an exam.
Main prep:
- The official AU294 course, used about 40 hours of lab time there, and about 2 months to go through the content
- Homelab (ProxMox: 1 control node, 3 RHEL10 managed hosts)
- I currently work as a sysadmin and manage a decent amount of Ubuntu/RHEL machines
I finished with about 30 minutes to spare. I did not use ansible-navigator as it seemed to be broken. I wasted 20 minutes troubleshooting what ultimately seemed to be an issue with the exam environment.
I HIGHLY recommend taking this in person. Unfortunately the closest testing center was 8 hours away. I used a wired connection and the session would freeze every 10 seconds, and if you were typing while it froze it would send your input like 30 times. This happens CONSTANTLY.
For example, if you were backspacing a couple times and it froze, you would end up deleting 4 lines lol. I think I would have finished in 2 hours if it wasn’t for the constant Ctrl-Z’ing.
I recommend getting very comfortable with ansible_facts, conditional logic, and regex.
Good luck to the folks getting ready to take it. The official course is not completely adequate prep, especially regarding Jinja.