A few weeks ago I took my CLP/CLE10 upgrade test. It was a difficult test as I was asked to do some things that I have never done before, but thanks to common knowledge I was able to figure thing out and work my way to passing and becoming both a CLP10 and CLE10. As most of you who have taken these test know, CLE10 is Novell's top Linux certification based on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. I can tell everyone some tasks that I had to complete but I can not go into detail. The CLP covers advanced linux based tasks such as scripting, logging, creating users, and performing advanced tasks on user accounts. CLE covers services that can be ran on a Linux server such as nagios, DHCP, DNS, FTP, squid, and many other services that may be used on Linux. During my test I was asked to configure two DHCP servers in a fail over fault tolerant state. Not only was I asked to configure these servers to be fault tolerant but I was also tasked to perform advanced features within the servers themselves for DHCP. I was also asked to configure a syslog-ng server with some very advanced features for logging. My third tasks had to do with advanced configuration of LVM data groups and NFS for both client and server. Many of you would say NFS is simple, but there are many advanced features on the server side and client side that I was asked to perform during this test. I then had a request to perform a maintenance check on a certain part of the system and write a script to perform actions based on the different states the specified part of the system was in, these were not easy tasks and the script was very advanced itself to include sed and awk statements in order to work properly.

If you are thinking of taking the CLP and CLE, I suggest that you get all the training materials that you can and study each chapter to the point you completely understand every word. Build a lab and perform the tasks in each chapter over and over again. I have been working with Linux on a daily basis in an enterprise environment for many years now, and this test was extremely hard. I wish anyone that is looking to become a Certified Linux Professional or a Certified Linux Engineer the best of luck.