Starting from May 15, 2014 it is no longer required to be RHCE to take the following exams:

• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Deployment and Systems Management Exam (EX401),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Server Hardening Exam (EX413),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Clustering and Storage Management Exam (EX436),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Performance Tuning Exam (EX442).

Red Hat Certificates of Expertise are now only valid for 3 years. The ones passed before October 1, 2014 will be valid until October 1, 2017.

The Red Hat Certified Architect certification (RHCA) now requires RHCE certification plus success to any five of the following Red Hat exams:

• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Hybrid Cloud Administration,
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Hybrid Cloud Storage (EX236),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Platform-as-a-Service (EX280),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Deployment and Systems Management (EX401),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Server Hardening (EX413),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Clustering and Storage Management (EX436),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Performance Tuning (EX442),
• Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (EX318),
• Red Hat Certified System Administrator in Red Hat OpenStack (EX210),
• Red Hat Certified JBoss Administrator (EX248),
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Security: Networking Services (EX333)*,
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Directory Services and Authentication (EX423)*,
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in SELinux Policy Administration (EX429)*.

*These exams are no longer offered but can still count for RHCA certification.

After passing the five mandatory exams, any new exam passed will add a distinction to the RHCA certification: level I, level II, etc.

Source: Red Hat website.

If you’ve got a very blur idea about what features the RHEL 7 brings with it, this RHEL 7 review published by QA Ltd (86min) is for you.
This review explores all the main features in detail and explains you what will change.

With systemd, services can be socket-activated, D-Bus-activated or manually started.
This means you have to be very cautious when stopping a service and take extra precaution if you don’t want it to restart!
Previously with RHEL 6, to stop the NetworkManager service for example, you had to type:

# service NetworkManager stop; chkconfig NetworkManager off

In the new RHEL 7 world, you will have to type:

# systemctl disable NetworkManager; systemctl stop NetworkManager

It’s disable then stop and not the other way around!
If you don’t follow this rule, you will be sometimes surprised to see your service still running: it will have been restarted by another process!
This is a true story that happened with the NetworkManager service.
Be assured this will happen again if you are not careful!

If you are working in a RHEL6-Windows environment, Red Hat recently released an update of its Integrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with Active Directory document, written by Mark Heslin.
In the Red Hat Reference Architecture Series, this paper presents the various solutions in a hybrid environment. For each of the four main configurations considered, it describes the different steps.
If RHEL6-Windows integration interests you, this is a must-read.

As previously announced, Red Hat just released the RHEL 7 Release Candidate.
This version can be downloaded from the Red Hat ftp site.

Source: Phoronix website.

Yesterday, during Red Hat annual Summit was announced the RHEL 7 Release Candidate.
This is the near-final version of the OS resulting from the beta program feedback.
This version will be made available to the public during the week of April 21, 2014.
In addition, while RHEL 6’s lifecycle is guaranteed to 2020, a RHEL 6.6 maintenance release would be planned for the customers delaying RHEL 7 adoption.
Concerning the future RHEL 8, work would have started for at least one year.
Sources: TheRegister.

If you are serious about security, there is one place where you need to go: it’s the aqueduct project website.
There, you will find all the security configuration guidances to strengthen your RHEL servers.
Even better, as it takes a lot of efforts to improve the security level of an already built server, Major Hayden’s website provides a ready-to-use CentOS 6 kickstart file compliant with the CIS (Center for Internet Security) guidance. This way, with very limited changes in this file (partition sizes, physical or virtualized drives), you will get a server that you can rely on.

To those, like me, who don’t feel very comfortable with ACL (Access Control List), I advise them to look at this SuSE article from 2003 that almost explains everything about this subject.

Everything started in 2009, when two researchers from the MIT, J.Arnold and F.Kaashoek, wrote an academic paper about “Automatic Rebootless Kernel Updates”.
In this paper, they explained the state of the art in kernel hot patching and what approaches they took to improve it.
Being able to patch a kernel without rebooting brings several advantages:

• you avoid downtime in mission critical environments,
• you can apply security patches to your kernel without waiting for maintenance windows, this way, you avoid most of the security risks,
• you make the life of your administration and application support teams much better.

Some time later, the two researchers created a company called Ksplice with other MIT colleagues.
In 2011, the Oracle company bought this start-up and started selling patches through a subscription program.
Today, besides the Oracle Ksplice initiative, there is a race between the Suse and RedHat companies to integrate this feature in the Linux kernel and provide the related tools in their respective distribution.
Through kGraft, Suse has already a working solution waiting for Linux kernel acceptance when RedHat is still struggling to stabilize its own version. Whoever wins, a GPL solution should be available before the end of this year. This is a definitive achievement.

Additional information is available on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Blog.

With RHEL7, RedHat decided to stop any 32-bit version of its distribution.
Anticipating the market evolution, the company is now working on a 64-bit ARM architecture called AArch64.
Yesterday, Jon Masters, RedHat ARM architect, gave a conference showing a demo of RHEL7 running on a 64-bit ARM server. This distribution should be released before the end of the year.

Source: Richard W.M. Jones’ blog.