I want to set a firm date for an RCHSA exam to put a deadline and pressure on myself.I think no less than 2 months and no more than 6 are appropriate, since I also want to finish the RHCE in coming year.

I see TrainUp has these exams about once per month. I think 7-10-2015 is too soon, and I’ll plan then for 9-18-2015. They have a similar schedule for RHCE exams. Conceivably 11-6-2015 or 12-4-2015 might be optimistic targets for this. Unfortunately, these seem always to be on a Friday (which is a small scheduling conflict for me, but not a deal breaker, as it’s a few blocks away from the office, and runs from 9-12.) I could do this with only 5 hours off (8AM to 1PM), and that’s more than permissible. I’m not putting money on the table yet, but I’m holding out that this is the right next step.

Update 2016-06-12

So that didn’t happen. A few reasons. I was promoted into a position that greatly restructured my week (going from 3 to 4 days per week to a regular 40 hour week). The job required a substantial amount of my free time, working outside of the office on planning and review. I am really bad at maintaining a disciplined focus on any project for more than a few weeks. Since deciding to learn about redhat and obtain an rhcsa, I’ve picked up a bit of ruby/rails, learned a good amount of django, learned a lot about sql and postgresql, moved our personal business records into a vps hosted and regularly backed up postgresql server, and grown very interested in databases. My interest level in adding acl’s and fighting with selinux configurations is very limited. While I have a centos 7 desktop in my office, and a fedora desktop at work, and spend 40 hours or more a week interacting with centos + cpanel servers for a living, my interest in redhat is lower than ever. I originally was hoping to grow into a ‘senior linux administrator’ position at my current company. As far as I can tell, going forward that person would report to me, so while it’s important to know a lot of tools, it’s less critical for me to obtain a piece of paper from a testing agency that says I know how to setup rhel.