Here's my $0.02 on the OPs question of interest.
I've little to no formal training in BSD, so there are certainly gaps in my knowledge - I just learn what I need as I go. This would make taking any closed certification exam problematic. I also have a 2" thick pile of printouts and notes I use for reference when setting up a system because I'm not going to remember the name of specific kernel parameters when I only use them once every 4-6 months at most.
The current test description document says that it covers FreeBSD 6.x (among other distros). A relative newcomer to BSD, the earliest version I've used is 7.0, so this wouldn't work too well for questions that have changed between versions. (M$ exams are very picky with this type of thing from what I've heard. They change where stuff is located between releases and even between patch levels - the exam question will specify the OS version and patch level; you're expected to know where a given obscure option is with this information and not being able to look at a screen to see that the button has been renamed or moved.)
I'm not going to travel long distances to take a test (closest upcoming one to me is about 1500 miles away), nor pay large amounts of money to do so. While $75 isn't a ton of money and much less than I've seen other certification exams cost, I can get another terrabyte of storage with that same amount of cash.
I also have a rather low opinion of the value of certifications in general. I can't tell you the number of times that I've shown up a person in something he/she was 'certified' in. For example, in my college excel class (yes, one of those required classes I slept through
), we had a microsoft certified something or other. The older lady sitting at the next bank of computers wasn't able to format her 3.5" floppy disk because it was used and too full to save the 'unformat' information and windoze 95 didn't have a checkbox to override. (This was when floppies were expensive compared to now, ~$2 a shot, and she couldn't afford a box of them... she was barely able to afford to go to school.) The MCAP (microsoft certified arrogant person
) swaggered over, proudly proclaimed his certification in a voice loud enough for everyone in the class to hear, looked at the error, clicked a things for about 5 minutes, and then declared without a shadow of a doubt that the disk was unusable. He was truly speechless when I (19 years old wearing old jeans and a t-shirt) rolled my chair over to her station, wordlessly leaned over the keyboard, pressed control-escape, arrowed up twice to run, started a command prompt, typed format a: /q /u, hit enter, said "there ya go", and rolled back to my station. :e My brother has spent tons of money on multiple certifications, but still doesn't know what he's doing in most stuff. A buddy calls me all the time for PC advice - his company recently paid for him to be certified, but it was such that he crammed for 2+ weeks leading up to the test, passed it, and dumped it all because he never used it. (See previous reference to obscure features never used.)
That all being said, I'd love to have some sort of certification in BSD. It would be completely useless for my present job (and probably in near-future jobs as well given the area I live in), but would be sweet to be able to say, put on my business cards, or be able put in my profile. Even if it's just an online exam that I could complete with the reference material that I have at hand when working on a system anyways, it'd be very cool.
