Red Hat Tuesday said it is offering a new training course, designed to improve the security skills of users.

The course, called RH423 Red Hat Enterprise Directory Services and Authentication, will cover directory services, authentication and security configuration for companies running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3), Red Hat said.

The course will be part of the Red Hat Security Curriculum, within the Red Hat Certified Engineer program. It will teach advanced methods for configuring Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and Kerberos (a secure method for authenticating a request for a service in a computer network) on RHEL 3 servers.

"For 18 months, we have been working on a portfolio of courses to give more advanced and specific training for people in an enterprise situation," Jasmine Huxtable-Wright, Red Hat training manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said Tuesday.

"The first of these was an enterprise deployment and systems management course, and this is complementary. It gives security-specific information required by anyone administering a Linux system in an enterprise," she said.

These are high-end courses, suitable for skilled Linux professionals and not for someone new to Linux, Huxtable-Wright stressed.

By the end of the course, trainees will be able to achieve "single schema authentication," a configuration that centralizes authentication and control of access to applications and data throughout the company, Red Hat said.

The course will run every six weeks, with 10 people per class, at a cost of $2,598, Huxtable-Wright said. Classes will be held in Red Hat's training centers on the East and West coasts of the U.S., and in the U.K., France, Germany and Italy, she said.

Red Hat launched RHEL 3 in October.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.