T Minus 30 Days Till RHCSA

JockVSJock

Ok, so I'm going to take a stab at logging all of my study time for RHCSA in this post. As of today, I have 30 days till I take this exam.

The last few months I haven't been able to devote as much time to studying as I would like. I got married, the holidays, work, family, and gotten sick. So I need to be able to use every hour the best I can.

I'm sure a few of you will ask why RHEL6. Well, at work we use a mix of RHEL5/6 and slowly moving away from RHEL5 to 6.

And I'm sure a few of you will ask why it took me as long to study for this exam. Well, I've had my goal post moved on me a few times. First I was studying for CCNA, and ready to take the 1st part of the exam, when my boss said to drop that and focus on getting RHCSA. So I switched and later learned that my Security+ was no longer valid, so I had the goal post moved on me again and took about two months to prepare for that cert. Finished that cert and started to study for RHCSA, when I had my goal post moved on me yet again when my boss wanted me to finish a number of CBT for Linux for work. Took me a few months to finish that and here I am.

I'm using the latest VirtualBox, and have a number of RHEL6 templates that i can spin up with the labbing software already built in, ready to run. For the book, the previous admin left behind Jang's RHCSA 6th edition, however I wish I would have got something else. I also have a subscription to Linux Academy too.

I'm still having issues getting Kick Start to run, and haven't had a chance to power up the extra pc that I bought to master KVM.

Tonight, I practiced LVM, encryption and creation partitions with fdisk and Parted. Fdisk I know like second nature. Parted I'm still not used to and still having issues creating multiple primary partitions. I also had trouble tonight trying to setup swap space with Parted. I will need to master Parted because I'm managing a number of servers that in the TB range of storage.

I also need to go back and review Umask along with Star.

JockVSJock

Labbed the following tonight:
-LVMs (creating and extending)
-Encryption (cryptsetup luksFormat and cryptsetup luskOpen)
-Making swap space from a partition
-ACLS
-User Mngt (Useradd, usermod userdel, groupadd, groupdel and groupmod)
-Local Repo (installed star, corepolicyutil and corepolicyutil-gui for SELinux)
-Star, tar and gzip exercises (creating various archives, reading the archive and uncompromising them)
-lsattr/chattr

Still having issues with parted commands when creating partitions. Having issues in formatting space (linux-swap) and setting up 1st partition, 2nd partition. Much easier to do in fdisk, IMO. However things change and I have to learn something new...

Muhammed H

Which CBTs are you following?

JockVSJock

For tonight, labbed the following:

-Setup TigerVNC VNCServer, not successful. IPTables causing issue. If I dropped and then flushed IPTables, it works. I added rules in INPUT and OUTPUT chains for ports 5900, 5901 and 5902 and still not working. Wasn't able to nc from either server to determine if those ports were up. However using nmap on the server itself, the ports are open.
-Went thru creating users/groups, modifying users/groups, and deleting users/groups
-Reviewed SELinux commands (getenforce, setenforce, sestatus, chcon, restorecon and semanage -l login)
-Also built a few yum local repos

Also noticed I made a mistake above. I meant the following packages policycoreutils and policycoreutils-gui for SELinux.

asummers

if you know fdisk you wont need to know parted at all

JockVSJock

asummers wrote: »

if you know fdisk you wont need to know parted at all

However parted has better features for handling larger disks, so I have to learn it.

That's the nature of this career field, always learning.

varelg

Oh wow what a list of events that got you derailed. Getting married alone is a big enough event.
At some point,you'd have to take practice exams. Or somehow compile your own. That helps a lot in measuring how prepared you are for the test. What resources are you using for the practice tests?
Parted may be handling larger disks better, but it's exam you are taking and you need to pass it. So if it's fdisk that will get you through the finish line, stick with it.

JockVSJock

varelg wrote: »

At some point,you'd have to take practice exams. Or somehow compile your own. That helps a lot in measuring how prepared you are for the test. What resources are you using for the practice tests?

There are two practice exams that come with Jang's book.

JockVSJock

Tonight, I had to review some SELinux stuff for work and also troubleshoot /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny stuff for work as well. So not as much time for studying as I would like. It was also 70 degrees here today, so I walked outside for an hour. Health is important and you cannot put a price tag on good health.

Labbing, did the following:
-setup Apache to server up a local repo and adjusted IPTables so another server could hit it
-setup vsftp to server up a local repo, also adjusted IPTables and can't hit this from another server. NC and nmap shows port 21 wide open on vsftp server...I have this as an iptables entry: iptables -I INPUT 4 -m state --state NEW -p tcp -m tcp --dport 21
-did some reading from Jang's book

lovejoi

Guys can I pass exam myself without training or is there any online training room after which I can pass it. In my country there is no redhat academy. [h=2]RHCSA[/h]

varelg

lovejoi wrote: »

Guys can I pass exam myself without training or is there any online training room after which I can pass it. In my country there is no redhat academy. RHCSA

There are candidates that pass RH exams through self-study. You will still need some kind of guide and a lot of practice. It is definitely doable.

JockVSJock

Took Friday off. I'm too mentally wiped out from the week to do anything constructive besides go out to eat and shop for groceries with the wife.

Today I labbed with the following:
-setup VNCServer. I'm still bogged down by IPTables. It works ok with iptables off, however the real test is when its running.
-setup vsftpd server. I'm having issues setting up all of the config files so it works correctly too...

JockVSJock

Rant on Michael Jang's book.

Throughout the book, he makes reference to install groups via yum, however has no examples. I looked high and low in his book for something to go off of.

After Googling around for most of the day, I found a lot of confusing blog post or incomplete blog posts on how to set this up.

I wrote up a tutorial/blog post at linuxquestions.org under my account.

asummers

JockVSJock wrote: »

Rant on Michael Jang's book.

Throughout the book, he makes reference to install groups via yum, however has no examples. I looked high and low in his book for something to go off of.

After Googling around for most of the day, I found a lot of confusing blog post or incomplete blog posts on how to set this up.

I wrote up a tutorial/blog post at linuxquestions.org under my account.

I found Jang's book to be worse than bad. I dumped it fairly early and just used online resources

JockVSJock

asummers wrote: »

I found Jang's book to be worse than bad. I dumped it fairly early and just used online resources

Amateurish at best, is the best way to describe Jang' writing in this book. Poor examples and poor writing plague this book. Its no wonder the previous admin left this book behind.

This is the last time I use his book for an exam.

To the recycle bin when this is over...

asummers

JockVSJock wrote: »

Amateurish at best, is the best way to describe Jang' writing in this book. Poor examples and poor writing plague this book. Its no wonder the previous admin left this book behind.

This is the last time I use his book for an exam.

To the recycle bin when this is over...

You will surprised that no matter how much I try and let people know not to use that book - people are determined to buy and use it.

Much better resources are available for free.

JockVSJock

asummers wrote: »

Much better resources are available for free.

What ones do you recommend then?

JockVSJock

Work continues to take study time away from me. Had to troubleshoot SELinux stuff again, troubleshoot cache files on servers, monitoring traffic with Wireshark and trying to plan out an openldap rollout.

For tonight, only got the Kickstart finally going via http. I want to try via vsftpd next, if I have time. I will lab this again tomorrow and plan on doing KVM stuff as well...

Maybe if I have time, I can write a blog post on what to do for Kickstart on Linuxquestions.org, since I think there is alot of bad documentation on how to setup Kickstart.

JockVSJock

Only had time to review KVM last night. I went out and bought a 64-bit HP Desktop to lab KVM.

I know what packages I need to install, I can rattle them off the top of my head:

qeum-kvm 
python-virtinst
libvirt 
libvirt-client 
virt-top
virt-viewer
virt-manager 

I know that I can operate/manage vms with the following command:

virt-manager

However, if I enter the following command:

virsh

I'm not able to run some of the commands, and there are more commands that Jang's book details. For examples, domains? So I will consult the Red Hat documentation to see if I can learn more.

Verities

Look at every exam objective and make sure you can do them off the top of your head or you know where to look for help in the man pages. If you do that you will be successful. Also, make sure you read the instructions for the exam very carefully or else you may fail the exam. If you can't figure out what to do at the CLI (use the GUI!), don't know what packages are used for KVM or can't remember, make sure you know how to search for packages (something like yum whatprovides */kvm). Take your time and make sure every configuration change survives a reboot. I have faith in your abilities to pass this exam.

asummers

JockVSJock wrote: »

What ones do you recommend then?

How about this rhce.co

It breaks down every requirement and then how to achieve it. Using that you can see what you find easy and what you need to do some more searching on.

varelg

Looking away from the problem for a moment sometimes helps you find a solution for it. Great that you decided to take a bit of time off from studies.
Kickstart docs that help a lot are in the official RH's Installation Guide. Pay attention to the mandatory elements of a Kickstart file and try to memorize few useful options of each. Since we are taking exam on a live server, anaconda-ks.cfg is always available to refresh memory on syntax. You could also dive deep and research pykickstart docs via rpm -qd pykickstart which gives out the local file that is almost identical to the Kickstart section of RH's Installation Guide.
LinuxQuestions has too many Linux advocates for any kind of productive discussion. Go to the source and post on CentOS' forums if you need answers/solutions.
Vsftp may require login which disqualifies it as a server to rely upon during a network installation. Samba is firmly disqualified just for that reason.

JockVSJock

For tonight, just stepped thru the following:

RHEL6 RHCSA Sample exam 1 - CertDepot

ITrascal

how did u do?

HailHogwash

JockVSJock wrote: »

However, if I enter the following command:

virsh

I'm not able to run some of the commands, and there are more commands that Jang's book details. For examples, domains? So I will consult the Red Hat documentation to see if I can learn more.

Even when you run eg "virsh shutdown <vm>" as root?

JockVSJock

Hey, too many irons in the fire and haven't been updating this thread.

However, I just got out of the testing center. Here are a few observations.

This is testing on a custom computer. It has two microphones and three cameras on it. Instead of presenting an gov't id to the secretary, you have it scanned into the computer. It would not scan my id, and so I had to have the secretary confirm that it was me so I could take the test.

There was a pair of noise reduction head phones, however they were broken.

To me, the directions were confusing on where I should be taking the test on. Were I to take the exam on the local RHEL system or the virtual system?

Anyways, there were 15 to 20 scenarios that I had to work. Don't want to into too much details, however there were scenarios that pertained to LDAP (which took me by suprised), user mgmt and LVM.

Should get my results in 3 to 5 days...I guess... I tried to use the chat feature to ask, however once I IM'ed them to end the exam, they would not IM back.

vanillagorilla3

How do you feel that you did? It doesn't like a pleasant testing environment.

I'm studying for the exam now. For the most part, I feel if I can't do something from the CLI, I can get it from the GUI.

hiddenknight821

I hope you pass this one as well as anyone else who has the voucher for the RHEL6 EX200 exam as I know next Monday is the last day to take the test with it. It must've sucked to go through that experience as I can relate when I first take the LFCS. Wish we can get a preview of the actual test environment without seeing the questions kind of like how Cisco would run you through a pre-testing tutorial before beginning your test. You're a few days away from shaking off that anxiety.

varelg

I don't know if LDAP- related objectives are part of RHCSA 6 exam but they definitely are part of RHCSA 7 exam. You'd work on the virtual machine, as far as I know.
Few testimonials like yours led me to choose classroom exam over kiosk. You won't have to take the class to take the classroom exam. Instructor also supervises the exam and not a clueless employee of the testing center.
Those that passed the exam say they got their results within hours after the exam. I got mine (did not pass) days after. But I really hope I am wrong and that you passed.

hiddenknight821

JockVSJock wrote: »

Anyways, there were 15 to 20 scenarios that I had to work. Don't want to into too much details, however there were scenarios that pertained to LDAP (which took me by suprised), user mgmt and LVM.

I'm not sure how you missed that objective. It was even listed in Michael Jang RHEL6 book. I recalled taking notes of the LDAP config in chapter 8. It's in the objective:

- Configure a system to use an existing LDAP directory service for user and group information.

But yeah I can see how frustrating that can be when you didn't have an LDAP directory server to test with in your practice lab. Although, Jang did say to look into a FreeIPA LDAP server.

techfiend

I did the FreeIPA studying last week and all I remember client side was setting up the host file and kinit <ldap user>. Does it go beyond this?