Finally RHCSA certified!

This morning I just got the official email that I passed with 283. Perfect score was definitely doable.

The LFCSA practice assessment grader on Linux Academy seriously need improvement as I was panicking after failing half way. Took the practice exam the night before the test, and it really built up anxiety as I couldn't understand what I did wrong. I'd suggest not taking any of their non-RHCSA practice exams.

Last Friday, I took the RHCSA exam in a classroom environment. I decided to do the classroom because this would be my first time taking a Red Hat exam, and I've read horror stories about how the kiosk computers went wonky. $400 is something I can't afford to waste on some possible freak accidents, and I preferred to play it safe.

I don't regret taking the classroom at all. Since I was unable to follow the proctor's verbal instruction, I was a bit lost at the beginning. Without violating the NDA, let's just say I was in for a big surprise as I did not realize the exam has started already. I truly enjoyed the fun challenging tasks Red Hat has to offer. If I hadn't fumbled in the beginning, then I believe I'd have scored higher with more time.

With that being said, I have to agree with Red Hat's decision for not disclosing the knowledge domains that the candidates need improvement on. I didn't understand the reason until I took the test. It's not realy that difficult to determine the areas you need to improve on if you study and prepare well for the exam. If you dare to skip one thing, then you're probably setting yourself up for failure. The easiest way to be sure that you pass the exam before actually completing the test is to test your configurations and double-checking your work. If you don't know how to perform what's being asked, then you can assume you lose points on that objective.

Work experience:
Never worked as a linux admin. The closest work experience is remoting in customers' computers using Windows, and that's only less than 5% of the call volumes we get daily at our call centers.

Resources I used:
- home server (8GB RAM, Core 2 Quad) running primarly CentOS hosting VMs.
- Michael Jang's 7th Edition
- Sander Van Vugt RHCSA/RHEL 7 Cert Guide
- Cert Depot
- Linux Academy

Duration:
Spent way too much time preparing for this cert. I've been meaning to pursue this since summer 2012. Had my reasons with the multiple setbacks in life including not wanting to get tested on version 6 when Red Hat announced version 7. I was preparing for RHEL 6, but wasn't confident with the idea of failing on the 6 and have to retake on the 7. In addition to this, I took a haitus, working on other relevant skills, such as programming, scripting, and reading self-help books on motivation, while waiting for good RHEL 7 resources to come out.

What's next:
My family. Really need to pay more attention to them now. Pretty soon I'll be reworking my resume and try to get into a sys admin gig next. RHCE is still my goal, but I can't shoot for it without the experience yet.

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Comments

gkca

Congratulations!

DatabaseHead

Nice job!

DoubleNNs

Congratulations!! Glad to hear you passed!

danny069

Congrats! You really had to practice those unix commands then considering you don't use that OS daily, good job!

hiddenknight821

Thanks everyone! I've been practicing system administration a lot during my free time at home and even at work. I believe what helped is that I took notes, blogged about it, and I type pretty quickly. Bash completion is quite helpful. I also went really deep on some topics. Especially on virtualization and LVM as I was building my home labs. Instead of using the qcow2 or RAW image files as storage backend for my VMs, I use LVM storage pools, which was quite interesting.

All the published study guides were focusing on using the GUI since it's faster to perform the tasks, but I couldn't risk using VNC at work. I'd SSH to my home lab and practice on it. I wanted to be able to do everything on the command line instead of using virt-manager. I managed to learn how to build CentOS VM guests and even clone a guest. However, when I clone, I gutted the copied configs with the new ones. Kept a 20+ note on Google Doc on virtualization alone for future reference. I plan to blog about it later when I can find the time.

brombulec

Great! Welcome to the RHC world

9bits

Congrats! I'm envious.

asummers

Congratulations.

I liked the write up - and it is always very interesting to hear about Linux Admin Job stories from around the world.

DAVIS NGUYEN

Congrats!

mandy7777

good job:D

varelg

Excellent hiddenknight, great achievement! I hope it opens new doors for you at work. Congratulations! RHCE perhaps in the future?

Bodanel

Congrats man. I suggest you dont stop here. The more you learn the easier it gets.

yuddhidhtir

Congrats. Can you mention your blog URL

JockVSJock

Congrads on the pass!

hiddenknight821

Thanks again, all.

9bits wrote: »

Congrats! I'm envious.

Don't be. Saw your thread. You can do it too.

varelg wrote: »

Excellent hiddenknight, great achievement! I hope it opens new doors for you at work. Congratulations! RHCE perhaps in the future?

No door at my current employer. We're a small call center 2K miles away from the HQ anyway. I'm slowly working on the RHCE at the moment, passively reading Sander Van Vugt study guide.

Bodanel wrote: »

Congrats man. I suggest you dont stop here. The more you learn the easier it gets.

Agreed. Got so much I need to learn. Need to study up on configuration management.

yuddhidhtir wrote: »

Congrats. Can you mention your blog URL

Not yet as I'm not ready to reveal myself on TE. Few of you may know me.

raghul725

Hello HiddenKnight821,

For labs did you create 3 hosts, 1 Server and 2 Clients please?

hiddenknight821

@raghul725 I followed Michael Jang's book thoroughly. He explained how to set up the physical host and the KVM VMs in the first two chapters of his book. You'd need to follow the exercises and end-of-chapter labs carefully to build the suggested lab. Although, I should add that I made some modifications to my setup as I use LVM storage for my VMs instead of using the raw file storage, which is used by default.

As you become more experienced and familiar with libvirt/KVM, you'd be able to customize your setup. I know others who use VirtualBox instead since it's easier to make snapshots and undo your mistakes.

raghul725

OK brilliant hiddenknight821, I have not started yet, just gathering all the info to start my Linux Journey.
Michael Jang's book - arriving tomorrow, all excited

Regards,