RHCSA advice needed pls!!!RHCSA advice needed pls!!!RHCSA advice needed pls!!!

Hi guys,
I've been a member for some weeks now, but this is my first post on any forum. I pre-ordered Hands-on Guide to the Red Hat(R) Exams: RHCSA™ and RHCE(R) Cert Guide and Lab Manual (Certification Guide) by Damian Tommasino and I also have Michael Jangs rhel 5 book. I was wondering what is the best approach to study for the RHCSA test, as I recently lost my job and I have a lot of time to study.

NOTE: I'm still in college, but I have 9 months of linux and scripting experience due to a lot of college home work/exercises/assignments.

Thanks your comments would be greatly appreciated.

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lordy

Well, you should set up a VM with RHEL6 or Scientific Linux 6 or CentOS 6 (as soon as it arrives).

Then you should work through the task list in the official prep guide:
Red Hat Training Europe | Red Hat Linux Training and Certification

You should do stuff like set up users, change/check file permissions and ACL, install services like HTTP and FTP (including iptables), work with LVM and filesystems (create, grow, check, etc.), install updates, check out disk encryption, automounting and the boot process.

When I was prepering for the exam roughly 4 weeks ago I printed out the prep guide, thought of tasks/questions for each point on the list and made sure that I could answer/fix them. The exam is pretty straight-forward. You will be given clear tasks so don't go into too much detail. You don't have to memorize parameters, the man pages will be available and there should be plenty of time.

joneno

Thanks Lordy......I actually installed CentOS 5 on virtualbox some minutes ago, and I was going thru some cbt videos (the videos are old but useful i guess) and doing labs. I've been hearing all kind of crazy stuff about how tough the exam is, that's why i'm not in a hurry to start another job. I really want these certification.

qwism

Well, you should set up a VM with RHEL6 or Scientific Linux 6 or CentOS 6 (as soon as it arrives).

I've never heard of Scientific Linux up until now...is that used in all fields? As for the RHEL 6 are you saying to buy the server/desktop version if you're looking to learn it? And would it be the desktop or the server version if you're looking to use it in a real world setting? Sorry for the newbie question.

lordy

Scientific Linux follows the same idea as CentOS: Take the available sources from Red Hat and build a free version of it.

CentOS as well as Scientific Linux should behave like RHEL in 95%+. There is really no need to buy a RHEL licence. I remember having read somewhere that there is a 30-day-trial version of RHEL, that would be perfectly sufficient to check out the minor differences.

binarypower

As you can tell I'm a major lurker on these forums and hardly, if ever, post. Consider yourself lucky, lol. I've been lucky to have my job put me through a 2 week redhat training (RH124 and RH135) last week and this week. My exam is tomorrow.

I can tell you that the trainer has stated specifically that the exam will cover exactly what is listed on their website:

Understand and Use Essential Tools
Access a shell prompt and issue commands with correct syntax
Use input-output redirection (>, >>, |, 2>, etc.)
Use grep and regular expressions to analyze text
Access remote systems using ssh and VNC
Log in and switch users in multi-user runlevels
Archive, compress, unpack and uncompress files using tar, star, gzip, and bzip2
Create and edit text files
Create, delete, copy and move files and directories
Create hard and soft links
List, set and change standard ugo/rwx permissions
Locate, read and use system documentation including man, info, and files in /usr/share/doc .
[Note: Red Hat may use applications during the exam that are not included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the purpose of evaluating candidate's abilities to meet this objective.]
Operate Running Systems
Boot, reboot, and shut down a system normally
Boot systems into different runlevels manually
Use single-user mode to gain access to a system
Identify CPU/memory intensive processes, adjust process priority with renice, and kill processes
Locate and interpret system log files
Access a virtual machine's console
Start and stop virtual machines
Start, stop and check the status of network services
Configure Local Storage
List, create, delete and set partition type for primary, extended, and logical partitions
Create and remove physical volumes, assign physical volumes to volume groups, create and delete logical volumes
Create and configure LUKS-encrypted partitions and logical volumes to prompt for password and mount a decrypted file system at boot
Configure systems to mount file systems at boot by Universally Unique ID (UUID) or label
Add new partitions, logical volumes and swap to a system non-destructively
Create and Configure File Systems
Create, mount, unmount and use ext2, ext3 and ext4 file systems
Mount, unmount and use LUKS-encrypted file systems
Mount and unmount CIFS and NFS network file systems
Configure systems to mount ext4, LUKS-encrypted and network file systems automatically
Extend existing unencrypted ext4-formatted logical volumes
Create and configure set-GID directories for collaboration
Create and manage Access Control Lists (ACLs)
Diagnose and correct file permission problems
Deploy, Configure and Maintain Systems
Configure networking and hostname resolution statically or dynamically
Schedule tasks using cron
Configure systems to boot into a specific runlevel automatically
Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux automatically using Kickstart
Configure a physical machine to host virtual guests
Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems as virtual guests
Configure systems to launch virtual machines at boot
Configure network services to start automatically at boot
Configure a system to run a default configuration HTTP server
Configure a system to run a default configuration FTP server
Install and update software packages from Red Hat Network, a remote repository, or from the local filesystem
Update the kernel package appropriately to ensure a bootable system
Modify the system bootloader
Manage Users and Groups
Create, delete, and modify local user accounts
Change passwords and adjust password aging for local user accounts
Create, delete and modify local groups and group memberships
Configure a system to use an existing LDAP directory service for user and group information
Manage Security
Configure firewall settings using system-config-firewall or iptables
Set enforcing and permissive modes for SELinux
List and identify SELinux file and process context
Restore default file contexts
Use boolean settings to modify system SELinux settings
Diagnose and address routine SELinux policy violations

It's a 2 and a half hour lab that covers these topics... not all, but a lot of them. It's a real world scenario. I would recommend printing this out or writing it down.. take it with you everywhere. Cross off things that you know really well. Test yourself by installing Fedora (I would do fedora or signing up for the 30 day trial of redhat enterprise) then trying to set up FTP, NFS, HTTP servers.

Go and screw up your fstab and grub and rebooting. Increase/decrease your logical volume managers. Quiz yourself on how many linux commands you can write down in 10 minutes, then going back and write a description on what those commands do.... speaking of that DO EVERYTHING IN COMMAND LINE.

If you have a friend who is linux savvy, ask them to screw up your server and then go and try to fix it. During the training they have these "lab-break-fix" scripts that go and change your network settings, grub.conf files... various things. then you have to go find out if your server is still up and you can ping out and what not.

If SELinux scares you, it shouldn't... at least not for the RHCSA. There are more commands for LVM than you will really need to for the exam (at least I hope).

Tomorrow I'll reply back and tell you how it went. Unfortunately I cannot give you specifics because I think they make you sign a NDA.

Good luck!

joneno

Thanks binary power,
I was actually studying a chapter on file permissions and ACL's, I found a redhat academy pdf online, and its been really helpful. I'm not bad with linux, neither I'm I a guru, I think with some studying I should be fine. How long have you been playing around with Linux, if I may ask? Thanks again.....I wish you good luck, and hopefully you post some good news tomar....lol !!!