Took RHCSA yesterday under less than ideal conditions
So I booked the RHCSA a month ago for yesterday, then a couple weeks ago, my employer asked me to attend a Microsoft event in Redmond from Monday - Thursday this past week. Unfortunately, the only flight I could get back was a red eye that left Seattle at 10:30PM, and landed in DC at 6:15AM, just under 5 hours. I hoped, prayed, and tried to medicate myself to sleep on the flight back, but between a lot turbulence and the fact that I couldn't get comfortable, I slept maybe 30 minutes at most the whole flight.
Upon landing I drove to the test center, about 15 minutes away, and took an hour and a half catnap, then woke up and chugged a 5 hour energy shot and went in. I felt mostly okay, but was definitely in a fog.
The exam started, and I could tell I was out of it as I had to re-read the initial instructions a few times to process it, but after about 10 minutes, I seemed to be coming out of it and hitting a groove, and proceeded without issue. I was handling every task with no issue, and I had 3 tasks to go as I approached the 90 minute mark. Then, I had a mental lapse, and ran a fdisk command against the wrong partition - conveniently enough, my boot partition. It didn't quite sink in exactly what I did until I rebooted and saw a grub prompt staring back at me and I though "Oh, I selected the wrong partition...". So I asked the exam proctor if there was any way I could mount an ISO to get into rescue mode, so I could straightened out my boot volume. He said no, my only option was for him to reload the base image and start over. I wasn't sure just how screwed up things were... I might have been able to straighten it out from the grub shell, but I knew that I was at a point of no return, and if I started over, I could probably finish with the amount of time left, but if I wasted a bunch of time in grub, I could do it. So I took the poison pill and had him reload.
I think I did all right... I finished by skin of my teeth, but didn't have any time to double check things, so I might've had some typos. No more exams on zero sleep with jet lag for me.
