Took RHCSA yesterday under less than ideal conditions
jmritenour
Member Posts: 565
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.
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.
"Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible; suddenly, you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi
Comments
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jmritenour
Member Posts: 565
Just got my results - 283 out of 300! I might have got a perfect score if not for my fdisk mishap and having to start the whole thing over.
"Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible; suddenly, you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi -
mapletune
Member Posts: 316
grats~!! what a story! =DStudying: vmware, CompTIA Linux+, Storage+ or EMCISA
Future: CCNP, CCIE -
brownwrap
Member Posts: 549
Congratulations! Maybe after you catch your breath you tell us how you prepared, although I guess there is no magic to it. -
jmritenour
Member Posts: 565
I didn't do anything too crazy for prep - I've just been doing administrative work on several different Linux distros for years, and Michael Jang's RHCSA/RHCE guide & lab manual. I decided to go for it back in February, so I had about 3 months to prepare, but a lot of that was broken up by the birth of our second child, my wife having to have surgery, and other day to day chaos."Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible; suddenly, you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi
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onesaint
Member Posts: 801
Congrats! That's pretty awesome under those circumstances.Work in progress: picking up Postgres, elastisearch, redis, Cloudera, & AWS.
Next up: eventually the RHCE and to start blogging again.
Control Protocol; my blog of exam notes and IT randomness
