This is a daily log of my experiences during the Redhat training course RH124.
Monday - Day 1
There are 10 people enrolled in this course. Introductions were made and it appears that most people in this course have some experience in different forms of Unix. After telling the instructor wha I do for a living and what I use RHEL for, I am told by the instructor that this course will probably be pretty boring for me as it is very basic. I am told that everything in the exam forAfter a long introduction from everyone in the course we went over the daily topics in the course. Every topic covered has tasks at the end of the chapter to ensure the student understands what is being covered.We have a course book which comes with a DVD with the RHEL software, a pen, and some note paper.Every student also has a machine preinstalled with the RHEL software and various labs we will be doing.We started by getting a basic over view of the OS. Including access to the various menus. Some of the tasks we briefly looked at were (all of this was done by using the gnome GUI)
- Editing the about me information
- Editing user profiles including customizing the terminal windows
- Location of documentation
- Logging in, switching users, and changing password
- Restarting a shutting down
After this we went into learning more about gedit. This is the basic text editor included with RHEL. I am told that all tools which are included in the RHEL repository are allowed and will be able to be installed during the RHCSA exam. The instructor briefly went over vim and nano.With in gedit we had some tasks we had to complete to ensure understanding of how to create, edit, and delete files.The tasks included
- Creating a new document
- Finding and replacing words in gedit
- Basic editing
- Saving documents
We then went into the file system explorer included with RHEL. This is called Nautilus. The tasks we had to perform using nautilus included:
- Basic browsing
- Moving, copying, and linking files
- Connecting to remote servers (FTP, SSH, Windows/Samba)
- Mouting and dismounting network shares
We also very briefly covered getting help for any application. This included just hitting F1 in the application in question, as well as going to a terminal and using the man pages.We than began covering the role of the root user. The tasks covered were:
- Using su - and why
- Using sudo
- Differences between the Linux root and Windows administrator
We then went to covering the System clock and its importance to the system. Some of the things to be considered about having accurate time included:
- Logging
- Messaging (timestamps)
- Cron jobs
- RSA Tokens
The tasks covered for the system clock were:
- Setting the clock
- Syncing time with external and internal sources
- Changing the time zone
- Using UTC
After that we covered adding printers and the use of CUPS. The basic tasks included:
- Location in the GUI to setting up a printer
- Using the system-config-printer command
- Setting up and connecting to local and remote printers
- Publishing printers so that others can use them
- Setting permissions to limit or grant access to printers
This brought us to our last topic of the Day. The Bash shell. We then went into a few of the features included with bash and the use of the commands within the cli. Two of the features included:
- Using the history command
- Tab completion
I was amazed that most of the students in the class had no idea they could use the the tab completion feature. To me that is one of the best features of bash. The last commands we went over before leaving for the day included:
- passwd
- id
- su [-]
- exit
- Putting applications into the foreground and background
- jobs
- sleep
- fg
Tuesday Day 2
The first thing we covered was managing physical storage. We covered the GUI disk utility. Which are told we will have access to during the RHCSA exam as well as all of the other tools.From there we started going through the practical stuff including:
- Seperating partitions
- MBR
- df command
- fdisk functions
We then had a discussion of the structure of the file system, and discussed the required directories that must hang off of root ( / ) Those directories are:
We then talked about the disk utility again and began practicing with it again. There are exams at the end of each chaper which require you to ensure all of the objectives for the chapter are met. While using the disk utility again we went through:
- creating partitions
- formatting
- mounting
- editing the fstab
- creating the directories for the mount points
We learned that you can also access the disk ultility via a command prompt (which can be done over ssh) with the gnome-disk-utility commandWe next headed into LVM. We covered:
- creating physical partitions
- creating physical volumes
- creating volume groups
- creating logical volumes
We then talked more about LVM and went into:
- displaying free space
- space used
- editing volume groups
- viewing volume groups
Most of class for the rest of the day was dicussions about LVM's and the different types of volumes contained within. We discussed:
- Deplying logical volumes
- Creating volume groups
- Extending logical volumes
- Removing physical volumes
- Managing logical volumes
Our next section covered monitoring system resources. This included:
- Processes, priorities, and signals
- ps command
- system monitor
- process management
- disk usuage analyzer
We also covered the kill command and what meanings between kill -9 and kill 15 are. We also went into the top command and how to navigate around inside of top to show different and useful information.Our last section of the day was about getting help in a text environment. This basically was about the man pages including:
- Using the man reader
- searching for keywords
- pinfo reader
- addition man pages included by 3rd parties
That was the end of the day. We definitley covered a lot of information on day 2. I feel as though I didnt learn a lot, but I did reaffirm what I already knew and it seems to have stuck and sunk in. I just hope I can keep it in my head when I take the exam. Day 3 up next.
