Advice Needed: Preparing for the Redhat EX294 Exam

[williammarlin]

I am planning to take the Red Hat EX294 exam, and I am looking for some guidance on how to prepare effectively. If anyone can recommend useful study materials, practice labs, or a solid learning path. I would appreciate it. Also, any tips from those who recently passed would be very helpful.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

Hello @williammarlin !

Please focus on the official objectives of EX294: https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/red-hat-certified-openshift-administrator-exam and prepare around it following the content explained/discussed in the recommended course RH294. 

If you can do the labs of this course on your own and within stipulated time - you should be good to go. 

should you feel you need more help or references for example using the official doc in exam then I suggest you get yourself familiar with the official docs which can come handy during the exam.  

[Sunnykumar1]

Hello @williammarlin 

Here are my tips for clearing the EX294 exam:

- Don’t memorize Ansible modules, use ansible-doc The exam allows ansible-doc, which gives syntax, examples, parameters. 

- Build everything using playbooks not manual commands (Manual commands do not count). 

- Keep your playbooks clean and modular

- Test as you go

- Organize your files properly, many fail because YAML or directory structure is wrong.

- Be time efficient

[grundblom]

For me I did a lot of copy and paste from the ansible documentation to get the yaml indentation correct. I also tried to keep my playbooks increadbly simple to try to reduce the time of troubleshooting the indentation. 

I would often miss indentation mistakes as my mind raced to try to write the playbook for the question. 

Good luck! 

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@grundblom wonderful inputs!

[Travis]

@grundblom -

If you know and use VIM, one of my favorite ways to quickly look for indentation mistakes ...

ESC

:set cc=3,5,7,9,11,13,15

This puts colored columns every 2 spaces. Makes it easy to see if anything is out of alignment. You can turn off the ColorColumn with

:set cc=

[Sunnykumar1]

Hello @grundblom 

For the indentation issue, I simply use the below command:
echo "autocmd FileType yaml setlocal ai et sw=2 ts=2 nu cuc" >~/.vimrc

So that when I open a YAML file in Vim:

- Indentation is automatic

- Tabs become spaces

- Indentation uses 2 spaces (YAML best practice)

- Line numbers are visible

- The cursor column is highlighted

Thank you

[Travis]

@Sunnykumar1 -

Yes, VIMRC is definitely the way I go and I would teach in the class how to set VIMRC. However, I found when some students didn't do it or didn't like some of the features, turning on colored columns in a live playbook was a quick and excellent way to visually demonstrate just how easy some of these things can be for debugging a playbook and verifying alignment. 

I use several items in VIMRC and on my work computer I also have some VIM plugins installed too. The NU is also great for line numbers when debugging, but it isn't as great when you are doing copy/paste.