Questions about getting ready for your Red Hat remote exam?

[Deanna]

This thread is dedicated to connect you with Red Hat subject matter experts who can help answer your questions regarding Red Hat remote exams. Please see the following resources for Red Hat Remote Exams below:

• Remote Exams Announcement
• Technical Documentation for "Getting ready for your Red Hat remote exam"
• Remote Exams FAQ

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**Our subject matters experts in the Red Hat Learning Community will not be assisting with tasks related to scheduling exams. 

[PetrCihlar]

Hi, it is normal the system asks for a password to "unlock" encrypted usb drive. Once you put the ISO on it (please note the downloaded RE ISO gets downloaded successfully but is reported as corrupted whenever the OS tries to mount it) Windows does it, as the.iso filetype extension is recognised adn Windows attermpts to mount it by default I think, just after the download. This is because the content of the ISO and therefore the USB stick you put the ISO on are ancrypted. Reinserting such an USB drive results in a password prompt. It also happens when Fedora media writer finishes the USB writing and attempts to mount the newly created USB stick. Ignore it. All is fine. Just boot the USB stick once you created it. It will decrypt itself on the fly and expand into RAM, where it runs from. Another possibility is just removing all the partitions (whipe out the partition tables) of the USB stick. It will become completely blank (unformated, unpartitioned). For Windows, there is free tool AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, if you plan to avoid the CLI.

[PetrCihlar]

@rtloRegarding the RH instructional PDF manual you are probably reffering to. I looked at it. It seems to me the paragraph no. 5 of the page 14 when you are asked to reinsert the USB stick and run lsblk to verify is not updated since RH introduced the encrypted ISO. You may skip the chapter 5 for the current encrypted ISO. RH will update its manual soon

[rtlo]

@PetrCihlar - Since it looks like others have had success, it must be either a) A new .iso arrived on Saturday, or b) I've got something going on with 'secure boot' or some other odd HP bios feature...in any case, I've used dd=/dev/zero to zero out the usb drive, and even tried using a brand new stick with the same exact outcome...when I try to boot it (selecting the device from the bios boot menu) it actually says 'authentication failure' - and that seemed congruent w/ the message i got when i (unintentionally) tried mounting it from the OS, so it seemed as though the encryption might be preventing a proper bootstrap...I've also updated my bios to the latest version (which may/may not be exactly helpful...i.e. I suppose I could 'revert' but that seems like a lot just to get a system to boot from a 'special' usb stick...)

...what is the direct download link for the latest ISO file? - is that link perhaps different from what's in the 'old' pdf documentation?

Thanks

[rtlo]

OK - update: It was "Secure Boot" all along...found that was indeed enabled in the HP BIOS settings..I *thought* that I had disabled this, but nope. Perhaps one thing to note though - when I chose the option 'enable legacy disable secure boot' - I couldn't get the system to boot anything following that - until I pulled the usb stick out...then I got a prompt to enter a 'code' to actually disable it (which is likely due to the 'physical presence required' setting).  Apart from that, and needing to reboot once again for my mic to start working, all seems well now Thanks @PetrCihlar @vishals !

[Tooms]

Hi,

I am still missing a NIC driver in the remote Exam ISO:

$ lspci -k -s 04:00.0
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller (rev 05)
DeviceName: RTL8111E Giga LAN
Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device e000
Kernel driver in use: r8169
Kernel modules: r8169

If I boot the latest ISO (downloaded today, v20220712) my NIC does not work so I can't continue to the login screen for the Exam.

Any chance to get that driver added within the next 2 weeks (before November 1st) ??

[Flrn00]

After it reaches 100% when loading into memory, it stays like this forever. Anyone knows the fix? Was told by support to visit an exam center as they don't know the solution

This is with the old ISO and secure boot disabled. I use AMD CPU and ASUS motherboard

[PetrCihlar]

It has nothing to do with Secure Boot. It is a compatibility issue often seen on AMD Ryzen CPU and some discrete Video cards, on newer chipsets.
Just like in the Wintel world. Windows 7 cannot be installed on brand new laptops and Windows 11 on some older ones. People use variety od computers of different type and age. Redhat is doing all they can to make the ISO most compatible. It will never be perfect. Cannot be. I believe the support for your hardware will be added in some future releases of the ISO. For now, the only way is using some older and mainstream type of computer or attending the exam center. You may please contact tech support and share your actual configuration with them. Thank you

[rtlo]

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In my case - it had pretty much everythig to do with Secure Boot - since disabling it was the only way I was going to get the image to boot (if you have any other magical suggestions though - I'm all ears, since I'd rather not disable it, sd it appears to have done a fairly decent job of responding with: "I can't read this thing - umm no."

Cheers,

Rod Treweek
ph. 503-430-9050
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[bus]

Will you be able to open an additional terminal for the control node in the exam environment to run ansible-doc and man commands to copy and paste from?

[PetrCihlar]

I am sure no one from RH will comment the content of any exam here and you should not too. People have equal conditions, they will come across challenges and it is up to them how they decide to solve them during the exam