Is it possible to cram for the RHCSA in a week?

[jessy87]

Hi everyone, I've been studying/working in RH for a few months now for work, and I took the first admin course back in February. I've been meaning to take the exam in march/april, but that has been cancelled because of Covid. I haven't been working too much on studying because I did not know when I could take it, and my work on RH has been repetitive so its not really good practice for the exam.

I just checked for exam dates today, and found one posted one week from now. Is it possible to cram for it? I went through the O'Reilly RHCSA course once before, but honestly speaking I have not worked on all the practice questions. I can get some time off work and spend maybe 40-50 hours studying for it till next week.

Am I being too optimistic? My boss wants me to get certified ASAP and the next listing on the website is not available.

[ricardodacosta]

TL;DR: yes

How would you cram? How much Linux sysadmin experience do you have? How confident are you in tackling scenarios involving the topics in the exam objectives [1]?

Will you have your nose in the book, highlighting commands, and files? If you do, then you will probably fail?

Here's how I practised for my EX200 exam:

There was no developers subscription [2] back then so I installed 2 CentOS VMs on my laptop. Because I didn't have the classroom/exam environment I had to learn to setup the infrastructure for services, and for clients. For example, if I wanted to setup and test the firewall for allowing ftp, then I need to setup a ftp server on vm1, configure the firewall there, and test it from vm2 (never test packet filter rules from the machine which will do the packet filtering - false positives are real). Same thing for NFS, timesync, etc.

I had to setup the server and client to practice, and in doing so, I learnt a lot.

I spent a lot of time setting up my infrastructure, breaking my infrastructure, and setting it up again. That time, was my exam practice because when I got to the exam, I had all this experience.

Time on the keyboard is of paramount importance when you attempt any Red Hat exams. Get your hands dirty. 

Good luck!

References:

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/ex200-red-hat-certified-system-administrator-rhcsa-exam

[2] https://developers.redhat.com/articles/getting-red-hat-developer-subscription-what-rhel-users-need-k...

[clwhite]

First of all, I really enjoy your online class.  You are very engaging and make the concepts understandable.

I am currently enrolled with the developer subscription which only has 160 hours of lab time available.  I have RHEL 9 on a VM and I would like to build labs in that environment to develop my skills especially when my 160 hours has expired.  How can I learn to do this?