Problem at RH124 - ch12s09

[RicardoNeves]

Hello

I've been trying to complete the lab "Install and Update Software Packages" but been getting several errors.

First time i tried it i got the error message "error during downloading metadata for repository errata" on step 2, "install the rht-system".

I already reset the lab and now i get the following error starting the lab (lab start software-review)

Whe i try to reach the url for the errata repo using firefox i get that is "Not Found"

Can you help?

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

Great news @yuriyl ! At this moment, the lab works fine  in a fresh lab environment but does not in an old continuing lab. I have raised the feedback to the course development team about this. It will be corrected soon.

[Travis]

@Chetan_Tiwary_ -

This is an error in how OpenStack provides the images to the VMs. At times on the older courses, the CDN ISO wasn't attaching correctly to the classroom VM. The reason lab resets work is that a new lab environment is created in OpenStack and new disk images get attached to VMs. An older, longer running lab environemt, there is no easy way to "attach" the missing ISO from the classroom VM.

Newer classroom environments are using disk labels and UUIDs for disks which help the order with mounting, but occaisionally if there is an issue when the system boots accessing the storage, the CDN ISO might not be attached to classroom which means there is no repository or metadata available which could cause these failures.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

Thanks for the update @Travis !

[Rolan]

The l in rhel9.3 looks pretty close to a 1 (Red Hat Mono Font?)

[TudorRaduta]

@Rolan it's true that unless the text is large or side by side, most people wouldn’t easily notice the difference, especially in body text or code blocks.

[Andrew]

This is where thinking about what you're doing comes into play - does a 1 make sense, or an l in this use-case? Usually it's pretty obvious - e.g. does it make sense for this repo to be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3 (rhel9.3), or Red Hat Enterprise One 9.3 (rhe19.3), or Red Hat Enterprise 19.3 (rhe19.3)?

Only one of these is logical - plus that one of these terms/phrases/names has been used over and over and over again during this course, whereas the others have not.

I kind of like this "easily confused font" thing, because it helps students think rather than just being typists...of course, when trying to impress the importance of touch typeing skills where VIM comes into play, I wish for imparting a little bit of "just be a typeist". The "all thumbs" technique most students insist on using today, and not knowing the names of characters wears a bit thin.

[Travis]

@Andrew -

Brings up an important point here too ... so I will share a few other tips (slightly adjacent to this issue). Some people generally ask for tips on taking and passing Red Hat Exams. One of the things I always stressed in my deliveries when I was an instructor was to be exact on the solutions provided to exam questions asked.

To that end, I often had trouble on some things like that with usernames/passwords or something else I was told to create. My advice for exams is to be very precise and copy the directory names, user names, passwords, directly from the exam tasks into the terminal or whatever you are using. This accomplishes two (2) things:

1. Eliminates the chance of accidental typos
2. Eliminates interpreting differences between letters and numbers like I, l, 1. Where I did a capital "i", then a lowercase "L", then the number "one", but in this case, the font used the 1 is clear but differences in letters is not.

[Andrew]

Great points.

However, I am very hesitant to teach "copy and paste" early on in a person's Linux learning arc - because thinking about what you're learning is very important. Copy & paste is a great technique for exactly that - being certain you're useing exactly what was prescribed, and it really should be used at every possible juncture...except for when learning the concept and thinking about what you're doing is the important part moreso that being exact; being exact can happen once you understand what you're doing, whereas understanding what you're doing if you're exactly copying/pasting does not follow (as easily, in my estimation/experience).

Thus, I don't typically teach copy/paste in RH124. I do encourage copy/paste (from, e.g. the man pages) for RH134 (commands like those for nmcli are really nice to copy/paste from man page, then edit as-needed, but it's important to be able to generate the as-needed in your own head from the information at-hand, which requires some level of understanding, which I do my best to help you acquire by the time nmcli comes up in RH134).

[Travis]

@Andrew -

I am not advising copy/pasting for the exercises and the course, it was a specific "Exam Only" tip, because sometimes the rendered exam questions I have trouble reading. In your example above, context can give clues for repos and directory names, but if you are told to make a password for a user something for an exam, there is no context because good passwords have upper/lower/number/special characters.

I specifically instructed my students not to copy/paste from books but to type things in and use muscle memory. If they wanted to copy/paste from something use man pages and on-system documentation.

[Andrew]

Concur.