How To Study For RHCSA Effectively

[BrianTheWall]

With a few cups of good java, a cozy corner in a coffee shop and a laptop with RHEL or even Fedora 28 Desktop, you can get underway to becoming comfortable with the RHCSA study material.

I have downloaded the PDFS from NDG Labs and done some online sessions. Does anyone have any feedback on this? How did you find the labs?

Can we get your feedback please?

[AbrahamArellano]

Hi Brian,

Currently, I'm subscribed to the RH199 RHCSA Rapid Track. To be honest is full of practice and I hope is a good guideline for the test.

I was also doing the Linux Academy RHCSA and I can say is hard to reach that good level of material. It is such a good course, unfortunately, it is too expensive right now.

I haven't tried so far with NDG Labs, maybe before my exam, I can take a quick look.

Regards

[AnakinSkywalker]

Hi Brian,

Do you can make your own lab with KVM, VirtualBox or another virtualization tool.

Read the objectives on https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/ex200-red-hat-certified-system-administrator-rhcsa-exam and try execute the tasks. The good tip is practice, practice and practice.

Create snapshots from your virtual machines and retry again, again, again.

Regards.

Erik Silva

[BrianTheWall]

Hi Erik. Thank you for that share of knowledge! I am actually doing this now in a classroom test environment to see how smoothly the VMs run. So far I create labs on physical machines for student practice. Went through the learning curve cold turkey and it has worked well.

Once or twice the two student machines have lost "sight" of the classroom.exampke server for no apparent reason. Do you or anyone have any feedback on that experience?

[dennisk · Accepted solution]

My students like the NDG labs. 

I also recommend that they be able to do a lab without the computer. Take a blank sheet of paper and write down all the steps needed to, say, create a user account or start and enable a service. I think this gives them confidence that they know the topic.

[BrianTheWall]

Dennis, I totally agree with you on this. I remember when I studied web design back in the 90s (dating myself), my teacher at the time insisted on us learning how to do html /css with just a blank notepad file, starting at the top and build a simple static html page with it. This practice allowed me to completely grasp the code mentally. So yes, I will adopt and ask students to do this. Great post.

[Jayadev]

RHCSA tests the fundamentals of linux. We have RH124 and RH134 for beginners and RH199 for people who already know linux. These courses explain the fundamentals of linux in great detail. They also come with guided and lab exercises that help you to realise the concept.

You can use centos or fedora also to try and realise the concepts. 

[BrianTheWall]

Jay,

we use centos and fedora as well. I have students bring in their laptops so I can assist them in configuring it with VMWare Workstation player. Then I show them how to load a virtual machine with 2 Fedora desktops; which we rename to the same names as the NDG Labs. We use Rufus or any other boot disk creator to make bootable installers for those who wish to place the Fedora/Centos on bare metal laptop. It has been working. HOwever do note that some of the NDG labs will not work as stated outside of the Redhat server environment. When this happens  we just modify those labs accordingly.

[BrianTheWall]

Now that RHEL8 is out, has anyone played with it yet in a lab environment? I have not downloaded it as yet. We use Gilmore. But I am still playing with RHEL7 and getting ready to dive into Openshift/Kubernetes mindset by this Fall 2020. Should be a good challenge. Anyone else have something to share?

[Tracy_Baker]

I wrote my own test questions. To do this, I looked up the objectives (here) and wrote a task for it.

For example, for "Archive, compress, unpack, and uncompress files using tar, star, gzip, and bzip2" I made this:

Create a tarball named my_etc_tarball in the ~/etc-backup directory that includes the entire /etc directory structure, which is to be compressed using gzip. Once done, extract the tarball into the /opt directory, making certain that the /opt/etc directory gets created.

And, yes, I did this for every single objective. By doing so, I had to understand how to write the question that meets the objective, which means I understood that the objective meant . . . and how to "answer" it.