@RBahra -
The course materials do a wonderful job covering all the skills you need for the exam and more. One thing that is crucial to keep in mind however, the course is not a "study guide' or a "how to pass the exam" or an "exam prep session". The courses for the EX200 (RHCSA exam) are the System Administration 1 and System Administration 2 courses. These cover a large range of topics and objectives and present all material and learning that are listed on the exam objectives. The courses also have additional topics and objectives that may/may not be on the exam. One of the best ways to study or prepare for an exam is to locate the exam objectives from the exam pages on redhat.com and map those objectives to topics, chapters, guided exercises, and end of chapter labs in the course.
Once you've done that, you should follow the content to the best of your ability, check references, check man pages and other on-system documentation so you can understand what you are doing and gain muscle memory. Finally, I would suggest doing the hands-on multiple times to where you aren't looking at book/course content and going through the scenarios seeing where you could possibly save time and completing the task more quickly. The thing making Red Hat exams challenging is not only do you need to know what you are doing and complete the objectives correctly, you must do so within a certain time constraint, so sometimes people will go on a tangent or get stuck on a question/task/objective, when it would be best to move on and revisit.
I would also suggest seeing what happens if you do something incorrectly or wrong. When following our prescribed steps, it is always great when we go down the happy path and things work, but if a mistake is made ... how do you recover. You don't want to try to figure that out the first time when you are taking a timed exam. It is better to understand some of the error messages ahead of time and how to fix them. Some examples could be SELinux (how to troubleshoot errors), services not having access to files (think HTTPD or something).
Man pages and system documentation can be your friend when it comes to copy/paste/tweak/execute. Find examples in the man pages and copy them and tweak them slightly for your use case. It saves time by not needing to type and also can help if you can't quite remember exact syntax or all options. One really cool man page I used to teach and show students was nmcli-examples. It was nothing but examples. I still use that myself if I need to setup network teams and bonds or do some more advanced nmcli commands.
Finally, I would encourage you to think beyond the exercises in the course and try your own things ... for example the guided exercise instructs you to deploy a webserver and have a certain index.html file there. So that is pretty easy and straightforward. However, an exam can test multiple things in a question so we might be combining things ... so try it with a non-standard directories for content (also requires figuring out permissions and SELinux) as well as how to configure Apache for the VHosts and document root. Or maybe non-standard ports, requires knowing how to better use firewalld commands and SELinux to tag and set items properly for non-standard network ports.
In the courses we deliver bite-sized chunks and targetted and specific information, in the exam, we are testing knowledge to see if you understand and can put things together.
Travis Michette, RHCA XIII
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SENIOR TECHNICAL INSTRUCTOR / CERTIFIED INSTRUCTOR AND EXAMINER
Red Hat Certification + Training
