RHCSA certification: training and delivery experience

I recently took the RedHat Rapid Track Course with Exam (RH200) and successfully passed the RedHat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification. This is the initial certification in the RedHat certification line, and I decided that the story about the preparation and passing of this exam would be useful to the Khabrasociety (I did not find detailed stories about this on Khabr). Immediately make a reservation that before the start of the exam you sign a document that prohibits the disclosure of information about what was on the exam, but it is not forbidden to tell what was on the official course of preparation for this exam, which I will do.

I’ll leave outside the question, why get this certification, I personally handed over because
  • my employer gave me this opportunity
  • when monitoring vacancies in my specialty, I often see a note that official certification will be an advantage,
  • Well, for your own FAQ, of course.


Who is this exam for?


RedHat recommends system administrators with 1 to 3 years of experience working with Linux to take this exam, and I would say that this requirement is true. Moreover, even having such experience, in preparation you may have to learn something new from those that are rarely used in real life, but are on the list of topics for the exam (for example, SELinux, ACL, password-protected sections). This list of topics needs to be carefully reviewed and evaluated, how many of them you know well, how many are not very good, and what you generally hear about for the first time.

The next step after RHCSA is RHCE (RedHat Certified Engineer), for which it is already desirable to be a Senior Linux Administrator, in principle, you can try to immediately pass 2 exams - RHCSA and RHCE. To understand what to take, RedHat offers online testing of your skills with further recommendations on which courses / certification you should enroll. However, it should be understood that this exam and the above testing are specific to RedHat, accordingly, questions are asked about RedHat teams, and for example, if you know the zypper package manager in SuSE well, then you may not answer questions about the yum package manager in RedHat.

According to my personal feelings, the knowledge of the RHCSA level is sufficient to make the basic setup of a new machine in the existing infrastructure of the enterprise and connect to the necessary services (but not to raise the services yourself). Those. for example, the training will not tell you how to raise an LDAP or NFS server, but they will tell you how to connect to existing LDAP and NFS servers from the client machine, configure a firewall there, add users, and install the necessary packages. Knowledge of the RHCE level already allows you to raise services yourself.

How is the exam


The exam takes 2.5 hours, and this is not a test where you need to answer questions, but work with a real operating system in which you need to configure / fix something. There is no access to the Internet during the exam, you cannot use literature, but you can use all the help that is in the system, i.e. read man \ info \ help on commands. However, I recommend remembering the syntax \ keys of the main commands in advance, because there may not be enough time to read the documentation on the exam.

After the exam is over, your machine is rebooted and a script is run that collects the results, which are then sent to RedHat for verification. The result arrives in the mail within 3 business days, it came to me that very evening. Only the total score is reported without indicating what you did right and what didn’t.

The important point is that before checking the machine on which you worked, reboot, i.e. all your system settings must survive a reboot. If the system does not boot (for example, an error in / etc / fstab), then you automatically get 0 points, even if you did the rest correctly. Or if you did not enable the service’s auto start at boot, it will not rise, and all tasks associated with this service will not be counted.

Another important point is that no matter how you do what they want from you (from the command line, through the graphical interface, by typing), it is important that in the end everything works. Almost any Linux configuration can be done in several different ways and commands, do as you know how, as it suits you.

How to prepare


Preparation depends on your budget, if the budget allows (or the employer incurs expenses), it is best to take one of the official RedHat trainings. If you have little or no experience with Linux, then these are Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) + Red Hat System Administration II with RHCSA Exam (RH135) trainings. If you have Linux administration experience, then this is the RHCSA Rapid Track Course (RH200) training. Each course lasts 5 days, the first 4 days of training, the exam on the 5th day, and it is possible until the end of the 4th day, if you understand that you can’t pass, postpone the date of the exam for the future. The cost of a course in the United States is about 3-3.5 thousand. $, Including an exam, the cost of an exam separately is $ 400. In Russia, at Softline, a similar course costs about 45,000 rubles.

The advantages of the official course are that there will definitely be exactly those topics that will be on the exam, the same people who take the exam teach the courses, respectively, they know what to look for. But even when taking the official course, I would recommend that you read in advance about all the topics from the above list, and have an idea about them.

If the budget for the course is not enough, I recommend preparing according to one of the books, for example, “RHCSA / RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide (Exams EX200 & EX300), 6th Edition”, Michael Jang, or “Hands-on Guide to the Red Hat Exams : RHCSA and RHCE Cert Guide and Lab Manual ”, Damian Tommasino. These books contain sample exams that will help you get a general idea. The official documentation is also a good source of knowledge.RedHat, primarily the Deployment Guide, and documents about LVM, SELinux, Virtualization.

However, just reading books / documentation is not enough, it is necessary to test all the knowledge gained in practice, i.e. on a real system. In the above books in each chapter there are laboratory work that should be performed. There it is recommended to do everything on a virtual machine with an OS similar to RedHat Enterprise Linux 6, i.e. Centos or Scientific Linux. If book preparation is too boring for you, try installing something like Centos Minimal on your work machine with a minimal set of packages for a working system without a graphical interface, and bring it to convenience (raise the grid, connect repositories, install and configure the necessary packages, etc.).

You can also search for videos with presentations of relevant topics on YouTube, for example, after this video, I got an idea of ​​SELinux and just laughed well.

Conclusion


In general, if you administer Linux in an enterprise where there is central authentication, data storage, network infrastructure and client machines, then, having studied the list of topics for the exam, and having done labs on them on a real system, you will not have problems with getting certification. If you know Linux only at the home desktop level, you will have to learn a little more. Since RedHat offers two weekly courses of 8 hours a day (total 72 hours + exam) for people who are not familiar with Linux at all, you can roughly estimate how many hours you will have to spend on self-preparation.

Also popular now: