RHCSA and RHCE 6 Certifications

RHCSA and RHCE 6 Certifications

This article is an introduction to the series of articles that will be presented on this site covering the Red Hat Certified System Administration (RHCSA EX200) and Red Hat Certified Engineer ( RHCE EX300) certification exams. You need to keep in mind the following notes when reading the associated articles.

• Scope
• Assumptions
• Resources
• RHCSA Objectives
• RHCE Objectives

Scope

I am trying to write a series of articles that cover the exam objectives that make up the RHCSA and RHCE certification exams. I am not trying to teach Linux administration from first principles.

Assumptions

• You’ve read the information on the Certifications section of the Red Hat website, specifically the RHCSA EX200 Objectives and RHCE EX300 Objctives sections.
• You have previous Linux experience. This does not necessarily have to be with Red Hat distributions, but it will help.
• You have access to RHEL 6, or one of its clones. I will be doing most of the work on Oracle Linux 6.x, which is a free binary clone or RHEL 6.x. You can get hold of this from http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux.

Resources

While you are working through the exam objectives, your first stop for information should be the Red Hat Documentation, available for free online. This will not be available during the exams, so get used to using the man and info pages also.

The man pages provide very detailed explanations of specific commands, including all available flags and syntax variations. You should get used to reading them because they will probably be the major source of information during exams. Typically you will just specify the command of interest as a parameter, but some sections with suggest checking the information for a specific section of the documentation. In this case it can be specified using an integer before the command parameter.

# man vmstat
# man 8 vmstat

The info command is an alternative to the man command. Some info entries are similar to the man entries, but others are much more in the style of the HTML documentation, with better examples. If you are struggling to understand the man pages for a particular subject, you should probably try the info entry for the same command.

# info vmstat

You also have the information in the “/usr/share/doc” directory, but its usefulness is very much dependent on the feature you are looking for. Some entries are almost devoid of information. Some give detailed step-by-step usage notes. It is usually the last place I look for information, but worth checking out if you are stuck.

If you need more detail specifically about the exams, I suggest you get hold of a copy of one of the certification guides, such as the one by Michael Jang.

RHCSA Objectives

The following objectives are taken from the RHCSA EX200 Objectives page. Each element links to page on this website that contains the information to fulfil that objective.

Understand and use essential tools

• Access a shell prompt and issue commands with correct syntax. (A nondescript requirement, requires no discussion)
• Use input-output redirection.
• Use grep and regular expressions to analyze text.
• Access remote systems using ssh and VNC.
• Log in and switch users in multiuser runlevels.
• Archive, compress, unpack, and uncompress files using tar, star, gzip, and bzip2.
• Create and edit text files.
• Create, delete, copy, and move files and directories.
• Create hard and soft links.
• List, set, and change standard ugo/rwx permissions.
• Locate, read, and use system documentation including man, info, and files in /usr/share/doc.

Operate running systems

• Boot, reboot, and shut down a system normally.
• Boot systems into different runlevels manually.
• Use single-user mode to gain access to a system.
• Identify CPU/memory intensive processes, adjust process priority with renice, and kill processes.
• Locate and interpret system log files.
• Access a virtual machine’s console.
• Start and stop virtual machines.
• Start, stop, and check the status of network services.

Configure local storage

• List, create, delete, and set partition type for primary, extended, and logical partitions.
• Create and remove physical volumes, assign physical volumes to volume groups, and create and delete logical volumes.
• Create and configure LUKS-encrypted partitions and logical volumes to prompt for password and mount a decrypted file system at boot.
• Configure systems to mount file systems at boot by Universally Unique ID (UUID) or label.
• Add new partitions and logical volumes, and swap to a system non-destructively.

Create and configure file systems

• Create, mount, unmount, and use ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems.
• Mount, unmount, and use LUKS-encrypted file systems.
• Mount and unmount CIFS and NFS network file systems.
• Configure systems to mount ext4, LUKS-encrypted, and network file systems automatically.
• Extend existing unencrypted ext4-formatted logical volumes.
• Create and configure set-GID directories for collaboration.
• Create and manage Access Control Lists (ACLs).
• Diagnose and correct file permission problems.

Deploy, configure, and maintain systems

• Configure networking and hostname resolution statically or dynamically.
• Schedule tasks using cron.
• Configure systems to boot into a specific runlevel automatically.
• Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux automatically using Kickstart.
• Configure a physical machine to host virtual guests.
• Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems as virtual guests.
• Configure systems to launch virtual machines at boot.
• Configure network services to start automatically at boot.
• Configure a system to run a default configuration HTTP server.
• Configure a system to run a default configuration FTP server.
• Install and update software packages from Red Hat Network, a remote repository, or from the local file system.
• Update the kernel package appropriately to ensure a bootable system.
• Modify the system bootloader.

Manage users and groups

• Create, delete, and modify local user accounts.
• Change passwords and adjust password ageing for local user accounts.
• Create, delete, and modify local groups and group memberships.
• Configure a system to use an existing LDAP directory service for user and group information.

Manage security

• Configure firewall settings using system-config-firewall or iptables.
• Set enforcing and permissive modes for SELinux.
• List and identify SELinux file and process context.
• Restore default file contexts.
• Use boolean settings to modify system SELinux settings.
• Diagnose and address routine SELinux policy violations.

RHCE Objectives

System configuration and management

• Route IP traffic and create static routes.
• Use iptables to implement packet filtering and configure network address translation (NAT).
• Use /proc/sys and sysctl to modify and set kernel runtime parameters.
• Configure a system to authenticate using Kerberos.
• Build a simple RPM that packages a single file.
• Configure a system as an iSCSI initiator that persistently mounts an iSCSI target.
• Produce and deliver reports on system utilization (processor, memory, disk, and network).
• Use shell scripting to automate system maintenance tasks. (See also Bash Scripting Tutorial)
• Configure a system to log to a remote system.
• Configure a system to accept logging from a remote system.

Network services

Network services are an important subset of the exam objectives. RHCE candidates should be capable of meeting the following objectives for each of the network services listed below:

• Install the packages needed to provide the service.
• Configure SELinux to support the service.
• Configure the service to start when the system is booted.
• Configure the service for basic operation.
• Configure host-based and user-based security for the service.

HTTP/HTTPS

• Configure a virtual host.
• Configure private directories.
• Deploy a basic CGI application.
• Configure group-managed content.

DNS

• Configure a caching-only name server.
• Configure a caching-only name server to forward DNS queries.
• Note: Candidates are not expected to configure master or slave name servers.

FTP

• Configure anonymous-only download.

NFS

• Provide network shares to specific clients.
• Provide network shares suitable for group collaboration.

SMB

• Provide network shares to specific clients.
• Provide network shares suitable for group collaboration.

SMTP

• Configure a mail transfer agent (MTA) to accept inbound email from other systems.
• Configure an MTA to forward (relay) email through a smart host.

SSH

• Configure key-based authentication.
• Configure additional options described in documentation.

NTP

• Synchronize time using other NTP peers.

For more information see

• Red Hat Certifications
• RHCSA EX200 Objectives
• RHCE EX300 Objctives

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