RHCSA certification: preparation and delivery experience
I recently completed 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 lineup, and I decided that the story about preparing and passing this exam would be useful for Habrasoobshchestvo (I did not find detailed stories about this on Habré). Immediately, I’ll make a reservation that before you start the exam, you sign a document that prohibits disclosing information about what was in the exam, but it is not forbidden to tell you what was in the official preparation course for this exam, which I will do.
I leave out the question why to get this certification, I personally passed it because
RedHat recommends that system administrators with 1 to 3 years of experience working with Linux take this exam, and I would say that this requirement is true. Moreover, even with this experience, you may have to learn something new from those topics that are rarely used in real life, but are included in the list of topics for the exam (for example, SELinux, ACL, password-protected sections). This list of topics should be carefully reviewed and evaluated, how many of them you know well, how many not so much, but what do you 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 pass 2 exams at once - RHCSA and RHCE. To understand what to donate, RedHat offers online testing of your skills with further recommendations on what courses / certifications you should enroll. However, it should be understood that both this exam and the above tests are specific for RedHat, respectively, the questions for the RedHat teams are used there, and for example, if you know the zypper package manager at SuSE well, you may not answer the questions about the yum package manager at RedHat.
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According to my personal feelings, knowledge of the RHCSA level is sufficient to make the basic configuration of the new machine in the existing infrastructure of the enterprise and connect to the necessary services (but not raise services on its own). Those. for example, at the training they will not tell how to raise an LDAP or NFS server, but they will tell you how to connect to already existing LDAP and NFS servers from a client machine, set up a firewall, add users, install the necessary packages. Knowledge of the level of RHCE already allow you to raise services yourself.
The exam takes 2.5 hours, and this is not a test, where you have 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 the literature, but you can use all the information stored in the system, i.e. read man \ info \ help by 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 for the exam.
After the exam, your machine is rebooted and run a script that collects the results, which are then sent to RedHat for testing. The result comes in the mail within 3 working days, I came that evening. Only total points are 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 everything else correctly. Or if you did not turn on the autostart service at startup, it will not rise, and all tasks associated with this service will not be reckoned.
Another important point is that it doesn’t matter how exactly you do what they want from you (from the command line, via a graphical interface, using a custom method), it’s important that in the end everything works. Virtually any Linux configuration can be done in several different ways and commands, do as you can, as you like.
Preparation depends on your budget, if the budget allows (or the employer incurs expenses), it is best to go through one of the official RedHat trainings. If you have little or no experience with Linux, then this is Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) + Red Hat System Administration II training with RHCSA Exam (RH135). If you have experience administering Linux, then this is RHCSA Rapid Track Course (RH200) training. Each course takes 5 days, the first 4 days of training, on the 5th day of the exam, while you can until the end of the 4th day, if you realize that you can not pass, transfer the date of the exam for the future. The cost of the course in the US is about $ 3-3.5 thousand, including the exam, the cost of the exam is $ 400 separately. In Russia in the company Softline, a similar course costs about 45,000 r.
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 lead the courses, respectively, they know what to pay attention to. But even with the passage of the official course, I would recommend in advance to read about all the topics from the above list, and to have an idea about them.
If there is not enough budget for the course, I recommend preparing for one of the books, for example, Red Hat Linux Certification Study (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. In these books there are approximate options for exams that will help to make a general idea. Also a good source of knowledge is the official RedHat documentation , 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 done. 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 preparing books for you is too boring, try putting something like a Centos Minimal on your work machine with a minimum set of packages for a workable system without a graphical interface, and bring it to convenience (raise the grid, connect the 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 about SELinux and just laughed well.
In general, if you administer Linux at 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 the real system, you will not have problems with obtaining certification. If you know Linux only at the home desktop level, then 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-training.
I leave out the question why to get this certification, I personally passed it because
- my employer gave me the opportunity
- When monitoring vacancies in my specialty, I often find that official certification will be an advantage,
- Well, for your own ChSV of course.
Who is this exam for
RedHat recommends that system administrators with 1 to 3 years of experience working with Linux take this exam, and I would say that this requirement is true. Moreover, even with this experience, you may have to learn something new from those topics that are rarely used in real life, but are included in the list of topics for the exam (for example, SELinux, ACL, password-protected sections). This list of topics should be carefully reviewed and evaluated, how many of them you know well, how many not so much, but what do you 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 pass 2 exams at once - RHCSA and RHCE. To understand what to donate, RedHat offers online testing of your skills with further recommendations on what courses / certifications you should enroll. However, it should be understood that both this exam and the above tests are specific for RedHat, respectively, the questions for the RedHat teams are used there, and for example, if you know the zypper package manager at SuSE well, you may not answer the questions about the yum package manager at RedHat.
')
According to my personal feelings, knowledge of the RHCSA level is sufficient to make the basic configuration of the new machine in the existing infrastructure of the enterprise and connect to the necessary services (but not raise services on its own). Those. for example, at the training they will not tell how to raise an LDAP or NFS server, but they will tell you how to connect to already existing LDAP and NFS servers from a client machine, set up a firewall, add users, install the necessary packages. Knowledge of the level of RHCE already allow you to raise services yourself.
How is the exam
The exam takes 2.5 hours, and this is not a test, where you have 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 the literature, but you can use all the information stored in the system, i.e. read man \ info \ help by 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 for the exam.
After the exam, your machine is rebooted and run a script that collects the results, which are then sent to RedHat for testing. The result comes in the mail within 3 working days, I came that evening. Only total points are 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 everything else correctly. Or if you did not turn on the autostart service at startup, it will not rise, and all tasks associated with this service will not be reckoned.
Another important point is that it doesn’t matter how exactly you do what they want from you (from the command line, via a graphical interface, using a custom method), it’s important that in the end everything works. Virtually any Linux configuration can be done in several different ways and commands, do as you can, as you like.
How to prepare
Preparation depends on your budget, if the budget allows (or the employer incurs expenses), it is best to go through one of the official RedHat trainings. If you have little or no experience with Linux, then this is Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) + Red Hat System Administration II training with RHCSA Exam (RH135). If you have experience administering Linux, then this is RHCSA Rapid Track Course (RH200) training. Each course takes 5 days, the first 4 days of training, on the 5th day of the exam, while you can until the end of the 4th day, if you realize that you can not pass, transfer the date of the exam for the future. The cost of the course in the US is about $ 3-3.5 thousand, including the exam, the cost of the exam is $ 400 separately. In Russia in the company Softline, a similar course costs about 45,000 r.
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 lead the courses, respectively, they know what to pay attention to. But even with the passage of the official course, I would recommend in advance to read about all the topics from the above list, and to have an idea about them.
If there is not enough budget for the course, I recommend preparing for one of the books, for example, Red Hat Linux Certification Study (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. In these books there are approximate options for exams that will help to make a general idea. Also a good source of knowledge is the official RedHat documentation , 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 done. 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 preparing books for you is too boring, try putting something like a Centos Minimal on your work machine with a minimum set of packages for a workable system without a graphical interface, and bring it to convenience (raise the grid, connect the 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 about SELinux and just laughed well.
Conclusion
In general, if you administer Linux at 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 the real system, you will not have problems with obtaining certification. If you know Linux only at the home desktop level, then 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-training.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/273785/
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