Red Hat Certified System Administrator better known as RHCSA exam is one of the well-known certification exam in Linux world. I’ve tried to write together notes that I used in my preparation of RHEL 7 RHCSA. Remember that, these are not explanatory notes, but a quick cheat sheet. The post includes links to all exam objectives for the RHCSA exam.
Understand and use essential tools
- Access a shell prompt and issue commands with correct syntax.
- Use input-output redirection (>, >>, |, 2>, etc.)
- Use grep and regular expressions to analyze text.
- Access remote systems using ssh.
- Log in and switch users in multiuser targets.
- 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 targets manually.
- Interrupt the boot process in order 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 and journals.
- Access a virtual machine’s console.
- Start and stop virtual machines.
- Start, stop, and check the status of network services.
- Securely transfer files between systems.
Configure local storage
- List, create, delete partitions on MBR and GPT disks.
- Create and remove physical volumes, assign physical volumes to volume groups, and create and delete logical volumes.
- 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 vfat, ext4 and xfs file systems.
- Mount and unmount CIFS and NFS network file systems.
- Extend existing 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 at and cron.
- Start and stop services and configure services to start automatically at boot.
- Configure systems to boot into a specific target 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 use time services.
- 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 aging for local user accounts.
- Create, delete, and modify local groups and group memberships.
- Configure a system to use an existing authentication service for user and group information.
Manage security
- Configure firewall settings using firewall-config, firewall-cmd, or iptables.
- Configure key-based authentication for SSH.
- 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.