Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) Exam Study Guide

This is an independent, unofficial and free 🤑 guide that provides resources to study and understand each of the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) Exam Objectives (EX200).

This guide is not the single source of truth nor the only resource you should use to prepare for the exam. This guide aims to help those incapable 💰 of investing in top-tier training and, who are willing to compromise themselves into self-teaching 💪 system administration.

Requirements

A computer capable of running Virtual Box or Virtual Machine Manager or VMWare or any other virtualization toolset of your choice.
A Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 image.
- 📌 How to activate your no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription
  (Attention: The free Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription is needed to access many of the resources provided in this guide!)
The ability to create virtual machines and to install RHEL8 using virtualization toolset of preference, as well as, to add more virtual devices into an existent virtual machine (for example: to add a new virtual network card or a new virtual storage device).
- 📌 An overview of installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on a new virtual machine using VirtualBox

“The Golden Rules” (How to Use This Guide)

Read “The Golden Rules” once more before starting any section.
Perform every objective of learning inside an RHEL8 virtual machine. Practicing in VM’s ensures you won’t harm the computer’s main system.
Go thru all links and content, even if it seems duplicated (and repeat if needed)! Content links aren’t there as alternatives, they are there on purpose! Revisiting a topic and using different formats (video/text) helps to understand and fixing the content. RHCSA is a hands-on exam, to get ready for the exam you need to feel comfortable with the content and there’s nothing better than reinforcement.
Identify the subjects that didn’t stick to you and expand the research to learn and make it stick (but keep focused, item 6.). You may email me or DM me on Twitter, I’ll be glad to help.
Ask for Help! Getting stuck for a long time causes frustration, it drains your energy and pace. Ask for help if you get stuck, email me, go to Twitter, help is not often immediate so take a breath, go walk, relax, get back tomorrow if needed.
Be Focused! Do not fall in Rabbit Holes! Tech is vast, read and re-read the objective and focus on achieving what the objective says. Example: do not try to master Bash scripting, it may take you forever! Focus on the requirements only.
Use and get comfortable with man and friends, the RHCSA exam has no access to the internet so you’d be better at knowing how to find help inside the RHEL system.
Create your notes/cheat sheets while studying (solidify/reinforce the content).
Practice and practice, after finishing the content make sure to revisit examples from each objective and practice it again.
Make sure to remember that: “As with all Red Hat performance-based exams, configurations must persist after reboot without intervention." (Note from RHCSA Objectives page.)

Content Organization

There is a separate blog post for each section of the objectives.
Each blog post about a section contains two parts: Resources and Cheatsheet.
In the Resources part, for each exam objective, there is:
- At least one video showing how to achieve it.
- Text material explaining the subject and the objective.
The Cheatsheet part contains some examples of commands related to the objective. It may not contain all the commands needed to perform the exam. It should be used only as a complement to your notes and cheat sheets.
Notes about the Cheatsheet items:
- The descriptions and comments are just quick notes and may not represent the documentation. Always refer to the man pages and online documentation for a proper understanding.
- Some commands may need sudo. The repetitively writing of sudo was avoided (you will be prompted for special permissions if needed).
Following the content order is not a strict requirement, but it will help.
The last blog post is dedicated to present more exercises and exam simulations.

Index of RHCSA Objectives

The following index lists the Red Hat Certified System Administration Exam Objectives as of October 2021.

Each section title is a link to the post dedicated to the section content:

📌 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

📌 CREATE SIMPLE SHELL SCRIPTS

Conditionally execute code (use of: if, test, [], etc.)
Use Looping constructs (for, etc.) to process file, command line input
Process script inputs ($1, $2, etc.)
Processing output of shell commands within a script
Processing shell command exit codes

📌 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 and kill processes
Adjust process scheduling
Manage tuning profiles
Locate and interpret system log files and journals
Preserve system journals
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
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 network file systems using NFS
Extend existing logical volumes
Create and configure set-GID directories for collaboration
Configure disk compression
Manage layered storage
Diagnose and correct file permission problems

📌 DEPLOY, CONFIGURE, AND MAINTAIN SYSTEMS

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
Configure time service clients
Install and update software packages from Red Hat Network, a remote repository, or from the local file system
Work with package module streams
Modify the system bootloader

📌 MANAGE BASIC NETWORKING

Configure IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
Configure hostname resolution
Configure network services to start automatically at boot
Restrict network access using firewall-cmd/firewall

📌 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 superuser access

📌 MANAGE SECURITY

Configure firewall settings using firewall-cmd/firewalld
Create and use file access control lists
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

📌 MANAGE CONTAINERS

Find and retrieve container images from a remote registry
Inspect container images
Perform container management using commands such as podman and skopeo
Perform basic container management such as running, starting, stopping, and listing running containers
Run a service inside a container
Configure a container to start automatically as a systemd service
Attach persistent storage to a container

📌 EXERCICES AND PRACTICE EXAM (To be delivered in feb/2022)

Footnotes:

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