Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) - Exam EX200 Course

Hello, and welcome to VTC's course on the Red Hat Certified System Administrator Exam. My name is Kenny Armstrong. In this course, we will cover the highlights of what you will need to know for the RHCSA exam. If you are new to Linux, I would recommend that you take a look at some of VTC's other Linux training courses. This course assumes that you have an ample amount of experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, or Scientific Linux. The RHCSA exam itself is designed for seasoned Red Hat Linux administrators. With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat has replaced the Red Hat Certified Technician certification with the RHCSA certification. The new RHCSA certification better reflects the skills that are needed by modern Red Hat Linux system administrators. All of the content in this course is derived from the Exam Objectives, as outlined by Red Hat. You can find them at this page here. I would suggest that you look over this page so that you will have a good understanding of what is expected of your skills as an RHCSA candidate. The video series, itself, will be modeled after the course outlined for the Red Hat System Administration II course, RH134, available at this page here. We will be concentrating on using Command Line Tools. The reason for this is that you might not always have a graphical environment available to work with. Also, administrators who are comfortable with the Command Line, can complete tasks quicker than clicking through a GUI application. We will, however, demonstrate the use of graphical tools, but they will not be the focus of this course. The RHCSA exam is a performance-based exam, which means that it is completely hands-on. The exam is performed on a live system. No books or outside notes are permitted. I highly recommend that you practice as much as you can. You will have about three hours to complete your exam objectives, so the more you practice, the better equipped you will be to pass the exam. If you plan to continue on and attempt the RHCE exam, you will need to know all these skills required for the RHCSA, as well as those required for an RHCE to pass that exam. This is a Red Hat exam, so you must practice on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6-based system. Attempting to study with another distribution of Linux will not help you a whole lot, since Red Hat has standardized on particular system directories and tools that other distributions do not include. You can obtain a copy of RHEL 6 by either purchasing install media, or by requesting a 30 day trial copy from Red Hat. You can still use the 30-day trial installation after your trial period is up, however, you will not be able to receive any new updates, or install anymore software from the official Red Hat repositories. The next option is that you can use one of the rebuild distributions, such as Scientific Linux or CentOS. The rebuilds have their own benefits in that they are virtually identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the Red Hat trademarks, such as logos. I, myself, used a rebuild for the bulk of my study for the Red Hat exams. The organizations that create these rebuilds are using the source RPM's that Red Hat provides for public download at their FTP site. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is built on Open Source Code, and in keeping with the Open Source tradition, Red Hat provides these Source RPM's for anyone to download and build on their own. Scientific Linux and CentOS utilize these RPM files to construct their distributions that contain the same directory structure and tools that are available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So, feel free to follow along with this course and practice your skills with these distributions as you prepare for the RHCSA exam. More information about the rebuilds can be found at www.centos.org and also at www.scientificlinux.org.