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RHCSA Certification Prep

The Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) is a performance-based exam that tests your ability to perform core system administration skills required in Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments.

Core Competencies​

1. Essential Tools​

  • Access a shell prompt and issue commands with correct syntax.
  • Use grep and regular expressions to analyze text.
  • Access remote systems using SSH.

2. Operate Running Systems​

  • Boot, reboot, and shut down a system normally.
  • Boot systems into different targets manually.
  • Identify CPU/memory intensive processes and kill them.

3. Configure Local Storage​

  • List, create, delete partitions on MBR and GPT disks.
  • Create and remove physical volumes, volume groups, and logical volumes (LVM).

4. Create and Configure File Systems​

  • Create, mount, unmount, and use vfat, ext4, and xfs file systems.
  • Mount and unmount network file systems using NFS.

5. Deploy, Configure, and Maintain Systems​

  • Schedule tasks using at and cron.
  • Start and stop services and configure them to start automatically at boot.
  • Manage local users and groups.

Practical Study Example​

RHCSA is fully practical. You must practice on a live RHEL or AlmaLinux/Rocky Linux system. Task: Create an LVM volume group, logical volume, format it as XFS, and mount it persistently via /etc/fstab.

# Example LVM workflow
pvcreate /dev/sdb1
vgcreate vg_data /dev/sdb1
lvcreate -n lv_app -L 10G vg_data
mkfs.xfs /dev/vg_data/lv_app
echo "/dev/vg_data/lv_app /mnt/app xfs defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
mount -a