Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Third Day of Red Hat Linux System Administration Course
More heavy duty stuff today. Not new concepts, but the nitty-gritty stuff is new to me. Today, we looked at the following in detail:

• Red Hat's Package Manager (used for installing/uninstalling programs and program updates)
• Using the lilo and grub boot loaders
• Understanding and configuring Kickstart
• Kernel services and configuration
• Software RAID configuration and creating Logical Volumes

I had a pretty tough day with the labs, mainly because I was thrown trying to remember how a few Linux commands -- particularly fdisk -- were supposed to work. A lot of other people were similarly struggling with the labs -- a lot of people ended up working pretty much straight through lunch trying to tackle some of the problems in them. I am glad that our instructor ended up going over that particular lab, if only because there are no solutions given to any of these (unlike in the previous class) so even if you think you've got something right, you have no objective way of checking. It's for reasons like this that I am pretty much convinced I can write a better guide (i.e. an RHCT book) than Red Hat has done with their handout material. Will have to make a pitch to my editor about that idea. I note that there are lots of RHCE books out there, but I haven't even seen a hint of an RHCT book becoming available as yet, and given the number of people in this class who are clearly interested in getting "just enough" information about Red Hat instead of going for a full-blown RHCE, there would be demand for it.

The labs today undermined my confidence about my ability to tackle the exam on Friday. I called Red Hat training when I got back home and looked into getting it deferred. There is a semi-hefty fee for rescheduling the exam. According to our instructor, much of tomorrow is labs, doing troubleshooting in prep for the exam, and since the deferral fee would be the same if I cancelled it tomorrow instead of today, I figure I see how good I feel after tomorrow's class before deciding.

The instructor has given us a number of broad hints as to what to expect with the exam. The first part is having to fix a faulty install of Red Hat Linux containing 4 mistakes we have to track down and take care of, and he's hinted strongly that we should bone up on the grub loader section as well as what it takes to make a DHCP connection to the main server in the class to direct a network re-install. And while the exam is "closed book", as it turns out there are full docs available on the local exam server, so as long as we can figure out how to access that server, we are allowed to read and use the docs as we see fit.