Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)

The Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) is a certification program offered by Red Hat, Inc., a leading provider of open-source solutions. The RHCSA certification is designed to validate the skills and knowledge of IT professionals in administering Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

To earn the RHCSA certification, candidates must demonstrate proficiency in tasks such as:

Understanding and using essential tools for handling files, directories, command-line environments, and documentation.
Operating running systems, including booting into different run levels, identifying processes, starting and stopping virtual machines, and controlling services.
Configuring local storage using partitions and logical volumes.
Creating and configuring file systems and managing permissions and ACLs.
Deploying, configuring, and maintaining systems, including software installation, package management, and managing system services.
Managing users and groups, including creating, modifying, and deleting user accounts and groups.
Configuring basic networking, including network interfaces and routing tables.
Managing and securing files, including managing SELinux contexts and using SSH for secure communication.
Performing system maintenance tasks, such as updating software packages, installing patches, and managing system logs.
The RHCSA certification is widely recognized in the industry and is a valuable credential for IT professionals seeking roles involving the administration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. It serves as a foundation for more advanced certifications offered by Red Hat, such as the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).

Course Objectives:

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, 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

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
Configure autofs
Extend existing logical volumes
Create and configure set-GID directories for collaboration
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
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
Manage default file permissions
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
Manage SELinux port labels
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
Build a container from a Containerfile
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