Meta-discussion on study flow

[JacobBHartman]

Specific to RHCSA but I imagine this would be relevant to other courses.

I would love to hear from others about their study flow and how it may differ from doing the explicit resources on Linux Academy. I imagine that this would be useful to put into a README. Rather than combining all of our suggestions into one "super suggestion", I'd rather see individualized recommendations.

An individualized recommendation may look like...

Jacob Hartman:

Per lesson section...

• I go through the videos at 1.25x speed (and try my best to follow along in a separate terminal)
• I review the study guide and make a flash card for each and every point. I port these flashcards to an app on my phone callend Anki
• Take the Quiz (duh)
• Do the exercises and labs (duh)

At the end of the entire course and before I take the exam...

• I'll review the practice exam
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTS4vpptZNU
• Google for 'rhcsa practice exams' and make sure they're the latest versions
• Ethan's notes on commands

I do not take notes, written or typed. I'd rather focus my attention interrupted on the video.

[jjcav84]

I have not taken it due to using enterprise linux command line since 2009 but if I were I would focus most of my time on doing an initial setup for a server over and over until I could do it with my eyes closed. The muscle memory is something that I find important.

[rayhsu723]

Linux Academy will get you 90% of the way there. Definitely do the practice exam on Linux Academy; it's a really good representation of what the actual exam environment will look/feel like. Ali's practice exam is pretty much the exam. If you can do all the questions on Ali's practice exam without any problems, you should be 100% good to go. These are the things that I would focus more on:

1. Reset password by interrupting boot process + setting up network configs

• The exam will give you these two questions first (refer to question 1 and 2 on Ali's practice exam). If you can't do these two correctly, the exam won't give you the other questions, which means you automatically fail. Memorize all the necessary steps for resetting password and use nmtui for setting up ip, netmask, and gateway (you could use nmcli but i think nmtui is way easier to use).

2. LVM

• In my opinion, do these tasks first. These are the heavy-hitter questions that make up a significant portion of your score. know how to resize an existing partition, how to create a new partition, and how to make swap space
• (THIS IS WHERE I FAILED) the exam will give you an MBR partition scheme where 3 out of the 4 partitions are already taken. However, the exam will ask you to create a swap space partition and a new logical volume partition. Know how to create an extended partition that will contain multiple logical partitions. If you do this incorrectly, your VM will fail to reboot, and you'll get a fat ZERO.
• don't forget to make everything persistent by mounting in /etc/fstab
• DO A REBOOT AFTER YOU FINISH DOING ALL THE LVM + SWAP SPACE TASKS. Don't be like me. There's no worse feeling than finishing up all the tasks and doing a reboot with only 20 minutes left only to realize that your VM doesn't boot up correctly because you screwed up your MBR partition scheme. I didn't sleep well that night.

3. LDAP + autofs

• Know how to set up LDAP and autofs to automount LDAP users to a specific home directory (they'll give you this) using LDAP credentials. The Linux Academy practice exam does this on the base machine using authconfig-gui. However, you need to be able to do all of this on the VM where you're doing all your work on. I recommend using authconfig-tui and looking up videos outside of Linux Academy to get an idea of how to do all of this. This is the only part of the exam where I think Linux Academy doesn't really do a good job of explaining.

Everything else on the exam is pretty self-explanatory and can be done easily (setting up repos, setting ACLs and permissions, finding files, zipping files, setting up NTP server, changing hostname, etc). Going through the Linux Academy labs and exercises helped me get comfortable with the commands and the different flags. Other than that, you should be good to go. If you got any questions, just ping the rhcsa-studygroup slack channel; we'll happily answer any questions that you got about the exam.

[JacobBHartman]

@rayhsu723 Those are really great tips and I will add them to my own personal study notes

What I'm curious about is how you and others are taking the quizzes and doing the exercises? Do you limit yourself to man pages or nothing at all while taking the quizzes and doing exercises? How do you remember the exact options for any given question after having only gone through the videos once and following along? What are you doing to remember the material?

[alexjjia]

What I'm curious about is how you and others are taking the quizzes and doing the exercises? Do you limit yourself to man pages or nothing at all while taking the quizzes and doing exercises? How do you remember the exact options for any given question after having only gone through the videos once and following along? What are you doing to remember the material?

When I first took the quizzes, I initially tried to do them with no reference material whatsoever, but then moved to using my notes whenever I legitimately forgot or simply did not know how to answer the question. From then on, I would retake the same quiz a few days later, and see if I knew the answers to them without using any notes. Additionally, upon completing all the videos for the course, I went over each and every quiz and lab, to ensure that I knew what the material was about, as well as how to solve the tasks at hand. For remembering the material, especially if you've never exposed to it before, repetition is key, on top of any other methods of memorization that works best for you (I personally remember things better with hands-on exposure / breaking and repairing stuff, but for others, that may differ).