RHCSA & RHCE Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: Training and Exam Preparation Guide (EX200 and EX300), Third Edition (2015)

Appendix A: Sample RHCSA Exam 1

Time Duration: 2.5 hours

Passing Score: 70% (210 out of 300)

Instructions: The RHCSA exam, EX200, is offered electronically on a desktop system running RHEL7. The exam presents a list of tasks that are to be completed within the stipulated time. Firewall and SELinux need to be taken into account. All settings performed on the systems must survive system reboots or you will not be given credits. Access to the Internet, printed material, and electronic devices is prohibited during the exam.

Setup for the Sample Exam:

Install RHEL7 (or its clone) on a physical system called hv1 with hypervisor and desktop/X Window support. Install a virtual machine called rhcsa1 and load minimal RHEL7 without GUI support. Do not configure a hostname and network interface duing rhcsa1 installation. Leave 2GB of disk space free in the system disk.

Instructions:

Instruction 01: Tasks furnished here are in addition to the exercises and labs presented in the RHCSA section of this book. No solutions are provided.

Instruction 02: Do not consult the material in this book or browse the Internet while taking this sample exam. However, you can refer to the online help and the documentation located in the /usr/share/doc directory.

Instruction 03: This exam should be done in a text console using commands or text tools.

Instruction 04: Perform all tasks on rhcsa1 unless otherwise indicated.

Instruction 05: You can reboot the system after completing each task or a few tasks, or wait until all tasks have been finished. Do not forget to retest the configuration after the reboot.

Instruction 06: Use your own judgement for making decisions where necessary.

Tasks:

Task 01: Assuming the root user password is lost for rhcsa1 and your system is running in multiuser target with no current root session open. Boot the system into an appropriate target and change the root user password to root1234.

Task 02: Configure the primary network interface with hostname rhcsa1.example.com (alias rhcsa1), IP address 192.168.0.251/24, gateway 192.168.0.1, and nameserver 192.168.0.1. You may use different IP assignments.

Task 03: Set the default boot target to multiuser.

Task 04: Set SELinux to enforcing mode.

Task 05: Perform a case-insensitive search for the pattern “then” in the /etc/profile file and save the result in the /var/tmp/pattern.txt. Make sure that empty lines are not included.

Task 06: Activate and start firewalld.

Task 07: Set the primary command prompt for user root to display the hostname, username, and current working directory information in that order.

Task 08: Create users barry, harry, larry, mary, and gary with home directories in /home. Set their passwords to Temp123$ and make accounts for mary and barry expire on December 31, 2017. Users larry and gary should have their secondary groups set to group dba (create this group if it does not exist).

Task 09: Create a directory called testdir2 as user mary in her home directory and set default ACLs on it for user barry for read and write access.

Task 10: Set up a FTP yum repository in the /var/ftp/pub/rhel7 directory on hv1, and configure a repo on rhcsa1.

Task 11: Create a logical volume called linuxadm of size equal to 10 LEs in vgtest volume group (create vgtest with PE size 32MB) with mount point /mnt/linuxadm and xfs file system structures. Create a file called linuxadmfile in the mount point. Set the file system to automatically mount at each system reboot.

Task 12: Add a group called linuxadmin and change group membership on /mnt/linuxadm to linuxadmin. Set read/write/execute permissions on /linuxadm for the owner and group members, and no permissions for others.

Task 13: Extend linuxadm file system in vgtest online by 35MB without losing any data.

Task 14: Create a swap partition of size 65MB on an available disk. Use its UUID and ensure it is activated after every system reboot.

Task 15: Create a standard partition of size 60MB on any available disk and format it with ext4 file system structures. Mount the file system on /mnt/stdext persistently using its UUID. Create a file called stdextfile in the mount point.

Task 16: Create a directory /direct01 and apply SELinux contexts for /root on it.

Task 17: Set up a cron job as the root user to search for core files in the /var directory and list them in /var/log/corefiles. This job should run every Monday at 1:20am system time.

Task 18: Use star and gzip to create a compressed archive of the /usr/local directory. Store the archive in /root using any name of your choice.

Task 19: Enable at access for user barry and deny for user gary.

Task 20: Modify the bootloader and set the default autoboot timer value to 2 seconds.

Reboot the system and validate the configuration.