My experience with the RHCSA and RHCE exams

Hello, blog!



I recently passed the RHCSA exam and the RHCE exam. I wanted to pen down my thoughts here.

RHCSA exam

This was a re-certification since I had given the exam the first time on Jan 30, 2022.

I believe the best resource for this is the Sander Van Vugt's RHCSA book [1].

A good trick to finding this book for free is to go to your local library and see if they have it or if they provide a subscription to O'Reilly online learning. I've gotten access to the latter through my University and through one of my employers as well.

My advice would be to really understand what you're doing and to not memorize any of the commands. In my opinion; there have been many smart people involved in creating the Linux operating system and lots of thought been put into every component.

If you feel like you want to learn more about why the operating system works the way it does, I recommend the Operating System Concepts book [2]. However, this goes into a level of depth that is not required for the RHCSA.

I found the containers part of the exam a bit challenging. I work a lot with Docker and needing to learn about buildah and podman tools for the exam took a bit of deliberate practice.

RHCE exam

The RHCE exam was far more challenging for me and I failed my first attempt. I think this is the first IT certification exam that I failed. Fortunately, the exam has a free retake which otherwise would have been a pretty expensive failure (~705CA$).

For my first attempt; I gave the exam from home and had issues with my setup. I was using a 4K monitor and the font size at native scaling (100%) was really hard to read so I scaled everything up to 150%. I'm not sure if it's this or just my exam environment; there was a second or 2 lag between my inputs and the motion on the screen. For the RHCE exam; it's vital to use the documentation and the 'ansible-doc'. Thus this lag made the exam extra challenging!

Time is of the essence for this exam. You will need practice to write playbooks in short time. Hands-on practice is ineluctable for this exam. Sander Van Vugt's course for RHCE is excellent as well and there's a free book available from Red Hat [3].

I would recommend getting lots of hands-on practice and solving every problem from [4] at least a couple of times to understand the solutions. One of the advices I would give for the exam is to make sure you setup your vim for yaml; it can be done as follows:

$ vi ~/.vimrc


syntax on

set bg=dark

autocmd FileType yaml setlocal ai et ts=2 sw=2 cuc cul

1. `syntax on` - Enables syntax highlighting.

  • Vim will color keywords, strings, comments, etc., based on the filetype.

2. `set bg=dark`

  • This helps Vim choose a color scheme optimized for dark terminals (higher contrast).

3. `autocmd FileType yaml setlocal ai et ts=2 sw=2 cuc cul`

This line sets buffer-local options whenever you open a YAML file:

`ai` (autoindent) → automatically indents new lines to match the previous line.

`et` (expandtab) → replaces tabs with spaces.

`ts=2` (tabstop) → a Tab character is displayed as 2 spaces wide.

`sw=2` (shiftwidth) → indentation levels (when you press `>>` or autoindent) use 2 spaces.

`cuc` (cursorcolumn) → highlights the column of the cursor.

`cul` (cursorline) → highlights the line of the cursor.

Together, these enforce YAML-friendly indentation (2 spaces, no tabs) and give visual aids (line + column highlighting) to avoid indentation errors, which are common in YAML.


Resources

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Red-Hat-RHCSA-Cert-Guide/dp/0138096279

[2] https://a.co/d/d5Miesu

[3] https://developers.redhat.com/e-books/ansible-study-guide

[4] https://www.tekco.net/?page_id=3549

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