Troubleshooting and System Maintenance

For this sample section, you need a computer that you're willing to dedicate for experimental purposes. Actual troubleshooting questions require the installation of the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, configured with a specific problem. The exam conditions would delete any and all data that you have on that computer. One option is a virtual machine solution such as that provided by VMware; as of this writing, no-cost subscriptions for VMware Server are available at www.vmware.com. I used VMware, using the tips that I describe in "Studying with a Virtual Machine" in the Online Learning Center (http://highered.mhhe.com/sites/0072264543), to write much of this book. Another alternative is Xen, also described in "Studying with a Virtual Machine."

If possible, get a friend, fellow student, or colleague to help set up the exercises for this exam. That's the best way to simulate real-world conditions. As shown in the RHCE Exam Prep guide at www.redhat.com/training/rhce/examprep.html, you may have to boot into different runlevels, solve networking and host name problems, configure the GUI, add partitions of various types, and use standard command line tools to analyze and configure your system. You can use any documentation that you can find on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux computer; however, you're not allowed to reinstall Linux to address these problems.

You can't pass either exam unless you solve all of the RHCT-level troubleshooting problems within the first hour. On the other hand, you need to budget your time judiciously; if you can't solve one RHCE-level problem, you may want to give up and move on to the next problem. But you may not be able to go back. You may be able to debug the next problem in just a few minutes, but even if you have time left over at the end of the section, you may not be able to go back to skipped problems and will not get any credit for the problems that you have abandoned.

These are not actual questions, but exercises consistent with the guidelines in the Red Hat Exam Prep guide. As exercises, they have no answers per se; however, they include a lot of information that can help you as a Linux administrator. However, I've set them up in a format that can allow someone else to set up exercises similar to what I'm guessing you might see on the Red Hat exams.

Even for these exercises, do not use a production computer. Some or all of these exercises are designed to make Linux unbootable. If you're unable to recover from the steps documented in these exercises, you may need to reinstall Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Saving any data that you have on your computer at that point may not be possible.