Certification Summary

This chapter covered the basic boot process of an RHEL system. You learned the basics of the BIOS and what happens when it hands control to the GRUB boot loader. You experimented with GRUB, observing the results of various errors.

Once GRUB boots your system successfully, it hands control to the kernel. You can find out more about what happens through /var/log/dmesg and the drivers it loads. It hands control to the First Process, also known as init, as configured in /etc/inittab. It then starts various services, which you can control with various text or graphical service configuration tools.

The non-network configuration files in the /etc/sysconfig hierarchy affect basic parameters such as the system clock, kernel updates, and the keyboard. There are Red Hat GUI tools available for those who forget how to configure some key configuration files by hand during the Red Hat exams.