Lab Questions | RCHE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide[c] Exam (Rh302)

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Lab 1

You need to test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 as a replacement for your current RH 7.2 installed Web server. But you do not want to lose the current 7.2 Web setup just yet. You just want to test RHEL 3 using the Web pages and CGI scripts to see if they will work. What can you do? (Note: Fresh installations from Red Hat Linux to RHEL 3 are recommended.)

Answers

Scenario 1: Buy a new disk and add it to the system. Then do a custom install to create a new installation of RHEL 3 to partitions on the new disk, adding an entry to /etc/grub.conf to provide a boot option to both versions of Linux.

Scenario 2: No space on server. Hmm … you've got to get creative and either find a test computer you can do the test install on or back up everything on the main server after taking it off line. Perform a new installation of RHEL 3. Copy your httpd.conf configuration file and see how it works. If it fails, you restore everything back to the way it was. Note: Test your backups first before overwriting an existing operating system.

Lab 2

You want to test the linux rescue option from a boot disk or Installation CD. To make this work, you'll need access to installation media locally (from a CD-ROM or hard disk) or over a network (from an NFS, FTP, or HTTP server). If required, create a boot disk from the bootdisk.img file described earlier in this chapter.

Insert the appropriate installation media (boot floppy or CD) into the drive.
Reboot your computer. If necessary, adjust the boot order in your computer's BIOS menu to boot from the appropriate media.
When you see the first RHEL installation screen, type linux rescue and then press ENTER.
Go through the text mode prompts for language and keyboard.
If you booted from the first installation CD, the following screen allows you to start networking on this system. While it can be helpful, it's not required here. Select No and press ENTER to continue.
1. If you've started with a boot floppy, the next screen is entitled Rescue Method. Select the system (CD, hard disk, NFS, FTP, HTTP) with your installation media. (If you've started with the first RHEL installation CD, skip to step 7.)
Enter the data required to point the RHEL installation program at your installation media. The details vary with the method. For more information, refer to the appropriate sections earlier in this chapter.
You should now see a text mode Rescue screen. Select Continue and press ENTER to continue.
If successful, you'll see a message that 'Your system has been mounted under /mnt/sysimage.' Click OK to continue.
Run several commands to see what the rescue disk has done to your system: df, ls -l /, ls -l /mnt/sysimage. Observe the results.
Run the vi /etc/inittab command. This is a critical file. Observe the results. Why do you think the /etc/inittab file is empty?
Run the chroot /mnt/sysimage command. Run the commands shown in steps 9 and 10. What happened?
If you're feeling adventurous, repeat this process. At step 7, select Skip instead of Continue. What is the difference? Could you mount the partition with the root directory on the /mnt/sysimage directory? Remember, you can find partitions with the fdisk command and create directories with the mkdir command. (You might have to be adventurous during the Red Hat Troubleshooting and System Maintenance exams.)

Answers

This is a useful exercise in using the Linux rescue system. If the problem is relatively minor, the steps shown will create a RAM disk with some essential tools on the root (/) filesystem. You can use these tools to repair damaged filesystems or partitions on your hard disk. The man pages don't work right away, because what is normally your root (/) directory is actually mounted on /mnt/sysimage.

The chroot /mnt/sysimage command makes the /mnt/sysimage directory into your root (/) directory. Everything (such as man pages) should work normally now.

The other option, to skip the mount process during linux rescue setup, does not mount any of your partitions. You can now mount them individually. If you create a /mnt/sysimage directory, you can even mount them in the same way as you saw during the first part of this exercise. Since your partitions are not mounted, you can fix damaged filesystems with commands such as fsck.

Lab 3

You want to practice network installations. To do so, set up an FTP installation server on a different Linux computer using the instructions described earlier in this chapter. These instructions also work if you want to create an FTP installation server on Red Hat Linux 9.

If you don't have another Linux computer, you can set up an FTP server on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP Professional/2003 for this purpose.

For the purpose of this exercise, assume that you've been asked to install a Web server, a DNS server, an FTP server, and a mail server during the RHEL 3 installation process.

Answers

As described earlier in this chapter, the standard Red Hat FTP server is vsFTP; the default location for download files is the /var/ftp/pub directory. You'll want to specify a subdirectory to copy the files from the /RedHat directory from the installation CDs.

As this is a book on RHEL, I do not describe the steps needed to create an alternate FTP server on a Microsoft Windows computer.

To install a Web server, a DNS server, an FTP server, and a mail server during the RHEL 3 installation process, you need to select the DNS Name Server, Web Server, FTP Server, and Mail Server package groups.

Lab 4

You want to practice network installations. To do so, set up an HTTP installation server on a Linux computer using the instructions described earlier in this chapter. These instructions also work if you want to create an HTTP installation server on Red Hat Linux 8 and 9.

If you don't have another Linux computer, you can set up an HTTP server on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP Professional/2003 for this purpose.

For the purpose of this exercise, assume that you've been asked to install a Samba server, a print server, and will need to recompile the kernel.

Answers

As described earlier in this chapter, the standard Red Hat HTTP server is Apache. The default location for download files is the /var/www/html directory. You'll want to specify a subdirectory to copy the files from the /RedHat directory from the installation CDs.

As this is a book on RHEL, I do not describe the steps needed to create an alternate HTTP server on a Microsoft Windows computer.

To install a Samba server, a print server, and the packages associated with recompiling the kernel during the RHEL 3 installation process, you need to select the Windows File Server, Printing Support, and Kernel Development package groups.

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