Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 2

This highly practical instructor led Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 2 training course is designed to give delegates practical experience in the administration of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system. With a strong emphasis on practical hands on training, this course will teach further essential administrative tasks required to successfully administer a Red Hat Linux system.

Targeted to closely follow the official Red Hat certification curriculum, this course together with the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 1 course, will enable the delegate to work towards achieving the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) qualification – which is available until May 2020.

In addition, by attending the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 System Administration – Part 1 & Part 2 courses together with the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 3 : Linux Automation course, these three courses will enable the attendee to work towards achieving the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).

Exercises and examples are used throughout the course to give practical hands-on experience with the techniques covered.

Course Objectives

On completion of this Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 2 course the delegate will have gained practical experience of the Linux commands, the GUI’s and posses the technical knowledge required to perform System Administration tasks.

Who will the Course Benefit?

This Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 2 course is suitable for anyone who has acquired basic administration skills from attending the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 1 course. This will include novice System Administrators, Network administrators, Programmers and other technical IT staff who need to acquire knowledge of the key administration tasks required to administer a Red Hat Linux system.

This course will teach many of the necessary skills to enable the delegate to work towards achieving the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification followed by the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification. The course assumes knowledge of the Red Hat Linux operating system to the level covered in the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 1 course.

Skills Gained

The delegate will learn and acquire skills as follows:

Automate a system install using Kickstart
Search files and output using regular expressions
Use switch user command
Use vim to edit text files
Introduction to Cockpit Web based Management
Scheduling tasks to run automatically at predefined times
Changing the priorities at which process run
Understand and configure Access Control Lists (ACL’s)
Understand and manage SELinux context types etc
Be able to connect to a central LDAP for checking identities
Use the command line to create Partitions, Volume Groups and Logical Volumes and Stratis
Extend and decrease Volume Groups and Logical Volumes using the command line
Extend file systems
Introduction to Virtual Data Optimiser
Access a Network File System (NFS) Server
Configure autofs
Be capable of mounting SMB (cifs) file systems
Managing groups, extended file permissions
Deploy Containers using Red Hat’s new tools Podman and Buildah (these replace Docker)
Troubleshooting
Configure a basic firewall

Prerequisites

The course assumes knowledge of the Red Hat Linux operating system to the level covered in the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 1 course.

Pre-Requisite Courses
Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 1

Examinations

This training course will teach some of the necessary skills to enable the delegate to work towards achieving the official Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) and the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification routes.

This course in conjunction with the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 1 course leads to RHCSA certification and together with the Administering Red Hat Linux 8 – Part 3 : Linux Automation course leads to RHCE certification.

Before taking any exam, ensure you have the recommended experience. The Red Hat website lists all exam requirements and these are updated regularly.

Exams are not included as part of the course.

• Course content

  Day 1

  Course Introduction
  Administration and Course Materials
  Course Structure and Agenda
  Delegate and Trainer Introductions

  Session 1: INTRODUCTION TO VIM

  Introduction to text file editing using vi/vim
  Basic commands
  Copying and moving text
  Search and replace features
  Reading and writing from file
  Exercise

  Session 2: SEARCHING TEXT AND USING REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

  Searching for text in vim
  Regular Expressions
  Using grep to search the contents of text files using regular expressions
  Introduction to using ‘sed’ using regular expressions.
  Exercise

  Session 3: MANAGING PROCESS PRIORITIES

  Use of nice and renice commands
  Foreground and background processing
  Grouping commands
  Exercise

  Day 2

  Session 4: INSTALLING RED HAT LINUX USING KICKSTART

  How Kickstart works
  Sections within a Kickstart configuration file
  Pre and Post Kickstart processing
  Creating a Kickstart file
  Creating the Linux Install Server
  Differing ways of starting a Kickstart installation
  Exercise

  Session 5: SYSTEM ACCESS CONTROLS

  Access Control List (ACL’s)
  Authentication policies and User Private Groups
  Password management using passwd, chage etc
  Managing user profile files
  Extended file permissions including suid,sgid
  Switching to another user
  Connecting to a centralized administration server
  Exercise

  Session 6: ADDING DISKS, PARTITIONS, LVM VOLUMES, FILESYSTEMS & STRATIS

  Creating partitions
  Creating Volume Groups and Logical Volumes
  Creating File Systems
  Stratis Layered Storage
  Exercise

  Day 3

  Session 7: FUTHER MANAGEMENT OF LVM’s

  Extending Volumes and LVM file systems
  LUKS encrypted partitions
  Creating and Managing Swap space
  Extending Stratis Storage
  Exercise

  Session 8: CONFIGURING A BASIC FIREWALL

  Limiting network access through a firewall
  The firewalld program
  Basic configuration using the GUI interface firewall-config
  Exercise

  Session 9: CONFIGURING AND MANAGING SELINUX

  SELinux
  Management of SELinux
  Easy configuration and customisation of SELinux
  Context types
  semanage, getsebool, setsebool and chcon commands
  SELinux log files
  Exercise

  Session 10: ACCESSING REMOTE SYSTEMS (NFS & SMB)

  Configuring client access to an Network Filesystem Server (NFS)
  Providing CIFS access (SMB)
  Configuring autofs
  Configure access from a client to a DNS server
  Exercise

  Day 4

  Session 11: FURTHER SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT

  The Yellow Dog Update, Modifier Tool (YUM)
  Creating YUM and dnf repositories
  Exercise

  Session 12: SCHEDULING FUTURE TASKS

  Using ‘at’ to manage one-off jobs
  Using the cron system
  System crontab files
  Monitoring cron access
  Controlling access to the ‘cron’ and ‘at’ facilities
  Using anacron
  Exercise

  Session 13: DEPLOYING AN FTP AND WEB SERVER

  The Apache Web Servers
  Apache server configuration files
  Apache Configuration Directives
  Basic Server Configuration
  HTTP and SELinux
  The FTP Service using vsftpd
  Anonymous FTP Access
  Exercise

  Session 14: MAINTAINING THE KERNEL

  Loading and removing modules
  Updating the Kernel package
  Using kernel arguments
  Exercise

  Day 5

  Session 15: VIRTUAL DATA OPTIMISER

  Overview of VDO
  Requirements and definitions
  Installing VDO
  Creating VDO volumes
  Monitoring VDO
  Increasing Physical and Logical Volume sizes

  Session 16: DEPLOY CONTAINERS USING THE NEW PODMAN AND BUILDAH

  What is a Linux Container
  What are the advantages of Containers
  Why is Red Hat’s Buildah and Podman replacing Docker
  Building a Container using Buildah
  Running Containers with Podman
  Exercise

  Session 17: TROUBLESHOOTING

  Understanding the boot process
  The Rescue Environment
  Booting into Single User Mode
  Recovery from lost root password
  Exercise