Project exam · Linux and Red Hat (RHCSA to RHCE)
Project exam: RHCSA practice
The brief
A timed, hands-on practice exam in the style of the RHCSA (EX200). You get ten tasks to do on your own VM in two hours: system settings, users and sudo, a shared folder, cron, LVM, persistent mounts, swap, SELinux and the firewall for a web server on a new port, and an archive. For each task you paste the output of a command; no hints or answers are shown until you hand it in.
Why it matters
The real RHCSA is performance-based: you configure live systems against the clock, and a task that does not survive a reboot scores nothing. Practising the same way, with the same kind of tasks, is the best way to find your weak spots before you pay for the exam.
Skills you practise
- hostnamectl and timedatectl
- users, groups, nologin shells
- sudoers
- SGID folders
- cron
- LVM with a set extent size
- ext4 and fstab
- swap on LVM
- SELinux port labels and firewalld
- tar with bzip2
You need
- A RHEL 9 virtual machine (free Red Hat Developer subscription) or Rocky Linux 9 / AlmaLinux 9, freshly installed or reset to a snapshot
- A second empty virtual disk of at least 2 GB attached to the VM
- Working package repositories, and the packages httpd and policycoreutils-python-utils installable
- Two hours without interruptions; reboot the VM once before you hand in, as the real exam does
What you will have at the end
Your exam score (pass at 70%) and notes.txt with the commands you used for each task, to review the tasks you missed.
How it is marked (rubric, 100 points)
| Tasks completedEvery task passes its check after a reboot. | 60 |
|---|---|
| Survives a rebootYou rebooted before handing in, and mounts, swap, httpd and the firewall all came back. | 20 |
| Time managementYou finished within 120 minutes and skipped and returned to any task that blocked you. | 10 |
| Reviewnotes.txt has your commands, and for each missed task you wrote down what went wrong. | 10 |
- 10tasks
- 120 mintime limit
- 70%to pass
Rules: a project exam
- Do each task on your own machine, then paste the command output into its box here.
- Work alone, without notes or a search engine, as in the real exam.
- No hints and no answers. You can run your code, but the checks run only when you hand in.
- Every task is checked automatically when you hand in, or when the time is up.
- You see which tasks passed at the end. You can take it again.