Friday, October 10, 2008

Red Hat Training

The Red Hat Linux training class I took this week wrapped up early on Friday, allowing me to leave and work from home the rest of the day.  I'm currently on the back porch with Rohan, a glass of water (booze will wait for later), and an H. Uppman Vintage Cameroon cigar.  May as well take advantage of a beautiful Fall day, before they're gone.  ;-)

Overall the class -- Guru Labs GL250 Enterprise Linux System Administration was pretty good.  It could have been a bit more organized the first day or two.  E.g., the server in room needed the full Fedora Core 6 repository setup but otherwise it went well.

The exercises in our lab book were geared towards Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Fedora Core 6.  This was my first time working with FC and it seems decent (I am aware that FC9 is the current release).

I'm considering going for RHCT and maybe RHCE certification.  I figure with the current state of the economy the more certs I have the better.  That means I'll need to setup a lab here at the house.  What I may do is rebuild Bagend -- currently sitting sans hard disk -- with additional RAM and a bigger disk than I had in it, loading CentOS 5.2, and installing a couple of different virtual Linux boxes under VirtualBox.  Earlier this week I did setup FC6 in VirtualBox on Rohan but for the purposes of lab exercises more machines would be beneficial.  Since I have limited physical space virtualized servers makes the most sense for me.

Bagend, which I build back in the Fall of 2004, currently has 1 GB of RAM, an AlthonXP at around 2 GHz, and had an 80 GB disk in it.  I have some old IDE disks I could add for additional space but recently, Microcenter advertised a 1 terabyte drive for about $129.  What I'll probably do is put the 80 GB disk back in and leave its XP Pro install alone, then add a large secondary disk and install CentOS on that, so I have a dual boot setup.  Then I'll add another gig or so of RAM and it should be good to go.

2 comments:

Dax said...

Hi Dave,

I'm glad you enjoyed the Guru Labs Linux training class!

The Guru Labs Linux training classes are updated and validated on Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases as well as the Fedora release from which the RHEL release was based off of. That's why the current classes are RHEL5/FC6. When RHEL6 comes out will have a major update of the courseware and most likely it will be based on Fedora 11. We also have courses/courseware that target the SUSE Enterprise releases (and matching OpenSUSE releases) as well.

Normally the classroom server is all setup and fully configured before class starts. We have a classroom setup guide and special RPMs, that the instructor uses to get the classroom setup. Normally it is smooth sailing with no bumps, but there can always be surprises!

We hope you come back for more training. You should check out the Linux Troubleshooting class. We wrote over 20,000 lines of code to create a troubleshooting "menu" interface that lets you select over 120+ problems to deploy onto your student machine and try to solve them. We have a deomo of it on our website.

Take care!

Anonymous said...

Hi Dave -

Great blog. I found it searching for info on the Camp .45 I just purchased. Sounds like we have a lot of the same interests as I am also going for RHCE and a couple Cisco certs.

Re: your plan to build a RHCE lab...what are your plans for playing with RAID partitions and logical volume groups with the virtualbox servers? That's the one area that I am weak in: storage. If the VirtualBox method will work I am all set.

Thanks again!

J