Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Administration: Master Linux administration skills and prepare for the RHCSA certification exam

Develop the skill to manage and administer Red Hat Enterprise Linux and get ready to achieve the RHCSA certification

Key Features

• Learn the most common administration and security tasks and manage enterprise Linux infrastructures efficiently
• Assess your knowledge using self-assessment questions based on real-world examples
• Understand how to apply the concepts of core systems administration in the real world

Book Description

Whether in infrastructure or development, as a DevOps or site reliability engineer, Linux skills are now more relevant than ever for any IT job, forming the foundation of understanding the most basic layer of your architecture. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) becoming the most popular choice for enterprises worldwide, achieving the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification will validate your Linux skills to install, configure, and troubleshoot applications and services on RHEL systems.

Complete with easy-to-follow tutorial-style content, self-assessment questions, tips, best practices, and practical exercises with detailed solutions, this book covers essential RHEL commands, user and group management, software management, networking fundamentals, and much more. You'll start by learning how to create an RHEL 8 virtual machine and get to grips with essential Linux commands. You'll then understand how to manage users and groups on an RHEL 8 system, install software packages, and configure your network interfaces and firewall. As you advance, the book will help you explore disk partitioning, LVM configuration, Stratis volumes, disk compression with VDO, and container management with Podman, Buildah, and Skopeo.

By the end of this book, you'll have covered everything included in the RHCSA EX200 certification and be able to use this book as a handy, on-the-job desktop reference guide.

This book and its contents are solely the work of Miguel Pérez Colino, Pablo Iranzo Gómez, and Scott McCarty. The content does not reflect the views of their employer (Red Hat Inc.). This work has no connection to Red Hat, Inc. and is not endorsed or supported by Red Hat, Inc.

What you will learn

• Deploy RHEL 8 in different footprints, from bare metal and virtualized to the cloud
• Manage users and software on local and remote systems at scale
• Discover how to secure a system with SELinux, OpenSCAP, and firewalld
• Gain an overview of storage components with LVM, Stratis, and VDO
• Master remote administration with passwordless SSH and tunnels
• Monitor your systems for resource usage and take actions to fix issues
• Understand the boot process, performance optimizations, and containers

Who this book is for

This book is for IT professionals or students who want to start a career in Linux administration and anyone who wants to take the RHCSA 8 certification exam. Basic knowledge of Linux and familiarity with the Linux command-line is necessary.

Table of Contents

1. Installing RHEL8
2. RHEL8 Advanced Installation Options
3. Basic Commands and Simple Shell Scripts
4. Tools for Regular Operations
5. Securing Systems with Users, Groups, and Permissions
6. Enabling Network Connectivity
7. Adding, Patching, and Managing Software
8. Administering Systems Remotely
9. Securing Network Connectivity with firewalld
10. Keeping Your System Hardened with SELinux
11. System Security Profiles with OpenSCAP
12. Managing Local Storage and Filesystems
13. Flexible Storage Management with LVM
14. Advanced Storage Management with Stratis and VDO
15. Understanding the Boot Process

(N.B. Please use the Look Inside option to see further chapters)

Miguel Pérez Colino is an experienced IT enthusiast with a clear orientation towards open source software and open standards. He has an extensive background in IT, from operations to the architecture of large deployments and from identifying and prototyping solutions to defining IT strategies. He has delivered large projects, including NATO interoperable command and control systems in defense, extensive large deployments in retail (>15,000 devices), and digital transformation in the finance sector.

Now, as part of the Cloud Platforms Business Unit of Red Hat, he works as a senior principal product manager building tools and defining methodologies to ease modernization and migration for customers, enabling the use of open source.

Pablo Iranzo Gómez is a software engineer whose Linux exposure began while studying physics, a period during which he was also involved in LUGs and some projects related to HPC clusters and system administration and consultancy.

Currently, he is a senior software engineer in Red Hat's SolEng department, focusing on OpenShift, with experience in consulting, cloud technical account management, OpenStack software maintenance in industries such as hospitality, retail, airlines, government, telco, 5G, partners, IT covering system administration and automation, virtualization, PaaS, support, the cloud, and so on, having a broad understanding of different views, needs, and risks across the industry.

Pablo was born in and lives in Valencia, Spain with his family.

At Red Hat, Scott McCarty is a principal product manager for the container subsystem team, which enables key product capabilities in OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. His focus areas include container runtimes, tools, and images.

Scott is a social media start-up veteran, an e-commerce old-timer, and a weathered government research technologist, with experience across a variety of companies and organizations, from seven-person start-ups to 15,000-employee technology companies. This has culminated in a unique perspective on open source software development, delivery, and maintenance.