New RHCE Exam Objectives (EX294) for RHEL 8

As we all know, RHEL 8 is officially released, and the performance-based Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam (EX294) revised its syllabus for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. To fulfill the need for RHCE Exam Objectives, automation knowledge as organizations pursue digital transformation, updated there exam and certification to match new needs and fill the skills gaps.

While scaling infrastructure efficiently, organizations are turning to Red Hat Ansible automation as a common language to automate across different functions to avoid challenges. To understand more than how to deploy, configure and manage an OS, system administrators need to know how to automate functions and how to make automation itself scalable. And this makes RHCE certification for RHEL 8 more valuable and relevant.

Though the exam is based on RHEL 8, the exam based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is available via on-site and individual exams until August 1, 2020.

Exam Details:

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To become a certified system administrator you have to clear the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam (EX294) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Prerequisites for RHCE Exam (EX294)

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To prepare for RHCE Exam Objectives (EX294), you have to learn and understand the objectives of

• Red Hat System Administration I (RH124),
• Red Hat System Administration II (RH134), and
• Red Hat System Administration III: Linux Automation with Ansible (RH294).

In the below section we will discuss the objectives which help you to clear the RHCE (EX294) examination for RHEL 8.

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) Exam Objectives for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 [EX294]

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As per Red Hat, the RHCE exam (EX294) candidate must familiar with tasks performed by Red Hat Certified System Administrator.

• Understand and use essential tools
• Operate running systems
• Configure local storage
• Create and configure file systems
• Deploy, configure, and maintain systems
• Manage users and groups
• Manage security

Understand core components of Ansible

• Inventories
• Modules
• Variables
• Facts
• Plays
• Playbooks
• Configuration files
• Use provided documentation to look up specific information about Ansible modules and commands

Install and configure an Ansible control node

• Install the required packages
• Create a static host inventory file
• Configuration file creation.
• Create and use static inventories to define groups of hosts
• Manage parallelism

Configure Ansible managed nodes

• Create and distribute SSH keys to managed nodes
• Configure privilege escalation on managed nodes
• Validate a working configuration using ad hoc Ansible commands

Script administration tasks

• Create simple shell scripts
• Making simple shell scripts that run ad hoc Ansible commands

Create Ansible plays and playbooks

• Know how to work with commonly used Ansible modules
• Use variables to retrieve the results of running a command
• Use conditionals to control play execution
• Configure error handling
• Create playbooks to configure systems to a specified state

Use Ansible modules for system administration tasks that work with

• Software packages and repositories
• Services
• Firewall rules
• File systems
• Storage devices
• File content
• Archiving
• Scheduled tasks
• Security
• Users and groups

Work with roles

• Create roles
• Download roles from an Ansible Galaxy and use them

Use advanced Ansible features

• Create and use templates to create customized configuration files
• Use Ansible Vault in playbooks to protect sensitive data

Here we know about the RHCE Exam Objectives (EX294). Now, let’s know about the RHCSA Exam (EX200) Objectives in the below section.

Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) Exam Objectives for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 [EX200]

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Understand and use essential tools

• Access a shell prompt and issue commands with correct syntax
• Use input-output redirection (>, >>, |, 2>, etc.)
• Use grep and regular expressions to analyze text
• Access remote systems using SSH
• Log in and switch users in multiuser targets
• Archive, compress, unpack, and uncompress files using tar, star, gzip, and bzip2
• Create and edit text files
• Create, delete, copy, and move files and directories
• Hard and soft links creation
• List, set, and change standard ugo/rwx permissions
• Locate, read, and use system documentation including man, info, and files in /usr/share/doc

Operate running systems

• Boot, reboot, and shut down a system normally
• Boot systems into different targets manually
• Interrupt the boot process in order to gain access to a system
• Identify CPU/memory intensive processes and kill processes
• Adjust process scheduling
• Manage tuning profiles
• Locate and interpret system log files and journals
• Preserve system journals
• Start, stop, and check the status of network services
• Securely transfer files between systems

Configure local storage

• List, create, delete partitions on MBR and GPT disks
• Create and remove physical volumes
• Assign physical volumes to volume groups
• Create and delete logical volumes
• Configure systems to mount file systems at boot by universally unique ID (UUID) or label
• Add new partitions and logical volumes, and swap to a system non-destructively

Create and configure file systems

• Create, mount, unmount, and use vfat, ext4, and xfs file systems
• Mount and unmount network file systems using NFS
• Extend existing logical volumes
• Create and configure set-GID directories for collaboration
• Configure disk compression
• Manage layered storage
• Diagnose and correct file permission problems

Deploy, configure, and maintain systems

• Schedule tasks using at and cron
• Start and stop services and configure services to start automatically at boot
• Configure systems to boot into a specific target automatically
• Configure time service clients
• Install and update software packages from Red Hat Network, a remote repository, or from the local file system
• Work with package module streams
• Modify the system bootloader

Manage basic networking

• Configure IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
• Configure hostname resolution
• Network services configure to start automatically at boot
• Restrict network access using firewall-cmd/firewall

Manage users and groups

• Create, delete, and modify local user accounts
• Change passwords and adjust password aging for local user accounts
• Create, delete, and modify local groups and group memberships
• Configure superuser access

Manage security

• Configure firewall settings using firewall-cmd/firewall
• Create and use file access control lists
• Configure key-based authentication for SSH
• Set enforcing and permissive modes for SELinux
• List and identify SELinux file and process context
• Restore default file contexts
• Use boolean settings to modify system SELinux settings
• Diagnose and address routine SELinux policy violations

In this article, we have understood the RHCE Exam Objectives and RHCSA Exam Objectives for RHEL 8. Further, we will discuss and learn more about RHEL 8.

Resource: Red Hat Official Website for EX200 and EX294.

Related Questions and Tags:

• RHCSA & RHCE Objectives for RHEL 8
• RHCE8 Syllabus
• RHEL 8 RHCSA Exam Objectives
• RHCSA Exam Objectives