Essential tools
Shell fundamentals, redirection and pipes, grep and regular expressions, file transfer, archiving, permissions, and getting real answers out of man pages under time pressure.
EX200 is a performance exam. There are no multiple-choice questions to eliminate and no partial credit for knowing the theory — you are put in front of a system with a list of tasks and a clock. This course is shaped accordingly: you spend the time at a prompt, not in slides.
Organised by Red Hat's own objective domains, so what you study maps onto what you are assessed on.
Shell fundamentals, redirection and pipes, grep and regular expressions, file transfer, archiving, permissions, and getting real answers out of man pages under time pressure.
Simple scripts with conditionals and loops, processing command output, and accepting input — enough to automate the repetitive half of an administrator's day.
Boot, reboot, and target selection, interrupting the boot process to reach a root shell, process management and signals, tuning profiles, and reading journal and log output to find out what actually happened.
Partitioning, physical volumes, volume groups and logical volumes, resizing, creating and mounting file systems, persistent mounts by UUID, swap, and set-GID directories and ACLs.
Scheduling with at and cron, enabling and disabling services at boot, configuring time, updating the kernel safely, and installing and managing packages and repositories.
IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, hostname resolution, static and dynamic configuration that survives a reboot, and configuring firewall rules with firewalld.
Creating and modifying local accounts and groups, password ageing, supplementary group membership, and configuring superuser access.
SELinux enforcing and permissive modes, file contexts and booleans, restoring contexts after a move, and diagnosing a denial from the audit log rather than reflexively disabling SELinux.
Finding and running container images, managing them as an unprivileged user, persistent storage for containers, and running a container as a systemd service that starts at boot.
Where the hours actually go. Each of these is done, not watched.
Performance-based, on a live system. No multiple choice.
Length: Approximately 3 hours
Marking is on the end state of the system, not on how you got there — any method that leaves the machine correct and persistent across a reboot scores. Confirm current length, delivery options, and pricing on Red Hat's own EX200 page before booking.
The best RHCSA training is hands-on and exam-aligned. Nrdyn's RHCSA course (EX200) is taught by working Linux engineers using exam-style labs covering administration, storage, users, services, and SELinux, so you practice the exact tasks the performance exam tests rather than reading about them.
This course is about 40 hours of instruction and labs. Most people spread that over four to six weeks alongside a job, and add practice time on their own system. Prior Linux experience shortens it; coming from Windows administration usually lengthens it.
You need to be comfortable at a command line and able to edit a file in a terminal editor. You do not need prior Red Hat experience or any certification. The course starts from the essential tools domain and builds from there.
Yes. Red Hat requires a current RHCSA to earn the RHCE credential, so RHCSA is the first step for anyone targeting the Ansible-focused EX294 exam.
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