RHCE

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) EX300 Study Guide

If you’re studying towards RHCE, then you may find this page useful.

Our configuration was tested on RHEL 7.0 and RHEL 7.1, some notes for the newest at the time of writing RHEL 7.2, have also been added, were available. There is a link to a sample exam available at the bottom of the page.

I also recommend you checking out the following blogs: CertDepot and RootUsers. They contain a great deal of information that can be helpful preparing for the RHCE exam.

RHCE exam candidates should be able to accomplish the following without assistance.

System Configuration and Management

  1. Use network teaming or bonding to configure aggregated network links between two Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems
  2. Configure IPv6 addresses and perform basic IPv6 troubleshooting
  3. Route IP traffic and create static routes
  4. Use firewalld and associated mechanisms such as rich rules, zones and custom rules, to implement packet filtering and configure network address translation (NAT)
  5. Use /proc/sys and sysctl to modify and set kernel runtime parameters
  6. Configure a system to authenticate using Kerberos (sssd, nslcd)
  7. Configure a system as either an iSCSI target or initiator that persistently mounts an iSCSI target
  8. Produce and deliver reports on system utilisation (processor, memory, disk, and network)
  9. Use shell scripting to automate system maintenance tasks

Network Services

Network services are an important subset of the exam objectives. RHCE candidates should be capable of meeting the following objectives for each of the network services listed below:

  1. Install the packages needed to provide the service
  2. Configure SELinux to support the service
  3. Use SELinux port labeling to allow services to use non-standard ports
  4. Configure the service to start when the system is booted
  5. Configure the service for basic operation
  6. Configure host-based and user-based security for the service

HTTP/HTTPS

  1. Configure a virtual host
  2. Configure access restrictions on directories
  3. Deploy a basic CGI application
  4. Configure group-managed content
  5. Configure TLS security

DNS

  1. Configure a caching-only name server
  2. Troubleshoot DNS client issues

NFS

  1. Provide network shares to specific clients
  2. Provide network shares suitable for group collaboration
  3. Use Kerberos to control access to NFS network shares

SMB

  1. Provide network shares to specific clients
  2. Provide network shares suitable for group collaboration

SMTP

  1. Configure a system to forward all email to a central mail server

SSH

  1. Configure key-based authentication
  2. Configure additional options described in documentation

NTP

  1. Synchronise time using other NTP peers

Database services

  1. Install and configure MariaDB
  2. Backup and restore a database
  3. Create a simple database schema
  4. Perform simple SQL queries against a database

Other RHCE Related Topics

FreeIPA Server on RHEL 7
Configure Remote Logging on RHEL 7
Software Bridge on Top of a Teamed Device on RHEL 7

RHCE Sample Exam for RHEL 7

I’ve created a sample exam, it’s available here.

My Exam Experience

You can read about it here.

Red Hat Certs Slack Community

You may find the Slack channel helpful.

181 thoughts on “RHCE”

  1. Thanks Tomas for this great effort. I have followed your RHCE tutorials and successfully passed ex300 exam.

    Reply

  2. Thanks bro, i passed my RHCE, you were right the test is not hard at all. now i can go on with RHCA. jaja thanks again.

    Reply

  3. Hi guys,
    I have a question:
    I took the RHCE exam a couple of days a go and failed with ZERO points. [THIS PART HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO NDA]
    I am so sad, disappointed … but, I have hope to future. I have plan to retake the exam soon. So, please let me know where was my problem.
    BTW, I am aware of non-disclosure agreement. And I respect to that. I just ask a friendly help to figure out where was my weakness.

    Thanks,

    Reply

  4. Hi Tomas,

    If you think so, I appreciated it if you remove my post.
    Thank you and sorry for making trouble to you.

    Thanks,

    Reply

  5. Thanks for this awesome blog Tomas.
    Although i was well prepared for the exam objectives, I wasn’t prepared enough to finish my exam on the given time :(
    Do you know RHCE 7 retake policy? I can’t seem to find it on google or on Red Hat website.

    Reply

  6. Hello Tomas,
    Thank you for sharing experience.

    Is it enough using CentOS7 to prepare exam EX200 or I have to use RHEL7?
    I’m going to use Sander van Vugt Cert guide.

    Reply

    • It should be OK to use CentOS7 since it’s built from Red Hat sources. I however used RHEL 7 for my studies, it’s free of charge without support, therefore no real difference whether you download CentOS 7 or RHEL 7.

  7. I just wanna say, this is the best resource I found on the web for RHCE exam. Thanks to Tomas, I aced mine. Took me 2 weeks, maybe more to complete your sample exam, it was awesome! Thanks man, you’re the real deal.

    Reply

  8. Passed RHCE!!!
    Thanks Tomas, Certdepot, Jarrod and IT fountain (Youtube channel) for putting up awesome content about RHCE. Although I had Linux Academy website subscription I wasn’t much impressed with their contents so I used these free resources as my main sources to prepare for RHCE.
    Thanks Again, Keep up the great work! :)

    Reply

  10. Sorry I wanted to leave valuable post, but I was honored with “403 Forbidden Jutsu” error message. My post contained an url pointing to RedHat. Breaking the url did not help.

    Reply

    • Hi, the comment has been caught by mod_security as potential spam. You can always leave a comment without putting any hyperlink in it.

  11. Hello Tomas, Just wanted to post a quick thank you for your content and labs, these helped me pass RHCE recently :)

    Reply

  12. Hello Tomas,

    I am preparing for rhce, which version of linux should i expect during the exam. ??
    Also,
    Are there any documentation pages available for Shell scripting during the exam ?
    or is there any way we can take help for shelll scripting while we attempt the paper ?
    How many total number of questions will we have to attempt during rhce exam ?

    Reply

    • You should expect any RHEL 7 point release, however, I think it’s safe to assume that the exam may not be ready for the latest version just yet.

      During the exam you have access to all documentation that comes with RHEL, therefore your best bet is the man page for bash $ man bash.

      The number of questions may vary, I cannot tell you how many questions you will get when you sit the exam I’m afraid.

  13. I know exam will be on 7.xx version.
    if you can tell 7.1 or 7.2 or 7.x ,, that will be help full

    Reply

    • I don’t have such information I’m afraid, but you can ask Red Hat and they will be able to supply you with the version that’s currently used in the exam.

    • I just confirmed from Redhat about exam version. It will be 7.0.

      Are there any known issues in 7.0 with teaming . ??
      when i setup up teaming it gives strange error on virtual box
      rtnetlink answers file exist

    • So it’s still on RHEL 7.0, that is good to know, thanks for sharing.

      I’m not aware of any teaming issues on RHEL 7.0 I’m afraid.

  14. Thanks Tomas,

    is there any way to copy/paste the data while in multi-user mode ??
    e.g.
    # blkid
    /dev/sr0: UUID=”2017-09-06-10-53-42-00″ LABEL=”CentOS 7 x86_64″ TYPE=”iso9660″ PTTYPE=”dos”
    /dev/sda1: UUID=”9862ac88-7696-4a41-9155-9cb58c67e6e6″ TYPE=”xfs”
    /dev/sda2: UUID=”FO2sMY-IiEp-plRc-xMaL-lOqB-a9xE-2bKe5e” TYPE=”LVM2_member”
    /dev/mapper/centos-root: UUID=”b4d76f23-1e71-4f07-b355-dbf0d4116f48″ TYPE=”xfs”
    /dev/mapper/centos-swap: UUID=”62f7ad39-cb17-4533-8af3-20751e2ab687″ TYPE=”swap”

    I simply want to copy UUID=”b4d76f23-1e71-4f07-b355-dbf0d4116f48″ and use it in /etc/fstab .

    Reply

  16. normally linux with gui starts in graphical.target
    linux with minimal start in multi-user.target.

    Once linux is installed with minimal , how does this copy/paste thing works.
    thanks for explanation, as i faced this issue during rhca exam and had to write manually the required data.

    Reply

    • This has little to do with targets to be honest but more with xterm. When you get networking configured, use SSH with multiple xterm windows (I had one for journalctl, one for audit.log and one to solve exam tasks). As mentioned previously, you can copy/paste in xterm without problems. This approach saved me a lot of time during the exams.

    • Hi Tomas, would please write how to use ssh with multiple xterm window. Please define what’s xterm and how we can use many at the same time to save time. Thanks in advance.

  17. Thanks Tomas,

    This approach will save lots of mine time during exam and others who are going to appear for rhce/rhcsa exams.

    Reply

  18. Tomas-

    Very Good content. Are you going to create any more study guides for other RedHat exams. I am done with RHCE and looking for similar blogs online for other RHCA Exams but unable to find much. Any other websites you can recommend?

    Reply

    • Thanks, I’m glad that you found the content useful.

      I have no plans to create other Red Hat exam-related study guides I’m afraid. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of my spare time to produce such content, and in my understanding, the amount of people who go for RHCA is significantly smaller compared to RHCE, meaning that less people would benefit from a guide, where effort required to create one would be more or less the same.

      I looked for similar blogs online myself, but couldn’t find much except for a handful of topic-related articles. I think it is safe to say that the majority of RHCA level exams cover advanced material for a specific topic (e.g. hybrid cloud storage) which don’t attract as much attention as lower level exams (RHCSA and RHCE).

  20. Hello Tomas,

    I am contantly getting this error with centos 7.0.
    When I restart
    #systemctl restart network

    logs :
    RTNETLINK answers: File exists

    I have searched the net . but could not find any thing use full so far.

    may be your expertise can solve this error.

    Reply

  21. this errors appears with both protos.
    both with manual and dhcp.

    i did find that post about dhcp client and relink message. but for some reason it did not work here.
    that solution that i try to solve this issue is .
    delete connection and add again .
    some time restart also help.

    This happens so often only with VMs that i make clone .

    What will be the permanent solution for this ?

    Reply

    • Try bootproto as “none” and see if that makes a difference.

      Sadly, this error can be reported for any issue while setting up networking, and it doesn’t really tell you what the actual problem might be.

      If you get this when cloning a VM, then take a look at MAC addresses and try resetting them. It might be a case of configuration files having records of old network adapters when in reality you probably attach the new ones after cloning the VM.

  23. Great work. This was very helpful stuff. like me, many candidates are getting clear the RHCE exam by your Guide. thanks for sharing this informative blog with us.I wish you luck as you continue to follow that passion.

    Reply

  24. I’m making it a point to express my gratitude to you for making this available. I passed the EX300 exam yesterday and it was mainly due to your instructions which helped me setup a lab on my laptop.

    So thank you!

    Reply

  25. I have passed RHCE exam yesterday in my first attempt. Thanks to you and CertDepot especially your sample exam. These two sites are really helpful (in addition to Sander video course). Exam was not very difficult but very long and I taken whole 3.5 hours to complete without having much time to recheck. I completed RHCSA exam in just 1 hour and 25min with full marks but this one taken full time plus I lost 30 points but got the certificate in the end.

    Thanks again

    Reply

  26. Hello Tomas,
    Do you know which CentoOS7 version and release is used on the the exam:
    7.4
    7.3 (1611)
    7.2 (1511)
    7.1 (1503)
    7.0 (1406)
    To many slight differences between them:(
    Thx

    Reply

  27. Hi Tomas,

    Is it compulsory to learn firewalld for RHCSA/RHCE or iptables alone can be used for configuring the firewall?

    Thanks in advance.

    Reply

    • RHCE objectives clearly state that you have to know how to use firewalld and associated mechanisms such as rich rules, zones and custom rules, to implement packet filtering and configure network address translation (NAT).

  30. Hi Tomas,

    I know you’ve recommended taking exams through qa.com if one is in UK in the past. However, they don’t seem to offer “exam-only” anymore.
    You also recommend doing only classroom based exams and not koisk. However, since the next date after 26th Jan is in March, i might have to go via kiosk as i need to take the RHCE is Feb. Tried every city in uk on red hat website. No classroom tests in Feb anywhere! Wow!

    Reply

    • A quick check at their website shows that they still do (e.g. EX200 or EX300 exam-only), or at least the listings are still there, however, there seems to be no option to do that online, and you have to phone them up. If you didn’t do so, I’d suggest you give them a call.

  31. G’day from down-under (Australia).

    Just wanted to say thanks for your efforts. I used it heavily in my studies. Your sample exam is invaluable and the structure allowed me to vary/extend it to ensure I was able to cover variations of the objectives.

    Passed Exam today – 24/01/2018.

    For your info:
    – Kiosk Based
    – RHEL 7.0

    Reply

  32. Great blog, it’s helped me a lot.

    I’d like to share with all of you my bad experience with Kiosk exams and discourage doing Redhat exams with it.

    I’ve been RHCE for the last 3 years and it was time for my renewal. Due to lack of available dates, I had to take the exam in the Kiosk mode.

    My problems started during the exam. Once I had all the questions completed, I rebooted both VMs and my surprise was that one of the VMs didn’t boot, and showed a blank screen and didn’t even reach the BIOS or the grub. I was pretty sure I didn’t mess with the boot (I’ve a lot of experience with Redhat systems) but as I had enough time I reinstalled the server and started over. When I completed the questions again the issue reproduced and I failed my exam (with zero explanations from Redhat even I complained).

    I accepted my failure and tested again. Redhat provided more details in the new exam and I was reported 21/23 items correct and still didn’t pass o_O.

    When I asked Redhat for explanations, they argued that one of the VMs needed intervention to boot and for that I lost some items (just enough to not pass? Seriously?).

    Indeed, the same VM of the first exam had the same issues at boot. When I reboot the VM from within the OS (I’m old fashioned know, but I use the “reboot” command), the VM won’t boot and a blank screen showed up again.

    If I powered off the VM and start up, it starts fine with no errors of any type (WTF?).

    I reported it to Redhat but still have no possitive repsonse and due to this I have lost my certification (expired yesterday).

    I wanted to share my really bad experience with you and warn you that Redhat Kiosk exams are shit, specially the support from the training team, they always blame you.

    Edu.

    Reply

    • Thank you very much for sharing your experience, and I’m sorry to hear that you had problems with the Kiosk-based exam.

    • I have a question to see if anyone can help me out, as I saw a weird behavior in samba in my home labs. I reported to Redhat as I believe it may be a bug in RHEL 7.0 but they didn’t agree.

      Once I configured the samba shares and mounted them with the multiuser option and checked everything was working fine, after rebooting the servers I notice the new logins into the shares where denied.

      In journald I saw this error message:
      nslcd[XXXX]: [3f1dc7] request denied by validnames option

      It sounds weird, as nslcd is the daemon responsible for the LDAP and Kerberos authentication, and samba users are local.

      Has anyone hit something similar? I tried to resolve it with no luck and after a while it started working again.

      Thank you very much.
      Edu.

    • Hi, after several emails with Redhat, they have apologized and renewed my certification.
      There really was something wrong with the environment in my exam.
      Regards,
      Edu.

  33. Hi Tomas,
    Thanks for this valuable site. I took the RHCE test and waiting results. My System 2 went in maintenance mode due to iscsi mount and couldn’t reboot. I tried to go single user mode, unfortunately, I was not able to fix before the time end. Everything was done correctly for first part of the question and I was able to discover the share, able to login, format the disk and mount it for second part as well. At the end I entered following in fstab and mount -a was not complying and I was able to see the mounted disk. df -h was showing correct. But after reboot the system went in maintenance mode. I did mkfs.ext4 /dev/….which was 100% correct. I only forgot logout the session before the reboot. Is that the cause I had the problem? I showed that issue with proctor and she said they will not grade the all tasks that I did on second machine and really worry .Please suggest to me where I did mistake? Any suggestion is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
    I copied UUID and put correctly as following:
    UUID=”B89F6d89-986c-4dae-a553-6a9ccc5caf8b2″ /iscsi /ext4 _netdev 0 0

    Reply

    • Hi Ryan, I’m glad that you found the site useful.

      Looking and the fstab line that you’ve posted, it should’ve been “ext4” and not “/ext4”.

    • Thanks for your respond.Sorry,I mistakenly entered /ext4 here not in the test. It was not the case.I’m 100% I did not enter /ext4. Please advice me other possible solutions.Thanks again.

    • I’m sure, I didn’t make any mistakes in the fstab file even though there is typo in above post but some how,I forgot the session logout before the the reboot and guessing that was the big disaster.Please advice me.Thanks!

    • I never encountered such issue during my studies I’m afraid, therefore not sure what to advise. Perhaps trying to replicate the problem could help?

  34. Tomas,It’s wounder full website to prepare Redhat Exams and thanks for this.Please guide me where I missed for the following scenarios:
    1)Network Teaming:I have 2 virtual machines and trying to build teaming on both machines but I’m having same issues on both machines.I did as follows:
    ip link (shows 3 network cards)
    #nmcli dev status
    #nmcli connection add type team con-name team0 ifname
    team0 config ‘{“runner”: {“name”: “activebackup”}}’
    # nmcli connection add type team-slave con-name slave1
    ifname eth1 master team0
    #nmcli connection add type team-slave con-name slave2
    ifname eth2 master team0
    # nmcli connection modify team0 ipv4.method manual
    ipv4.addresses “given address/24” connection.autoconnect yes
    # nmcli connection up team0
    error:connection activation failed.
    #nmcli con up slave1 : connection activation failed: master connection not found
    # #nmcli con up slave2 : connection activation failed: master connection not found
    # teamdctl team0 state
    Error: device team0 doesn’t cxit
    #cd /etc/sysconfig/network-script/
    #ls : ifcfg-team0 is there
    I can not ping and can not make fail over. Please advice me.Thanks.

    Reply

  35. I really appreciated your quick respond and I’m getting following output with nmcli d :Looks, not connected even though I was able to add the slave1 and slave2 on the team0. Also, nmcli con show is showing team0 and all slaves.
    DEVIVE TYPE STATE CONNECTION
    enp0s3 Ethernet disconnected eth0
    enp0s8 Ethernet disconnected
    enp0s9 Loopbackup Unmanaged

    Reply

    • I don’t see the team0 device. That’s why you get the error “device team0 doesn’t exit”. Moreover, you used eth0 and eth1 when creating slaves, but I don’t see them either.

    • Thanks, Tomas!!!.Firstly,I deleted team0, slave1 and slave2 then recreated team0 again.Then added 2 slaves on team0 with enp0s8 and enp0s9 after creating them. Now,no issues to up the team0,slave1 and slave2. I’m also able to ping the ip which I assigned on team0. Thanks for your help again!!

  36. Thanks to this site and CertDepot’s I passed the RHCE with 271 points on Friday, which was really an unexpected achievement. It wasn’t easy – the key was practice, practice and more practice. You don’t have much time in the exam so you need to eat, sleep and breathe RHCE in the run up to the exam so when you go in you can immediately do some or even all of the tasks practically with your eyes closed. This gives you some breathing room to fix stuff if you run into issues.

    Reply

  37. Finally, I passed the RHCE exam.I took Kiosk individual exam which was really horrible.Proctor was unfair with me and telling to me not to use shift+ctrl+ and so many other functionalities and everything was confusing.Time to time he or she was disturbing to me and telling my exam was ended.Uff, I asked the reason but he or she said ignore that.Computer was very slow.I did not have hope to pass but I solved the 90% questions.Thanks for this valuable site.

    Reply

  38. Which one of the following methods would you recommend to use during the exam:

    virsh console
    or
    virt-manager

    Reply

  39. Thanks Tomas for your website and your time spend creating it! I took exam twice and your site along with Sander’s book were very valuable resources to finally pass the exam. I would suggest for anyone something you already mentioned, take time to read all tasks carefully and plan ordering things. Spending too much time on one task and not having time for rest is a recipe for failing exam. Entire exam is not that hard but time is more important than anything else. Don’t try to things in the best way they can be done just do them as quickly as possible. I don’t like personally using nmcli or authconfig-tui but setting up network interfaces or kerberos is way faster with these tools.

    Reply

  40. Thanks Tomas,

    I have passed RHCE today
    score: 261
    I have attempted the paper via KIOSK . Exam version is still 7.0 (Pakistan).

    Exam Experience.
    Exam was fairly easy. not as tough as I expected. But couple of tricky questions , that might have reduced my score. I finished the exam in 3:00 hrs. with 30 minutes to spare for rechecking.

    KIOSK exams are hard to attempt in this sense that you will not be answered any questions from the online examiner.Only read the instructions and make your own plane.

    For all those who are going to attempt RHCE. Just one suggestion .
    Tomas has made a great site . This site covers each and every aspect that you can encounter during the exam or even more. You need to check each and every topic carefully.

    I have followed lisenet , certdepot, Redhat official book for this course and youtube off course.

    Many Thanks Lisenet

    Reply

    • Thank you for your feedback Muhammad. Congratulations on passing the exam, and welcome to the RHCE family!

      I did put a lot of effort into writing the RHCE article series, therefore if you read and learn all the topics listed on this website, you should be in a strong position of passing the exam.

  42. Hi Tomas

    I really appreciate the effort you put in creating your site. It helped me to pass RHCE on friday the 1st of June 2018.

    Thank you

    Nathie

    Reply

  43. Thanks Tomas,
    I use your site, GitHub RHCE_notes_v2.4.pdf and Sander Van Vugt book to pass the exam last Friday. For learning lab I use virtualbox and vagrant to build my VMs using the FreeIPA guide you provided. You have done an excellent job here.

    Thanks.

    Reply

  44. Tried today, but failed unfortunate. The irritating thing though is that I read through the objectives and thought “yes”. But I did not have enough time. Exam still on version 7.0.

    Still I would recommend your site – it has been very helpful.

    Reply

    • I would recommend on taking the RHCE exam only if you can do the sample exam (the one that’s available on this website) in less than 2,5 hours. If it takes you more than that to complete it, then you may run out of time during the real exam.

  45. Hello Tomas, thanks for this amazing site. Anyway, can you please tell me why didn’t you cover some of the objectives? For example:

    Route IP traffic and create static routes
    Use shell scripting to automate system maintenance tasks

    Configure SELinux to support the service
    Use SELinux port labeling to allow services to use non-standard ports
    Configure the service to start when the system is booted
    Configure the service for basic operation

    Please correct me if I missed something. Thanks

    Reply

    • Hi, thanks for your feedback!

      To answer your question, all of these topics are covered throughout the RHCE series, with one exception of shell scripting.

      Shell scripting is an ambiguous term in my opinion, and it is simply not possible to cover it in one blog post. The Bash man page alone has over 3600 lines.

      Having said that, there are several articles on this website that cover scripting (not RHCE related though), feel free to take a look at this one, this one or this one. These are all Bash scripts I wrote some time ago, you might find them helpful!

  46. Hi Tomas,
    I just have gone through rhce exam and unfortunately due to no reboot till end i have failed the exam.keeping in mind NDA i would like to ask few general questions regarding RHEL if someone reply it will be great help.
    Q=1 i have seen many videos for link aggregation through teaming some people are mentioning gateway and some donnot mention ipv4.gateway which one is right as i can ping in both cases. ?
    Q=2 i have read that in shell scripting the script should end with .sh but again even in shell script some are mention .sh and some are not but if i execute the script in end it gives the result so which way is better.
    Q=3 In HTTP i configured all in conf.d virtual hosting part not in httpd.conf default and have not rebooted the system will this effect that after reboot no http elinks will work.
    Q=4 in KVM virtual machines how can i copy form one terminal to other as ctr+shift+v is not working.

    Reply

    • Hi, to answer your questions, see below.

      Q1. This depends on what you are asked to do during the exam. If you need routing, then you need a gateway. If you don’t need routing, then you don’t need a gateway.
      Q2. A shell script file does not have to end with .sh, but it should start with a shebang and has to be executable.
      Q3. Apache configuration can be put in several places. System reboot is irrelevant in this case, everything should work.
      Q4. Use xterm.

      Good luck with your exam!

  47. Hi,
    First of all thank you for your very good tutorials.
    I plan to do RHCE from redhat 7 in next 6 months. Do anybody know when they plan to switch exams to redhat 8?

    I am already good in redhat 7, as i know redhat 8 should be released for testing in 1st quart of year.

    Reply

    • There is not date confirmed yet, but this is what happened with RHEL 6 exams.

      RHEL 7.0 was released in June 2014 and you had 9 months (until the end of February 2015) to book and sit an RHCE exam on RHEL 6. There was also an option to buy the exam voucher by that date and take the exam any time within the year.

      This suggests that you can expect to be able to do the RHCE exam on RHEL 7 until at least the end of 2019.

  48. Hello Tomas,

    I was conducting some research on a website for RHCE , lots of people suggested me to read your website.
    Thanks for helping the community . I am currently studying for RHCE , is there a problem if i practice on a server ipa with centos 7.3 or 7.4 while the current exam is on 7.0.? what are the pro and cons of that ?
    Thanks for your prompt answer

    Reply

  49. Thanks for your help. I finally passed RHCE recently and reading your articles and some of the questions/answers was not a waste of time at all.

    Reply

  50. I took RHCE today and passed it. I have to thank you for this material. I used part of this and Sander’s webinars as well. Keep up the good work Tomas!

    Reply

  51. Hello Pros,

    Congratulations!!!
    I am booked on the 15th. Any experience you would like to share?

    thanks

    Reply

  52. Hello,
    To save time. On postfix configuration, if I run through the postfix -e “” on the system1, can I just sftp the main.cf to system2 and restart postfix. Does anyone see a issue with that?

    Thanks

    Reply

    • In short, xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System, so you can install it on any Linux system that has a GUI.

      At the same time if you have a GUI installed on your OS, then some kind of a terminal emulator will be present on the system already. RHEL 7 defaults to Gnome as a GUI environment, therefore you should have gnome-terminal available out of the box. If you went for KDE then you would have konsole. I use XFCE therefore on my machine I have xfce4-terminal.

      To sum it up, xterm is a terminal emulator that you can install on any Linux OS, but you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You can always use whatever terminal emulator comes with a GUI. I hope this clarifies things.

  54. Hello Tomas,

    I am trying to use -R option with useradd command , but it does not seem to work. empty response and also /etc/passwd empty.. no new user is created..

    [root@localhost ~]# useradd -R /tmp/ newuser
    [root@localhost ~]#

    Very limited help with linux man pages. also google seems to be quite with this option.

    #useradd –help .
    -R, –root CHROOT_DIR directory to chroot into

    would you please explain this option and its usage with some example stuff.

    Reply

    • I don’t use chroot for anything but SSH, so not entirelly sure on how you’d use that parameter with useradd, however, if you look at the man page, it says that it would use the CHROOT_DIR directory and would use the configuration files from the CHROOT_DIR directory. This suggests that the command expects to find an existing CHROOT_DIR directory. Have you created one and have you copied all configuraton files into it? I would expect the command to fail if you don’t have the CHROOT_DIR directory configured.

  55. Hello all, I am yet to sit my RHCSA EX200 exam, I will be sitting probably this month. I am hoping to clear this on my first attempt and have put in a lot of work. (Thank you for the valuable content on this site). I am after your opinion – if I clear RHCSA exam and begin studying towards the RHCE on RHEL 7 for the remainder of 2019 (assuming this will retire in the next 8 – 12 months). If I am keeping an eye on the community and say purchase an individual RHCE exam just before it closes – I should get 12 months from that date to sit? If I pass, I would earn RHCE on RHEL7. If I fail, then I would need to sit RHCSA + RHCE on RHEL 8? As you would no longer be able to purchase the RHEL RHCE exam – do I have this correct?

    Reply

  56. Hey, I had this week my rhce exam and I got only „System configuration and management: 5 of 11 items“ and „Network services: 11 of 25 items“. I don‘t know, why I‘m losing in this topics so much points? I hope everyone can help me.

    Regards Manu

    Reply

  57. Hi Tomas,
    I got failed yesterday in RHCE EX300K the main reason was i was not able to attempt all the questions. Please let me know can we ssh the VM’s from Host as i want to do copy paste the information provided in the exam (url’s and commands from man pages) and i was stuck in team question in which if i disconnect eth1 which was active interface the ping got dropped and still eth2 was showing in teamdctl team0 state.

    Reply

    • Sorry to hear that, better luck next time.

      For any exam related questions, please raise them with Red Hat support.

  58. just an idea if you add say source of client system to servers trusted zone all firewall configuration is out of the way, of course not the specific ones.

    same scenario can be achieved with one simple rich rule.

    Reply

    • Yea, that’s expected, and it’s the main idea behind using the trusted zone – all network connections are accepted.

      It’s similar to the block zone where any incoming network connections are rejected.

  59. Thanks for this resource. I used it as the main resource for for my RHCE preparation and passed it yesterday.

    Reply

  61. I recently took the RHCE using kiosk… sucked, soo many issues. I have a question. One of the first issues I saw was that DNS resolution did not work, and the exam did not provide me with a DNS address. I wasted so much time on this issue because so many things depended on a working DNS. I finally was able to guess the DNS address and move forward, but with all the issues with the Exam being a Kiosk and DNS issues I only managed to do a fraction of the test.

    I am wondering, has anyone else had the issue of DNS address not being provided?
    Would setting up a DNS caching server resolve this issue?

    Reply

    • Hi John
      Sorry about the result.
      What do you mean by DNS issues? Was it between the 2x exam guest systems or between the host and the 2x guest systems?

  62. I gave RHCE exam on Saturday and today i got the result. FAILED 203/300. I have no idea how in the blue world i failed the exam. In result description they said

    NFS=0% even though NFS was working properly. I made it persistent so it survives the reboot and it did. still got 0%.

    Same happened with Mariadb. got 25%.

    System configuration and management: 64% The only problem i faced was with Samba so i let it go because of time crunch even the Script was correct.

    This is objective score

    OBJECTIVE: SCORE
    System configuration and management: 64%
    Network services: 68%
    HTTP/HTTPS: 100%
    NFS: 0%
    SMB: 25%
    SMTP: 100%
    SSH: 100%
    Database services: 25%

    I dont know what should i do now. There is no way in this blue world that NFS was not working only needed 7 more marks.

    Reply

    • Did you reboot everything before finishing the exam, and if so, were all services available and working?

      Your score of zero suggests that services did not start after reboot.

  63. Hi Tomas,

    Congrats with becoming an RHCA.
    I’m busy studying for my RHCE, which I should have done years ago… I’ve noticed that some of the links on this page under Network Services take you to wrong pages for instance:
    Configure SELinux to support the service you end up on MariaDb install page.

    Thank you for running such a good site, so far I’m really learning a lot.

    Reply

    • Thanks. The links are correct. The article that you’ve mention does cover SELinux configuration to support the service.

      In fact, all services that are covered on this page contain SELinux configuration required for the exam.

  64. Hi Tomas,

    I took the EX300 exam yesterday and passed with a score of 271.

    Your work here and on the practice exam definitely helped me. I had relied on Sander for most of the material but he doesn’t teach you how to get through everything in the allotted time like your material suggests.

    My advice to anyone preparing to sit EX300:

    Make sure you can get through Tomas’ practice exam in 3:30 or less. I cannot stress this enough. Practice enough times until you can get through it without having to rely on the man pages too much. Ideally, you should finish with enough time (i.e. 40 minutes to an hour) to go back and check your work, and reboot both systems to make sure everything survives.

    Read the questions very carefully, and do not read anything more into what is being asked.

    Do not leave what I call the “heavy hitters” (i.e. anything that requires a mount – NFS, Samba, iSCSI) to last. Do them early and make sure they survive a reboot. Troubleshooting mount problems is the last thing you want to be doing as the clock runs down.

    Don’t get stuck on something you are stuck on. Move on to the next objective and then circle back on anything that was not completed in a reasonable time.

    Again, thanks Tomas for the excellent resources!

    Reply

  65. Hi Tomas,
    I am taking the kiosk exam next week. How many reboots do you suggest throughout the exam?
    1) Configure selinux + teaming at the start;
    2) then for each individually NFS, iSCSI, smb
    Just hoping that the reboot does not take long time each time.
    Comment is appreciated.

    Reply

    • Unfortunately, no. I don’t have plans on taking the new RHCE exam. It’s all about Ansible, if you are looking for a study guide, then any DO407 material should be fine.

  68. Hi Tomas,
    Any thoughts on why samba doesnt mount after reboot. But if Ill do mount -a, it works perfectly, What do i miss here?

    Reply

    • I put _netdev on fstab, so any advise? the server works perfectly, bot h server, mount -a works fine.
      but it jsut doesnt mount right away, This is between two linux server.
      Thanks

    • The _netdev mount option ensures that the mount is delayed until the network is fully available. Systemd is already aware that cifs or nfs filesystems require network before trying to mount them, therefore specifying _netdev is optional.

      Try adding x-systemd.automount option for optimal integration with systemd to ensure that the mount is made faster.

  69. Also, i have the same problem with iscsi, after mount -a, all is well,. then i will reboot them now, same it has _netdev

    then after reboot, the mount point is mounted. I was happy. But when i tried to put some file, it says Input/Ouput error.
    I cant put a file.
    Thanks

    Reply

    • It’s hard to say, might be a problem with networking. You should check the logs to see if there is anything useful.

  70. Just in case, you will forget the line below, is there a docs that represent that value? even justthis value? -V 4.2?
    Thanks

    RPCNFSDARGS=”-V 4.2″

    Reply

    • I think that RPCNFSDARGS parameter is defined in /etc/sysconfig/nfs, therefore you can refer to the config file during the exam.

  71. Tomas, about changing the port of SSH. there’s two choices to do it. But i think 2 is easier and faster than number 1?

    1.a. you need to bind is with semanage po -a -t ssh bal blah
    b. change the port in /etc/ssh/sshd_c -> change it to port 555
    c. firewall-cmd –permanent –zone=work –addsource=172.25.1.0/24
    d. firewall-cmd –permanent –zone=work –add-port=999/tcp

    2. firewall-cmd –permanent –add-rich-rule ‘rule family=ipv4 source address=172.25.1.10/32 forward-port port=555 protocol=tcp toport=22’

    Reply

    • These are two different approaches I think, the first one would indeed change the SSH port, the second one is simply a rich rule (that does not change the default SSH port). If you are asked to change the SSH port, you should follow the first procedure.

  72. understood that is in /etc/sysconfig/nfs, my real question is, this value “-V 4.2”, how can i find that just in case i forgot the value?

    Also, the iscsi is killing me, after 2 reboots, it is mounting . after third reboot., to check the consistency, the disk is not mounting on client, then on the server side, when i ran ls on targetcli, all the config is gone. Why is it like that? i did not do anything. i just reboot the server.
    Thanks

    Reply

    • You can find the version of the NFS server in the docs, I don’t remember which one exactly I’m afraid as I took the RHCE exam several years ago, but I’m sure that 4.2 was the latest version of the NFS server.

      With regards to iSCSI, did you save the target config? Always save the config before you reboot the server.

  73. Okay, after i setup both target and client,
    1. i partition the iscsi disk from target, create partition, vgcreate, lvcreate, mkfs and fstab. all is good.
    2. after series of reboot, the config is missing in targe
    3. but when i type LSBLK in target, i can see the LVM name i created in client.

    Reply

  74. Okay i tried to create the target and client again, it works fine, but after the reboot its still working, why
    i put this in target /etc/lvm/lvm.conf (global_filter = [“r|^/dev/vg0|”]),

    i dont understand why, its not even in the tutorial or any lessons. When I put it back to original, all the target settings is gone. I think this is a bug in redhat.. Please tell me have you encoutnered this.
    Thanks

    Reply

    • What volue group do you use for iSCSI? The filter that you posted would remove the device from scanning. If that device is used by iSCSI, then you should exclude it. LVM filters are described in RHEL 7 manual, section “4.5. Controlling LVM Device Scans with Filters”. I’ve only used them for clustering though.

    • the /dev/vdb, secondary device in target, shared to client, then mkfs.xfs /dev/sda1 from client.

  75. Hi Tomas,
    Once you type exit. it will automatically save. Anyway the only time that this is wroking fine is i need to do something in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf, anyway everytime yuou reboot both client and target, do you need to logout? iscsiadm -u?

    Reply

    • You should not need to log out. At least that’s not something that I usually do.

      I think what is happening in your case after reboot is that the target server loads LVM before iSCSI and takes over LVM volumes. As a result iSCSI cannot use them anymore. One way of solving this problem is to use an LVM filter to exclude iSCSI devices.

    • Hi Tomas, what i did to exclude is via itnernet, im hoping theres soemthing likethat in the docs.

      also, in your tutorial, you mentioned, we should, leqarn how to setup IPA. In the objectives, It did not mentioned any IPA there.

      Do we need to learn IPA? does enrolling clients,server to IPA is even needed? or included in the exam?

    • You’re right, setting an IPA server is not an RHCE exam requirement, however, it’s benefitial to set it up for the exam to learn how kerberised NFS server works as well as how to configure IPA clients. Kerberos server is one of the base stones of an IPA server, therefore it is likely to appear on the exam.

  76. In RHCSA objectives, we need to learn LDAP, is it the same in RHCE?

    #autconfig|grep ldap
    #authconfig|grep krb5

    then

    authconfig –enableldap ldapserver ldapbasedn ldaploadcacert –enablekrb5 –krb5kdc krb5adminserver kr5brealm –emnablessd –ebnablessdauth

    Reply

  77. FYI: The two links above both point to “Kerborized”, the groups method is not linked in correctly?

    – Provide network shares suitable for group collaboration
    – Use Kerberos to control access to NFS network shares

    Reply

    • It’s linked twice because the post covers boths objectives (Kerberos as well as a network share for group collaboration).

  78. I passed my RHCE back in April and was wondering about recertification. Is it necessary to take the RHCE over again in 3 years? I thought I read somewhere that I could take a different exam that would also keep my RHCE cert current. Was looking into taking the Ansible exam.

    Reply

  79. Just wanted to say thanks. I passed my RHCE today and your site was a very large portion of my studying. I appreciate all the work you put in setting this up.

    Reply

  80. Hi Tomas and thanks for the great work.
    We know RHCE will only focus on version 8 objectives after June 2020.
    Please, I just want to know if someone has any information about the future of the actual RHCE 7 Objectives after June 2020.
    Is Redhat planning to create a new certificate with those objectives based on version 8?
    I started studying for RHCE7, but I will attend a training class for 3 months out of the country and It will be difficult for me to focus on it.
    Cheers

    Reply

    • As far as I am aware, the majority of Red Hat exams are moving from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8.

      RHCE for RHEL 8 has already been released with revised objectives, therefore the exam on RHEL 7 is being discontinued. The RHCE exam on RHEL 7 will no longer be available after June 2020.

  81. Hi Tomas,
    I have a little question : do you know the point of each chapter in RHCE7 exam ( ex: nfs :50pt, samba 60pt , … ) :

    System configuration and management, Network services, HTTP/HTTPS, NFS, SMB, SMTP, SSH, Database services.

    Another question: how they count the score of “System configuration and management” ?
    is scripting scored in “System configuration and management” !!

    Thanks.

    Reply

    • That’s a good question! Unfortunatelly, I don’t know the answer. I think that scoring is based on percentage, but not sure about points per chapter.

  82. Hi Tomas,
    Thanks for the study guide that you provided over here, today i had passed the RHCE exam. Thanks again.

    Reply

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