05/02/2025
I'm really not sure what my plan is with this. I just wanted to try creating a blog to practice my html and css. I don't have a ton to write about at the moment. I've been working on several projects lately. My boss gave me an 8th generation iPad that's locked to a deceased owner, she said if I can wipe it, I can have it. I recently went on vacation and can write a little about that. I've mainly been focusing on getting my RHCSA though and will probably talk about that the most.
I recently took my RHCSA exam and failed. RHCSA stands for Red Hat Certified System Administrator. It's my next step in working towards being a linux administrator. I love working for the local hospital but lately it seems like they want to replace us with vendors and I'd like to be prepared to leave if I have to. Thanks to our good friends (sarcasm intended) Elon Musk and Dictator.. uh *cough cough* President Trump, there's like no fucking jobs! I live in a small town and the only things around for an IT guy are a hospital, a powerplant, and a naval base. Well we can thank the dynamic duo for making it near impossible to find a government job on base and old Musky boy firing half of his twitter staff has left the job market hungry. Not to mention companies turning to AI for any task possible. But I digress.
If I want to be prepared, then I need to get certified in something a little more specialized than an A+. And well, I'm a daily driver of Linux. I've been using it on and off since I fell in love with it at 12 years old and if I had a choice in career path (which I do) I'd choose Linux. So that's what I'm doing. I went with Red Hat because they are one of the more popular enterprise linux distributions among employers. So I went to Udemy and purchased a 14 hour boot camp course on the exam. I got up every morning an hour before work and went through the whole lecture course. I practiced what the course taught in a vm on my other monitor. I switched from Arch to Fedora on my PC so that I could get familiar with DNF and other Red Hat technologies. Most of the concepts in the course were things I was already a little familiar with since I use linux daily. I was feeling pretty confident that I was going to pass. The day came to take it, I logged in and.. well... uh...
I failed the fucking test and I was devestated. I choked. The way the RHCSA works is they give you an iso to flash to a usb stick that contains the test environment. You boot into a Red Hat box that has the test and 2 VMs installed on it. You're given around 20 tasks to do on the VMs within 3 hours. Your changes have to survive a reboot. Both machines had boot issues that were also a part of the test. I took an hour to get into the machines. I choked so bad I forgot how to set a static IP... on devices with NMTUI installed for crying out loud. This left me 2 hours to do the rest of the tasks and I just didn't finish. I needed a 270 to pass and got a 150. I was devestated but...
Here's the deal. I'm too fucking old to let this discourage me. This is what I want to do and I'm going to do it. I don't care if it takes 1 more, 2 more, 10 more times. I am going to pass this test. Now I know what the test is like and I can prepare a little better. I found a great lab tutorial and study guide from aggressiveHiker on Github. This guy deserves a shoutout. If you want to take the test before you take the test, try this guys lab out. I have a free retake and plan to schedule it soon. For now, I'll keep grinding at the studys.
Honestly I don't feel like writing about the other stuff right now. But stick around! I'm happy to say that I'll be updating this blog from time to time. And sorry about the UI but I promise it will get better over time!
Thanks for reading!