Learn › RHCSA (EX200) › Exam Orientation + Essential Tools
tar - a hands-on Linux lab on a real virtual machine.
The RHCSA essential-tools capstone mission on a real RHEL 10 machine. Archive, link, filter, capture, and lock down, graded on the end state exam-style. Mission mode: no commands shown.
You have finished the Essential Tools module. Now you assemble the field kit on a real RHEL 10 machine, the way the exam works: you are handed objectives, and any method that produces the correct result on disk scores. Nobody watches which keys you press. The grader looks at what you left behind.
Six objectives, one machine. Every one uses a tool you trained: tar to archive, ln for a hard and a soft link, grep to filter a file, redirection to capture a stream, and chmod to set an exact mode.
This is mission mode. No commands are shown. You read the objective, recall the tool, and produce the artifact. Progress checks itself by inspecting the files you create, and a signal is one click away if you get stuck.
One quick rep before the machine boots. The grader for the last objective reads a file's exact permission mode as a number. You have a file demo.txt already set to mode 640. Print just its octal mode.
prompt: student@servera:~$ answer: stat -c %a demo.txt output: 640 hint: stat with the -c format and the %a specifier prints only the octal mode, nothing else: stat -c %a demo.txt
That is the muscle the grader checks: an exact mode, read straight off the file. The mission asks for that same precision six times, each with a different tool.
Boot the machine below and take the console. Six objectives: archive the work tree, give the report a second true name, add a shortcut to it, extract the service accounts, capture a probe with its errors, and lock the report down to an exact mode. No commands shown, progress checks the files you leave behind.
Practice Mission Control: Operation Field Kit in a real Linux terminal at The Linux Camp. Progress is verified automatically as you type commands on the machine.