This is the beginning of the final week of the first month of the RedHat study buddy group! How have things gone for you? I hope you’ve stayed on track with your studies, because I sure haven’t!

The last time I posted about this Study Buddy Group, my goals were:

  • Set up a more permanent virtualization environment on some hardware that I’ve reclaimed. I want to set up a bare metal instance of CentOS to use as a KVM host. (I did this! I own a 16GB workstation that has an i7 processor and I was able to get it repurposed with CentOS 6 and started messing with the virtual machine manager.)
  • Get through Chapter 2 of the RHCSA /RHCE book. (I got about half way through. I’ve found it dry and hard to work through. I don’t use kickstarter much and this chapter is rough.)
  • Park on specific topics as desired. I’ll probably do a good night or two camping out with iptables. (I hunted around a little bit, but didn’t camp on any one topic.)

Help Meh!

Straight up, I’m floundering. Between some work projects that are sucking the life out of, the last thing I want to do is spend time gagging on a dry chapter that’s 100 pages long complete with tedious practices. I’m sure I can learn plenty from it and wedge kickstarter based deployments into my current workflows, but I’m just not seeing it’s specific practicality to what I do now.

Share How You’re Doing!

So tell the group how you’re getting on with your studies! How far have you gotten and are you on track for a Red Hat certification before the year ends? I’m questioning my hope for a December 7th exam date now that I’m 5 weeks away from the date. I’m going to try and double down with the study effort this week at night.

Have you found any good study resources for the Red Hat subject matter? Do you need anything to help in your studies? Some VMs? Want to do a Google+ hangout? Tell me all about it in the comments below!

The Week Ahead

I’m going to keep my goals simple and have just two:

  1. Finish chapter two and thoroughly cover the labs
  2. Camp on iptables

I’ve usually just thrashed my way through iptables work but still get syntax snarled up and have to search for the exact rule that I need. I need to park on that topic and get the basics down.

Here’s to trying to order my week to prioritize RedHat study during my late evenings. Feel free to comment at me and nag me to get studying. =)