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Last Saturday was my last class.

I was hoping there would be a test or some kind of knowledge check, but it was just us going through the text and doing labs on our own. I’m definitely more knowledgeable than I was when I started, but I can’t say that I’m cert test ready.

On the plus side, WIL meets several times a week and there are people in the group looking for study partners, so I can make some time to join in on that. I’m really enjoying learning Linux. I was thinking about it today and reflecting on when I made a partition for the first time, and it feels like driving a manual car (I do this btw). And, I just like the sense that you have the power to make something happen and you aren’t just pushing a button (or pressing a pedal). Now granted, it’s definitely more complicated than that - and eventually I want to learn how to automate things, but you feel me.

But back to Red Hat.

So, as the end of the class was drawing near, and as I was flipping through my reading materials, I had the feeling that I was missing information. The basics to me were pretty easy (folder navigation, file manipulation, exiting vim), but I could tell there were still swiss cheese holes in some of the concepts that I had read about prior. To combat that, I’ve started using Asciinema to record my terminal as I do labs. The goal is the labs will turn into learning moments, the learning moments will turn into blog posts, and then I’ll reminisce about way back when I was a noob. The current areas that I could use some work in are networking, storage, SELinux. When I find myself in situations like this, if re-reading the text doesn’t do it, I go and learn something more difficult because it may provide better context on how the initial thing I wanted to learn fits in with the grand scheme of things. Since I know all of this is the foundation so that I can eventually automate dozens of servers, I decided to learn Ansible. Here’s a clip of me installing it for the “first” time.

I’m lucky, I should be receiving something in the mail to help me with my homelab. I’ll share a photo or two if I get it.