Learning RHEL, best way to start?

Soon we are going to have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server to run our case management systems.
One of the tasks delegated to me is to sort of become the expert on that system.

I saw that there are several (expensive) training courses and certifications for RHEL but for now just to "mess around" and also to learn what is the best place to start?

My first step is to get a machine up and running with a free version. For this would you recommend going with Fedora or one of the off shoots that use the RHEL source like CentOS, Oracle Linux, and Scientific Linux?

If I can get this stuff to dual boot on my laptop that would be great, if not I can take and old PC from work and see about making something of it.

Outside of getting a working training unit what sort of documentation and learning material would you recommend?

 

I should tag in with what I found today.

I decided to go with Fedora Core for my distro.

For learning I have the training manuals for the first 2 levels of Linux System Administrator and 2 other documents over 150 pages long called Linux Fundamentals and Linux Essentials.
I got a computer up and running at work to be my testbed, no optical drive on it so cant run my live CD, will either have to find a way to do that (prob pull HDD and install on another machine) or run it in a Virtual environment witch comes with the benefit that I can sort of mess around with it in my spare time without switching workstations.

Edit: Using UNetbootin to make my USB into a bootable version of the live CD.

 

Firstly, CentOS and RHEL are identical, so you can't really go wrong with that. Fedora is fine too though.

How should you get started depends on your background, current level of knowledge on the Linux ecosystem, and how complex your future work might be. Any more details?

 

I think any distro will do nowadays. Linux is matured enough. But the best RHEL clone, and the easiest to find free support i.e. "just google it", IMO is CentOS. So I suggest that you switch to CentOS distro.

Fedora Core is really different from RHEL. It has a lot of new stuffs that are not related to RHEL. For example, you won't be able to setup Fedora Core to use RHEL repo, so you won't learn about repo priorities, etc.. Plus Fedora Core has a lot of new stuffs that you cannot install the same software that you will be installing with RHEL, the libraries will be different you'll be forced to install old libraries all the time. Of course that wouldn't necessary be a bad thing, but for starters, and for "learning" RHEL, it's probably best to stick to something similar.

If you want to learn RHEL administration, I suggest you start installing CentOS on a standalone computer with no dual boot etc, just stand alone CentOS, apply all the updates, install proprietary drivers all time (this will teach you how to compile drivers, update kernels - which is really almost automatic nowadays, but that's what's happening in the real world so no worries).

Then start with exercises like installing webserver software, all of them that people usually use, PHP/tomcat/sql server or post-gre, and so on. This will also teach you the inner working of the network settings, routing, DNS etc.

One of the biggest uses of servers nowadays are for HPC use. Usually people in scientific computing use a lot of HPC apps. So start installing software like PBS Torque, free computational software like GAMESS, Gromacs, etc.

That's all I have right now. Maybe someone else can chime in.

 

Cool, thanks for all that detail f4ding.

I have my testbed on Fedora 19 full install not just live. Right now I am just going through and learning all the terminal commands and such as well as the file structure. Doing things like adding printers via IP ETC.

I guess once I have exhausted what I am learning now CentOS will be the next step.

 

Basically FC is the test bed for what will be some day, maybe, going into RHEL. Centos is a direct clone, with slight slower updates. I'd say use both. Centos makes a great testbed for what you have, FC is great for what you will some day have.

 

Drop Fedora, go with CentOS. Every distro has its quirks and it sounds like you have enough on your hands with learning Linux. A good exercise to do is break the boot sequence of the system (for instance, delete the kernel image) and fix it. In contrast to a Windows system almost anything is fixable by booting a broken system with help of a USB key and some standard tools.This way you can even postpone fixing the system to a more convenient time. The things you find out this way will save your one day (it did for me).

 

Meh I am dual booting going to run both.

I ended up needing to redo all my partitions and such to make it work well but still have not quite got the bootloader right.

I ended up wiping my drive (and it was very complicated thanks to lvm partitions that can not be deleted/removed without me using the lvremove command from the terminal (even when running on a live cd)
I ended up installing Fedora first and creating 3 partitions
sda 1 - 20GB /home
sda 2 - 3.5GB /swap
sda 3 - 25GB / (root)
and left about 27GB unallocated

Then I did the CentOS install and its installer was a bit strange but via manual configuration managed to get it to share the /home partition, it automatically used the /swap partition
The confusing part was the bootloader it only let me install it to the root of sda1 or to a new /boot partition it would not let me place it on the new /root created sda4 for CentOS
Also CentOS was calling sda sdb and was calling my usb flash drive that i was running the installer on sda.

But at this point both should be installed and I think that Grub was installed on sda1 and may have overwitted the grub2 bootloader that should be sitting there, but since its grub and grub2 they probably have different folders.

I'll mess with it more in the day tomorrow. As of now it boots directly into CentOS and I just need to figure out wich Grub it is using and find a way to add Fedora to it.

Would have been a bit easier to install them in the reverse order I think.

 

You should only use just 1 bootloader to handle everyone. Make things easier in the long run. (Pretty much ... Don't install additional bootloaders if you already have one)
Not that hard to manually add or have it automatically add entries.

 

Got grub to pop up and let me choose fedora I think I had to hold shift.

I did make a small change to the grub.conf file in CentOS (seems to be the bootloader I am using not the Grub2 that installed with Fedora)

I changed timeout from 5 to 10 and I changed the chain loader setting for Fedora from rootnoverify to simply root.