The weekend I continued on my RHCA Journey with my RHCE studies by covering chapters on configuring email transmission with RHEL. The bigger chapter went over providing remote block storage with iSCSI. Both topics are fairly new to me as it is not something I’ve had to deal with much in the past. Both are topics though that interest me and I want to know more about.
The email chapter was fairly basic, just covering relaying local messages from the system to a mail system, nothing like setting up a full-blown mail server. The full mail server is something I have wanted to do for a while, just to see how it all works. I have done so with an Exchange server in the past, however, my email server is now hosted by Rackspace. I would love to set up my own mail server and host my own email, as I do with my website. I have read that this is not a recommended thing to do, for security issues and such. I think I’ll still try it one day, as the process sounds challenging and fun.
The biggest chapter which I went over today actually was on iSCSI. I’ve done it myself a few times in the past, but I still haven’t wrapped my head around it all just yet. I feel I need to read over this chapter a few more times and use my other sources as well to see how they explain it. A while back I set up an iSCSI target on a Synology NAS, so it was interesting to see it in a non-lab type setup. I think that helped me understand it a bit better. What I just need to do is read over the material a few more times to understand why I’m doing what I am doing, and then just practice setting it up a few times until I get it into my memory better.
At this point, I have gone through half of the training material for the RHCE. I should be able to finish in the next week and then start reviewing the areas I’ve determined to be weak points for me and going over the labs a number of times. I will then have a better idea on when I’ll schedule the RHCE exam.
Tomorrow I will begin a chapter on File-based storage with NFS and SMB, so that should be exciting and a good review. Be sure to check back again tomorrow for more information on how that goes.
Cheers,
Ivan Windon – RHCSA
