RH302 Practice Questions

To understand the role of a boot loader, take a step back from Linux. When you boot your computer, the BIOS starts by detecting basic hardware, including your hard drives. Once it's done, it looks for the boot loader on the Master Boot Record of the first available disk. If you're working with an older PC, the BIOS can't find your boot loader unless it's located within the first 1,024 cylinders of the hard disk.

Newer BIOSes overcome this problem with Logical Block Addressing, which is also known as LBA mode. LBA mode reads 'logical' values for the cylinder, head, and sector, which allows the BIOS to 'see' a larger disk drive.

If you have multiple hard drives, there is one more caveat. If your drives are IDE hard drives, the /boot directory must be on a hard drive attached to the primary IDE controller. If your drives are all SCSI hard drives, the /boot directory must be located on a hard drive with SCSI ID 0 or ID 1. If you have a mix of hard drives, the /boot directory must be located on either the first IDE drive or a SCSI drive with ID 0. In other words, this is not an issue on the Red Hat exams unless the computer that you're tested on has more than two hard drives. And I believe that's less likely, as that would increase the cost of the exam.

If you are getting the Kernel panic error, it means it is boot loader related problem. Redhat Enterprise Linux uses the GRUB boot loader. You can pass the kernel parameter from the boot loader as well as you can correct the kernel parameter passing from boot loader from GRUB screen at boot time.

GRUB boot loader configuration file is: /etc/grub.conf

And Correct Configuration is:

default=0

timeout=5

splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

hiddenmenu

title Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (2.6.9-5.EL)

root (hd0,0)

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-5.EL ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet

initrd /initrd-2.6.9-5.EL.img

Probably miss-configured the boot loader, so giving this problem. You can pass the correct parameter from GRUB prompt:

Table 3-3:GRUB Editing Commands

Command

Description

b

Boot the currently listed operating system

d

Delete the current line

e

Edit the current line

o

Create an empty line underneath the current line

O

Create an empty line above the current line

If you know all parameters and sequence of the boot loader you can enter in command prompt also.

Press c on GRUB screen.

Grub>root (hd0,0)

grub>kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-5.EL ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet

grub>initrd /initrd-2.6.9-5.EL.img

grub>boot

#vi /etc/resolv.conf

nameserver 172.24.254.254

# dig server1.example.com

#host server1.example.com

DNS is the Domain Name System, which maintains a database that can help your computer translate domain names such as www.redhat.com to IP addresses such as 216.148.218.197. As no individual DNS server is large enough to keep a database for the entire Internet, they can refer requests to other DNS servers.

DNS is based on thenameddaemon, which is built on the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) package developed through the Internet Software Consortium

Users wants to access by name so DNS will interpret the name into ip address. You need to specify the Address if DNS server in each and every client machine. In Redhat Enterprise Linux, you need to specify the DNS server into /etc/resolv.conf file.

After Specifying the DNS server address, you can verify using host, dig and nslookup commands.

We can control the services for current session and for next boot time also. For current Session, we use service servicename start or restart or stop or status. For automatically on next reboot time:

chkconfig servicename on or off

eg: chkconfig nfs on

chkconfig portmap on

or

ntsysv

Select the nfs and portmap services.

Reboot the system and identify whether services are running or not.

Quotas are used to limit a user's or a group of users' ability to consume disk space. This prevents a small group of users from monopolizing disk capacity and potentially interfering with other users or the entire system. Disk quotas are commonly used by ISPs, by Web hosting companies, on FTP sites, and on corporate file servers to ensure continued availability of their systems.

Without quotas, one or more users can upload files on an FTP server to the point of filling a filesystem. Once the affected partition is full, other users are effectively denied upload access to the disk. This is also a reason to mount different filesystem directories on different partitions. For example, if you only had partitions for your root (/) directory and swap space, someone uploading to your computer could fill up all of the space in your root directory (/). Without at least a little free space in the root directory (/), your system could become unstable or even crash.

You have two ways to set quotas for users. You can limit users by inodes or by kilobyte-sized disk blocks. Every Linux file requires an inode. Therefore, you can limit users by the number of files or by absolute space. You can set up different quotas for different filesystems. For example, you can set different quotas for users on the /home and /tmp directories if they are mounted on their own partitions.

Limits on disk blocks restrict the amount of disk space available to a user on your system. Older versions of Red Hat Linux included LinuxConf, which included a graphical tool to configure quotas. As of this writing, Red Hat no longer has a graphical quota configuration tool. Today, you can configure quotas on RHEL only through the command line interface.

1. vi /etc/fstab

/dev/hda11/dataext3defaults,usrquota 1 2

2. Either Reboot the System or remount the partition.

Mount –o remount /dev/hda11 /data

3. touch /data/aquota.user

4. quotacheck –ufm /data

5. quotaon -u /data

6. edquota –u user1 /data

and Specified the Soft limit and hard limit on opened file.

To verify either quota is working or not:

Soft limit specify the limit to generate warnings to users and hard limit can’t cross by the user. Use the quota command or repquota command to monitor the quota information.

Do the following steps as:

1.Verify the File whether Shared or not ? : cat /etc/exports

2.Start the nfs service: service nfs start

3.Start the portmap service: service portmap start

4.Make automatically start the nfs service on next reboot: chkconfig nfs on

5.Make automatically start the portmap service on next reboot: chkconfig portmap on

6.Verify either sharing or not: showmount –e localhost

7.Check that default firewall is running on system ? if running flush the iptables using iptables –F and stop the iptables service.

To automatically mount at boot time we use the /etc/fstab file. Because /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit file reads and mount all file system specified in /etc/fstab. To mount Network Sharing Files also use the /etc/fstab but filesystem is nfs.

vi /etc/fstab

192.168.0.254:/data/commonnfsdefaults0 0

reboot the system.

Do the following steps as:

1.vi /etc/sysconfing/network

NETWORKING=yes

HOSTNAME=station?.example.com

GATEWAY=192.168.0.254

2.service network restart

Or

1.vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0

ONBOOT=yes

BOOTPROTO=static

IPADDR=X.X.X.X

NETMASK=X.X.X.X

GATEWAY=192.168.0.254

2.ifdown eth0

3.ifup eth0

Do the following steps as:

1.Create a partition having size 5 GB and change the syste id ‘8e’.

2.use partprobe command

3.pvcreate /dev/hda9Suppose your partition number is hda9.

4.vgextend test0 /dev/hda9vgextend command add the physical disk on volume group.

5.lvextend –L+5120M /dev/test0/lvtestvolume

6.verify using lvdisplay /dev/test0/lvtestvolume.

Do the following steps as:

1.chmod g+s /storage

2.Verify using: ls -ld /storage

Permission should be like:

drwxrws--- 2 root sysusers 4096 Mar 16 18:08 /storage

If SGID bit is set on directory then who every users creates the files on directory group owner automatically the owner of parent directory.

To set the SGID bit: chmod g+s directory

To Remove the SGID bit: chmod g-s directory

Do the following steps as:

useradd username

passwd username

usermod -e “date”

example: usermod -e “12 Feb 2006” user4

Verify: chage –l user4