Published: 9/8/2026

Practice environment: Red Hat labs + local Vagrant lab

Pipeline RH024 → RH104 → RH124 → RH134 → Book → RH199 → EX200; official labs and Vagrant.

Goal

Make it clear where I practice and which phase of the EX200 plan I’m in:

RHCSA path on ROL: RH024 (video) completed; RH104 Fundamentals v9.1 in progress.
Earned base courses: RH124 and RH134 (Credly badges).
Current reinforcement: Red Hat RHCSA 9 Cert Guide (Van Vugt, Ch. 7 permissions) + RH199 Rapid Track v10.0.
Official labs on ROL/LMS and local lab VirtualBox/Vagrant (2 VMs) for SSH/networking.

Study pipeline

RH024 → RH104 → RH124 → RH134 → Book → RH199 → EX200 (target) → EX294 (RHCE path)

Pre-exam practice target: ~Oct 30, 2026 (~73-day plan; day ~20/73).

Courses and resources

Resource	Status	Role in my path
RH024 — Getting Started (video)	Completed (Sep 8)	RHCSA path prerequisite on ROL
RH104 — Linux Fundamentals (v9.1)	In progress (10/56)	Fundamentals + GNOME labs via VNC
RH124 — Red Hat System Administration I (v10.0)	Completed	Foundation: users, permissions, storage, bash
RH134 — Red Hat System Administration II (v10.0)	Completed	LVM, firewall, SELinux, boot, containers
Red Hat RHCSA 9 Cert Guide (Sander van Vugt)	In progress (335/1593 p.)	Now Ch. 7 Permissions / ACL
RH199 — RHCSA Rapid Track (v10.0)	In progress (10/154 p.)	Accelerated review on ROL

Usual access:

LMS portal — sessions and labs with an active account.
ROL catalog — chapter material and labs.

Local Vagrant lab (Rocky Linux 9)

To practice when I don’t have the Red Hat lab open, I keep a base lab in the repo: labs/rhcsa-base/Vagrantfile. It brings up two Rocky Linux 9 VMs (RHEL 9 compatible), ideal for networking, SSH, remote cron, firewalld, and similar scenarios.

VM	Hostname	Private IP	Resources
`server`	`server.lab.local`	`192.168.56.10`	1 vCPU / 1024 MB
`client`	`client.lab.local`	`192.168.56.11`	1 vCPU / 1024 MB

Environment features:

Box: rockylinux/9, VirtualBox provider.
Host-only private network with fixed IPs (simpler and more repeatable than DHCP for practice).
Timezone America/Montevideo (UTC-3), so logs, cron and journal times match my real setup.
Idempotent provisioning: dnf update + admin tooling (vim-enhanced, bash-completion, man-pages, bind-utils, net-tools, iproute, policycoreutils-python-utils, setools-console, chrony, rsync, etc.) and /etc/hosts entries to resolve server and client by name.

Quick usage from labs/rhcsa-base/:

vagrant up            # create/start server and client
vagrant ssh server    # log into the server
vagrant ssh client    # log into the client
vagrant halt          # power off the VMs
vagrant destroy -f    # wipe the lab and start fresh

Local Vagrant artifacts (.vagrant/, *.log, *.box) are in .gitignore, so they are not versioned.

How I work each session

Open the chapter on ROL (RH199, rh134-10.0/pages/...) or advance in the Van Vugt book.
Use the environment assigned by the course, or bring up the local lab with vagrant up, depending on what I need to repeat.
Capture commands and notes in the following modules on this blog.
If the official lab expires or the course window renews, I keep practicing in the local lab without depending on Red Hat.

What I avoid

I don’t mark an exercise as done until I’ve actually run it in a real lab (official or local).
I don’t use the local lab to skip the course material: it’s a complement for repetition and experimentation.

Outcome

Practice aligned with official RHEL labs, reinforcement with RH104 + book + RH199 toward EX200, plus a local lab (Vagrant/VirtualBox, 2 VMs) for SSH/networking and review.