The Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) EX200 exam is a performance-based certification that tests your ability to work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in real-world scenarios. Unlike multiple-choice exams, you are given a live system and must complete tasks correctly within a 2.5-hour window. There are no multiple-choice questions — every point is earned by demonstrating hands-on skill.
This free printable RHCSA practice test PDF covers all major exam domains: essential tools, user and group management, file permissions, storage management, system services, and networking. Use it to self-assess your readiness and identify gaps before exam day.
You must be comfortable navigating the filesystem and manipulating files using command-line tools. Key utilities include grep for pattern searching, sed for stream editing, awk for text processing, and find for locating files by name, type, size, or modification time. File management operations — copying, moving, creating archives with tar, and compressing with gzip/bzip2 — are tested frequently.
RHCSA candidates must create and manage local users and groups using useradd, groupadd, and passwd. You will be expected to configure sudo access through the sudoers file or drop-in files under /etc/sudoers.d/, set password aging policies with chage, and manage user shells and home directories.
Beyond standard chmod and chown, exam tasks test special permission bits: SUID, SGID, and the sticky bit. Access Control Lists (ACLs) via getfacl and setfacl allow fine-grained permissions beyond the traditional owner/group/other model. Expect tasks that require you to configure default ACLs on shared directories.
You must partition disks using fdisk or gdisk, create and extend Logical Volume Manager (LVM) volumes, format filesystems with ext4 or xfs, and configure persistent mounts via /etc/fstab. Network filesystems — NFS and SMB/CIFS — are also testable, including automounting with the autofs service.
systemd is the init system on RHEL: you must enable, disable, start, stop, and mask services. firewalld zone and service management is required. SELinux tasks include setting enforcing/permissive mode, managing boolean values with setsebool, and fixing file context labels with restorecon. Networking tasks use nmcli to configure static IPs, hostname, and DNS without a GUI.
Print the PDF and work through each question without looking at the answers first. After completing a section, review your responses against the answer key to identify weak areas. For performance-based topics, replicate the tasks in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS Stream virtual machine to build muscle memory — reading alone is not sufficient for a hands-on exam.
Focus additional study time on any domain where you score below 70%. The storage and SELinux sections tend to be the most challenging for candidates without daily sysadmin experience. Schedule at least two full-length timed practice sessions before booking your exam date.
Red Hat publishes an official exam objectives list. The heaviest-weighted areas in EX200 are storage management (LVM, filesystems, mounts) and system services (systemd, SELinux, firewalld) — each routinely accounts for several tasks. Essential tools and user/group management form the foundation and are tested throughout. Networking tasks are fewer in number but must be completed correctly to avoid cascading failures on other tasks that depend on network connectivity.
Because tasks are interdependent, always verify each completed task before moving on. A misconfigured filesystem mount that fails at boot will cause the grader to mark subsequent tasks that rely on that mount as failed. Methodical verification — using systemctl status, mount, id, and ls -la — saves points.
man), info pages (info), and files under /usr/share/doc/. You cannot access the internet, external notes, or any outside resources. Practicing navigation of man pages before the exam is strongly recommended.