Welcome to day two of Red Hat training, wherein your handsome protagonist realizes that he probably could have passed the RHCE exam without any prior study, but is glad he came for the tips and tricks that the instructor enjoys sharing. And also for the free Mountain Dews.

We zoomed through just about everything today, slowing briefly for CUPS (which I needed a bit of background on), PAM (lots of booting and login type gotchas that he made a few very deliberate points of telling us about), then zooming again through X Windows gotchas in the last 15 minutes of class as my caffiene was wearing off and the sugar was beginning to blind me.

I recall only that a venn diagram was used to explain how many things can stop gdm from actually running, and that deleting files matching ~/.x* will usually fix anything your end user fucked up that's keeping their graphical session from logging in. Hopefully my notes are more coherent.

Somehow I doubt it.

The phrase "useful in your very near future" was used at least once. These are the subtle clues that make me scribble a little star in my workbook for Thursday evening's review. My iPod Shuffle is the only thing that keeps me sane during the chattering of my neighbors during the labs. System administration requires either direct narration, trance music or silence. Chatty classmates do not belong in this set.

Tonight it took me about 30 minutes to get through a day's worth of work-related e-mail and either punt the issue back to the user for more comment or just solve whatever it was that was broken. Nothing critical, but a couple of things like unpaid invoices that would turn critical if I left them until the end of the week without taking action. Looks like a long disconnected vacation is still a ways away.

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