I’m one step closer to both the Red Hat Certified Datacenter Specialist and Red Hat Certified Architect certificates after passing the Red Hat EX401 exam last week. The RH401/EX401 covers Red Hat deployments and their Satellite server software. Satellite provides Red Hat Network services at a local level for companies that have large installations of Red Hat servers. It also uses Cobbler, PXE boot, and Kickstart files to run automated deployments. A Kickstart file is a template for the initial installation of a Linux box. It sets everything from the partitioning scheme, to installed software and settings, to how to handle the installation and scripts to run after the installation is completed. Kickstart’ing a bare metal machine can yield a fully operational and configured Linux server in around 10 minutes. It is certainly one of the more interesting topics for me.