Ultimate Guide to Red Hat Summit 2018 Labs: Hands-on with RHEL

This year you've got a lot of decisions to make before you got to Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, CA from 8-10 May 2018.

There are breakout sessions, birds-of-a-feather sessions, mini sessions, panels, workshops, and instructor led labs that you're trying to juggle into your daily schedule. To help with these plans, let's try to provide an overview of the labs in this series.

In this article let's examine a track focusing only on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It's a selection of labs where you'll get hands-on with package management, OS security, dig into RHEL internals, build a RHEL image for the cloud and more.

The following hands-on labs are on the agenda, so let's look at the details of each one.

From source to RPM in 120 minutes

The definitive Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 hands-on lab

In this hands-on lab, Red Hat field solution architects will lead attendees through a mix of self-paced and instructor-led exercises covering the core and updated capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, including:

- Service startup and management with systemd
- Performance tuning & monitoring with performance co-pilot, tuned, and numad
- Storage management with ssm (System Storage Manager)
- Data de-duplication and compression with Permabit
- Network interface management with nmcli (Network Manager CLI)
- Dynamic firewall with firewalld
- System administration with Cockpit
- System security audit with oscap-workbench (OpenSCAP)
- System backup and recovery with rear (Relax and Recover)

Presenters: Chrsitoph Doerbeck, Red Hat, Matthew St Onge, Red Hat, Joe Hackett, Red Hat, Rob Wilmoth, Red Hat, Eddie Chen, Red Hat

Defend yourself using built-in Red Hat Enterprise Linux security technologies

In this lab, you'll learn about the built-in security technologies available to you in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

You will use OpenSCAP to scan and remediate against vulnerabilities and configuration security baselines. You will then block possible attacks from vulnerabilities using Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and use Network Bound Disk Encryption to securely decrypt your encrypted boot volumes unattended. You will also use USBGuard to implement basic white listing and black listing to define which USB devices are and are not authorized and how a USB device may interact with your system. Throughout your investigation of the security issues in your systems, you will utilize the improved audit logs and automate as many of your tasks as possible using Red Hat Ansible Automation. Finally, you will make multiple configuration changes to your systems across different versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running in your environment, in an automated fashion, using the Systems Roles feature.

Presenters: Lucy Kerner, Red Hat, Miroslav Grepl, Red Hat, Paul Moore, Red Hat, Martin Preisler, Red Hat, Peter Beniaris

Up and Running with Red Hat Identity Management

Red Hat identity management (IdM) can play a central role in user authentication, authorization, and control. It can manage critical security components such as SSH keys, host-based access controls, and SELinux contexts—in a standalone environment or in a trust relationship with a Microsoft Active Directory domain controller.

In this lab, you'll learn:

- Basic installation and configuration of IdM
- Configuration of an IdM replica - Joining of clients to the IdM domain
- Basic user and host management activities
- sudo setup
- SSH key management

Attendees will leave with a lab that can be repeated in their own environments and form the basics for a rudimentary environment.

Presenters: James Wildman, Red Hat, Chuck Mattern, Red Hat

Building a Red Hat Enterprise Linux gold image for Azure

In this practical lab, we'll walk through the process of how to build a standard gold image for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that works in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. Customize the image for best practises, install the Windows Azure Live Agent, and convert the disk image to the Windows Azure format. This is necessary if you want to use Cloud Access with Azure, and not the marketplace.

Stay tuned for more Red Hat Summit 2018 Labs and watch for more online under the tag #RHSummitLabs.