#Red Hat
42 posts
RHEL in Practice #5: Automating RHEL with Ansible — Bridging to the RHCE Track
The fifth post in the RHEL in Practice track. We take the hand-driven work from #1〜#4 — nginx, PostgreSQL, Podman, and monitoring — and tie it back together with Ansible, organizing the big picture of reproducing the same result from a single set of code. We cover ansible-core installation, a minimal inventory and ansible.cfg, the idempotency concept, examples of moving hand work into a playbook, and the path to abstraction with rhel-system-roles — leaving the deep syntax to the RHCE track.
RHEL in Practice #4 Monitoring: Cockpit, PCP
The fourth post in the RHEL in Practice track. Once you have web, DB, and containers running, it is time to look at what is actually happening on top of them. This post walks through one full cycle: standing up the Cockpit web console for browser-based server management and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) for collecting and recording performance metrics on RHEL, then wiring the two together to view performance graphs. It also covers when to reach for the basic commands like top, ss, journalctl, and sar.
RHEL in Practice #3: Container Workloads — Podman, systemd (quadlet)
The third post in the RHEL in Practice track. Putting the web and DB we stood up by hand in #1 and #2 back up as containers, we organize the operational flow of Podman, RHEL's standard container engine. Image pull and run, volumes and port mapping, rootless containers, and integrating containers as systemd services with quadlet for automatic startup at boot — all in one cycle.
RHEL in Practice #2: Database Operations — PostgreSQL on RHEL
The second post in the RHEL in Practice track. Having stood up the web tier, we move to the data tier behind it: installing and initializing PostgreSQL via RHEL's AppStream modules. We cover the data directory and SELinux context, postgresql.conf / pg_hba.conf settings and the firewalld opening for remote access, and everything from creating users and databases to backup, recovery, and diagnosis when you get stuck — all from a real operations perspective.
RHEL in Practice #1: Running a Web Server — nginx, systemd, SELinux Policy
The first post in the RHEL in Practice track. It brings together the systemd, SELinux, and firewalld knowledge from the basics, intermediate, and advanced series, and walks one full cycle of standing up an nginx web server properly on RHEL. Package install and service registration, SELinux context and port labels, opening firewalld, plus the spots where non-standard ports and document roots most often trip people up — all covered from a real operations angle.
RHEL Basics #1: What Is RHEL — From Fedora to RHEL, plus AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux
Fedora is where new technology gets tried first; what survives flows into RHEL. CentOS Stream sits in the middle as a preview of the next RHEL, and AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have settled into the role of free RHEL-compatible distros. Here's the shape of the RHEL ecosystem after CentOS, in one read.