Redhat Academy - Making Life Easier

When I took the Red Hat Academy courses a while back, I knew enough about linux/unix to make life a lot easier on myself. Here is what I recommend for students doing RHA courses, all the commands are done in the terminal:

1) Add /sbin and /usr/sbin to the path variable. This will let you run commands like mount and fdisk without typing /sbin/fdisk
Open your bash profile in a text editor like nano
nano ~/.bash_profile

Find the line that says:
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
And add to the end of it and make it look like this:
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
and log out and back in to apply it.

2) Add your user account to sudoers so you can use sudo without a password.
open the /etc/sudoers file in a text editor (linux guru's - I know it's not the best way to do it, but I'm not teaching vi here)
nano /etc/sudoers
At the end of the file, add the following line:
yourusername ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
then save and exit.

You can now type sudo x and it will run x as root. You can also do sudo su - and it will make you root, without entering a password.

That's the two biggies for now - if I think of anything else, I'll post it. If you have any suggestions or ideas, post a comment and I'll see what I can do.

And no requests for me to do your work or anything like that. Not happening.

Addition: The biggest problems that we had when I took the course was dealing with the ipsec VPN. Basically, you had to use VMWare with a bridged network connection, and you had to forward/open ports in any NAT/firewall between you and the server. I recommended OpenVPN as an SSL-based alternative VPN. It has no problems with most firewall/NAT setups, and can be run as a layer 2 or 3 VPN. There are also lots of authentication options, as well as rolling your own. I discussed this VPN option with our instructor, and I think he liked the idea. He wanted me to setup a Fedora server (VM) to test/demo it with, and I didn't have time to mess with it then (and I really dislike Fedora, for reasons I won't get into here). I've basically forgotten about it since then. If any Red Hat administrators would like my help/ideas on this, feel free to contact me. I'd be glad to help.