My LFCS experience

zlykot

Hey there,

I figured I would share my experience regarding the LFCS. I did my MCSE a few months back and noticed that I could easily get MCSA Linux on azure by passing this certification and so on BF I purchased the training/exam deal for $199.

I went through the official material provided by LF in about a week. I found the material selection was good but I did not particularly enjoy the format. Each chapter started with a short video, followed by a series of slides. The information in the slides was fairly straight and to the point but only covered the basics. The initial ~10 labs were quite interesting with custom snippets of code that aimed at showcasing items such as the OOM killer and various schedulers. After that things fell off a bit, the material became a lot more RH/Centos focused, labs needed a bit more work to get working on ubuntu etc.

Overall my preference would be to either have a book to read with the supplemental labs or just have it all videos.

On to the test, The process was quite streamlined from scheduling to the actual test, everything was perfect. The test itself was a bit frustrating. Terminal emulation was quite annoying, Vi for example required scrolling and I could not easily find the cursor and other things like that. I eventually gave up and just used nano ;l

The other minor annoyance was that some of the questions seemed to be in the wrong order, question 2 referenced requirements from question 5... not a big deal just not perfect. In addition one question referenced to a container as a virtual machine so finding took a few extra minutes...

Overall very minor things but the exam requires good time management, I ended up running out of time on the last question but still got a 86%. In my opinion the exam would be quite enjoyable if it allowed for the use of standard terminal/client and reworded the questions a bit.

Hope this helps someone.
T

yoba222

Congrats on the pass!

zlykot wrote: »

. . . The initial ~10 labs were quite interesting with custom snippets of code that aimed at showcasing items such as the OOM killer and various schedulers. After that things fell off a bit, the material became a lot more RH/Centos focused, labs needed a bit more work to get working on ubuntu etc. . . .

Linux Academy and Sander Van Vugt do this too. Sander starts off with a decent balance, showing how to do it in Ubuntu/openSUSE/CentOS. Then about 1/3 of the way in, he mostly stops bothering to teach openSUSE. Then about halfway in, he stops bothering with Ubuntu too and you might as well have just gone for RHCSA.

Linux Academy is even lazier; I don't even think openSUSE is discussed from the get go.

Sounds Good

what was your experience with Linux prior to beginning this endeavor? It sounds like you studied for a week in order to pass it?

zlykot

yoba222: I didn't even think about SUSE but that's totally true, they basically dropped that mid way through the course
Sounds good: probably 15 years off and on... 3years full time. The course objectives are fairly broad so I have not had exposure to all of them over the years. A word of advice, 1 week for a novice won't do it. The material provided by LF is more of a guide on how to get started in each category but is no where near enough to make you pass.

On another note, I did send LF an email regarding my experience. Especially regarding accessing some "network resources" which were returning "permission denied" and other things that I saw as issues related to the exam. I got a fairly candid response that everybody seems to get. "We have investigated, cant tell you anything but you should look at commands". Well right after the test I did and was able to execute what didn't work in their environment just fine on mine. Now It might have been something related to the configuration of my box, since I assumed the test environment is fairly vanilla but who knows.

Either way, I see their point but its frustrating. I passed time to move on.
T

DoubleNNs

zlykot wrote: »

Terminal emulation was quite annoying, Vi for example required scrolling and I could not easily find the cursor and other things like that. I eventually gave up and just used nano ;l
T

I don't quite understand this line. What do you mean by vi required scrolling? Like, w/ the mouse?

zlykot

imagine if vi has :set lines=100 but your window only has 50 lines. youd have to use the scroll bar on the side to move up and down to find your cursor.

hiddenknight821

I still don't get why that's even necessary when you can move the cursor from the keyboard. If I want to move my cursor to line 5, I'd just do :5 and then move it to the beginning of the line by doing shift + ^. That's whole point of VIM's popularity.

Swift6

Good work on passing. Planning to take other LF certs?

chrisone

Good work on the pass!

My only gripe about the material was that you are encouraged to find the missing pieces elsewhere via your own research. Not everything on the exam topics is taught on the course materials.

That being said, I took the challenge on, accepted my own responsibility in assuring that I myself had the necessary tools and materials at my own disposal in order to cover all the topics on the exam.

The pass was very satisfying and I am glad I went with LFCS instead of the other multiple choice/heavily dumped linux certifications. The pass is in the proof of your configurations

zlykot

hiddenknight821 wrote: »

I still don't get why that's even necessary when you can move the cursor from the keyboard. If I want to move my cursor to line 5, I'd just do :5 and then move it to the beginning of the line by doing shift + ^. That's whole point of VIM's popularity.

Well in the lab I had to scroll all the way up to see the first line in the VTY and then scroll down to see myself typing the :5

zlykot

Swift6 wrote: »

Good work on passing. Planning to take other LF certs?

I doubt it unless the cert becomes more "in demand" or there is a discount/other incentives.

zlykot

chrisone wrote: »

Good work on the pass!

My only gripe about the material was that you are encouraged to find the missing pieces elsewhere via your own research. Not everything on the exam topics is taught on the course materials.

That being said, I took the challenge on, accepted my own responsibility in assuring that I myself had the necessary tools and materials at my own disposal in order to cover all the topics on the exam.

The pass was very satisfying and I am glad I went with LFCS instead of the other multiple choice/heavily dumped linux certifications. The pass is in the proof of your configurations

I guess I have different expectations, I am paying for the training and would expect the vendor to do the leg work for me saving me time. Otherwise what is the point?