LFCS on 10/19/17

Am I ready?

Well, this is the first cert I've gone for where I have not done a single practice exam. There aren't any in existence for this cert. That's been a strong study strategy in the past--going over what I got wrong on the practice exam until I have it nailed. I lack that confidence-hype I used to rely on before an exam.

I've been using Linux as a daily home user for probably 3 or 4 years now (whenever Windows 8 came out that was it for me. Windows 10 further cemented my resolve). Not much enterprise Linux experience.

To prepare, I've put about 100-150 hours of study and lab time in over the past 6 months. I'd say about 75% labbing and 25% reading. First with the LFS101 on Edx and then with Sander Van Vugt's LFCS videos on Safari Books.

I tried the official LFS201 and find the material to be very college lecture-like and only vaguely covering what ought to be on the exam. Even coop, who seems to be the course author admits that the course designers and the exam designers don't coordinate with each other when they create. WTF?

I also tried Linux Academy but there are far too many syntax inconsistencies and uncorrected straight up errors in their videos for me. I don't get why everyone loves them so much. Maybe just the LFCS track is badly in need of revision. Maybe it's because that's all there is that's somewhat decent for online Linux training, take it or leave it.
I left it.

Perhaps tomorrow will be a success story. Perhaps practice exam #1. We'll find out.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

duta74

Good luck...

stryder144

I have this one on my cert map for this year. Specifically, I purchased the heavily discounted exam/training bundle last Black Friday. Good luck and let us know how you did.

gkca

Good luck!

yoba222

Well, I think I passed. I won't find out for 72 working hours. I answered all but 2 or 3 questions. I verified that I accomplished all tasks I was given so it should be a pass. I think.

Taking that exam is not only demonstrating Linux skills but learning the personality of an unfamiliar environment.

The first 30 minutes I made very little progress because the environment and its personality was so unfamiliar. The next 30 minutes I made progress but inefficiently. I figured out a routine by the second hour but it was down to the last second by that point. I'm usually the first in the room to finish traditional exams.

I've heard only bad things said about the exam environment. It wasn't as bad as expected.

The left 1/3 of the screen was the questions and a menu to scroll between the 25 questions. That worked fine for me. The remaining right side of the screen is a single terminal window. Clicking from the question side back to the terminal was finicky until I figured out that I had to click not on the location of the terminal cursor but one line above it to be able to start typing again.

There's an option to reset console, which took maybe 30 seconds to do and that fixed the glitch too.

The terminal was occasionally the slightest bit laggy but I've used worse--you know when you SSH into something and type a key and it doesn't appear on the screen immediately. It really wasn't that bad. I was on a WiFi connection with a laptop on a perhaps 50-100Mbs connection.

Auto tab completion was a little weird. It worked most of the time but on occasion double-tabbing to see a list didn't work.

Here's a tip: I used vi for text editing. Step one, create a file in home called .vimrc. Add the single line:
set number
Save it. This will add line numbering by default. If your keyboard arrow keys dont' move the cursor but instead print out BA, etc. add the additional line:
set nocompatible
Using vi without arrow keys is a little too retro for my taste.

I mostly did the questions in sequence so I didn't have to deal with remembering which ones I completed. Maybe not the most ideal strategy, since some questions took 15+ minutes each to do and others literally less than 30 seconds to do. I didn't see point weights listed anywhere though I've heard not all points are equal.

I didn't bother rebooting. I'm going to have a beer now.

stryder144

Thank you for the insight. Which distribution did you use? Here's hoping that you did indeed pass!

hiddenknight821

OP, I hope you passed. I'm not surprised the exam format threw you off as I was also not used to it either. I failed the first time within minutes as I apparently locked myself out in confusion. I was a little cocky with my first LFCS attempt, and I bombed the test both times. I'm glad they give free retry in most cases. I came in a little unprepared, but to be honest, the test was terribly designed. Mind you, I took the very first edition, and it was nowhere at the level it's at right now, judging by the domains/competencies covered as of today. I looked at both failures as a room for improvement, and it eventually helped me passed my RHCSA at first attempt.

So don't give up. I'm sure you did great regardless.

securityorc

Thanks for describing your test experience! I also hope to get this cert by the end of the year. I agree with your evaluation of the Linux Academy course, not only was it chaotic, but also felt pretty shallow. I'm going to start LFS201 soon, while keeping up the labbing.

One course that I found it's awesome quality, is Pluralsight's LFCS path, by Andrew Mallet (The Urban Penguin). Much more well structured, going into details and packed with demo's than the alternatives.

As for practice tests before the exam, I am going to try the tasks lined up on this blog Cryptography, Linux, and me: Practice test! and on https://www.certdepot.net/

Hope you passed!

yoba222

And a fail.

Scored 72% needed 74%.

Rebooking for next weekend if they offer it on Saturdays. Made a list of the things on the exam from memory and will be labbing it out daily. I can think of about 10% of the questions that I knew how to do, had I been relaxed and not rushing at the last moment to complete.

securityorc wrote: »

Thanks for describing your test experience! I also hope to get this cert by the end of the year. I agree with your evaluation of the Linux Academy course, not only was it chaotic, but also felt pretty shallow. I'm going to start LFS201 soon, while keeping up the labbing.

One course that I found it's awesome quality, is Pluralsight's LFCS path, by Andrew Mallet (The Urban Penguin). Much more well structured, going into details and packed with demo's than the alternatives.

As for practice tests before the exam, I am going to try the tasks lined up on this blog Cryptography, Linux, and me: Practice test! and on https://www.certdepot.net/

Hope you passed!

I went with Ubuntu 16.04. While Linux foundation gives three distro choices, all training I've found online so far has been heavily biased to showing CentOS steps only. Linux Academy is probably the worst offender. Sander Van Vugt was pretty fair about showing steps for all three distros until right about at the halfway point of his videos. Then it's nearly all CentOS until the end. Maybe the project was being rushed?

That blog list looks pretty accurate, though there were other things. I have a suspicion that the question bank for the LFCS sticks to relatively distro-neutral stuff, so probably not going to get hardcore SELinux or AppArmor questions. Or probably not deep yum/apt questions as they also differ.

yoba222

Also,
I learned how to use TMUX and am glad I did, as it is super helpful to be able to split the terminal window in two, having a man page open as a reference to get the syntax down for a more complex command. I've seen it blogged not to waste time doing this. I disagree.

Linux Foundation says that Ctrl+c will break the exam, so I got in the habit of instead using Ctrl-d instead. Not ideal, but at least something. I've also read that using nano might mess up the exam because of the needed Ctrl-x and Ctrl-o commands. While I used vi and not nano, I did use visudo for something. visudo seems to be based on nano and I had no problems saving my changes. I used the Chrome browser. Perhaps the person having trouble was on FireFox or something.

yoba222

Sitting here waiting for the exam to open for attempt #2 in 10 minutes. I feel ready this time.

Verities

yoba222 wrote: »

Sitting here waiting for the exam to open for attempt #2 in 10 minutes. I feel ready this time.

Did it go well?

junilinux

Maybe he has got a party for his achievement and forgot to get back to this thread for a result

yoba222

Certified!

Surprised at only getting a 77% second time around. Feel like it should have been in the 90s. A pass is a pass though.

Many of the questions were repeats, but some were different. There was one question that I didn't know dealing with a legacy boot parameter setting. I also brainfogged and started setting up LVM partitioning wrong. I ended up running partprobe and the OS complained about needing a reboot. Never encountered that before.

It took about 5 minutes to reboot, my mind cleared while waiting, and figured out the LVM setup. But I think the reboot messed something up with the network share. Was getting a "client mount RPC error: program not registered." I probably should have raised the issue but I didn't and let it go. So I know it wasn't a perfect score.

In retrospection, if the Linux Foundation "interviewed" me like in one of those articles I've seen, I wouldn't make a good spokesperson for them. My original plan was to do a training course within the next 2 years to refresh the expiration. Then, 4 years from now, possibly consider the LFCE.

They changed the requirements and removed the ability to refresh the expiration date by doing training this past July or so. The change happened three months after I paid for the cert attempt. So my current plan is to just let it expire.

I never needed a Linux certification; I just wanted a solid goal at the end of a good Linux learning journey. I achieved that journey. If I must have a current Linux cert 2 years in the future, I'll just go with Red Hat, which seems to be offered in the state I live in now (used to have to travel to a neighboring state 3 years ago).

Verities

Congratulations.

ky13

Congrats!

junilinux

Congrats mate,
So happy to hear one more forum member has passed this exam.