All you wanted to know about Linux certification but were afraid to ask

David M Williams
Monday, 23 July 2007 20:48

Business IT - Open Source

Linux Professional Institute

At a more advanced level comes the Linux Professional Institute, or LPI, which aims to be recognised as the global leader in certifying Linux professionals while advancing the Linux and Open Source movement through partners, activities and other means. LPI released its first two exams in 2000 and then a further two exams, aimed at a higher-grade, the following year. It released its third, senior-level, exam grade early in 2007.

Unlike many other exam providers, LPI are extremely open about how they develop their questions. This includes a great deal of pilot testing and statistical analysis to identify those questions that should go live as well as the minimum passing score, which is scaled so that the pass mark is 500 with a normalised distribution that places the majority of results between 200 and 800 (being three standard deviations away from the mean.) Their exam FAQ is very interesting reading. As of December 1st, 2005, LPI have administered over 103,000 examinations with the passing rates ranging from 67% to 86%.

As touched on, the LPI path comes at three levels: junior, advanced and senior – or, more clinically, LPIC-1, LPIC-2 and LPIC-3. Each level requires successful completion of two exams.

The LPIC-1 credential attests an individual can work at the Linux command line, perform easy maintenance tasks including backups and user admin, and install and configure workstations. The LPIC-2 credential means a professional can administer a small to medium site and design and deploy small mixed network environments. The LPIC-3 credential demonstrates a person has several years Linux admin experience and has integrated it in diverse environments, knows advanced and enterprise administration levels, can plan and implement full environments and perform system programming and shell scripting.

Sample LPIC-1 questions are:

Which of these commands could you use to show one page of output at a time?

1.       more
2.       less
3.       sed
4.       pause
5.       grep

If you wanted to turn off mail notification, what command would you use?

1.       biff n
2.       mesg n
3.       mesg off
4.       notify off
5.       set notify=off

What command(s) do you use to create swap space?

1.       mkswap
2.       activeswap
3.       swapon
4.       initswap
5.       mkfs –t swap

Sample LPIC-2 questions are:

You have just added PCMCIA to your system so you can add a PCMCIA Ethernet adapter to connect to a wireless network. Upon testing you discover it works properly when you enable it manually, but it does not initialise during boot. Which of the following is most likely the problem?

1.       Card services is not configured properly to initialise during the boot process
2.       The init scripts do not include PCMCIA initialisation or are not initialising in a suitable sequence
3.       PCMCIA support must be compiled into the kernel
4.       Hot-plug support is not enabled in the kernel at boot

You are testing some new settings for syslogd in /etc/testlog.conf but none of your changes seem to take effect when you send a SIGHUP to syslogd. What is likely to be the problem?

1.       You have errors in your configuration file that are causing them to be ignored upon reading of the configuration file
2.       syslogd does not respond to SIGHUP
3.       The wrong configuration file is being read on SIGHUP
4.       You cannot use alternate configuration files with syslogd and you must rename your testlog.conf file.

Which file contains the settings that determine root login privileges via ssh?

1.       ssh.config
2.       ssh_config
3.       sshd.config
4.       sshd_config

You have a client machine that is receiving unknown host error messages, but you are able to ping the hosts IP address. What file should you examine?

1.       /etc/hosts.conf
2.       /etc/resolv
3.       /etc/host
4.       /etc/resolv.conf
5.       /etc/nsswitch

Finally, sample LPIC-3 questions are:

When configuring a syncrepl provider slapd, which directives must be present in slapd.conf? (Choose TWO correct answers)

1.       syncprov-sessionlog
2.       syncprov-overlay
3.       syncprov-checkpoint
4.       syncprov-errorlog

When troubleshooting capacity problems, when would taking measurements be most appropriate?

1.       During successful operation
2.       During an overload or an episode
3.       After an overload or an episode
4.       After replacing problematic hwardware

Which of the following are valid passdb backends? (Select THREE correct answers)

1.       smbpasswd
2.       bdb
3.       tdbsam
4.       mysql
5.       ldbm

As can be seen, the jargon and technologies become more arcane and advanced as one rises through the levels. In this regard, LPI’s qualifications are worth attaining because they demonstrate sound core Linux expertise without respect for any individual distro. However, on the other hand, LPI mandate that higher-level certs can only be reached if the preceding exams have been completed. This means a senior Linux admin cannot elect to take the third-level LPI exams and receive recognition. They must work their way through the junior and advanced exams to receive any acknowledgement of his or her status. Additionally, LPI lapse certs after five years: your highest-level achievement must be re-taken within five years or it is no longer marked active.

LPI give pointers to approved training materials and resources but do not produce any official set of materials. Additionally, courses may be taken at training partners but LPI do not help find any on their site; fortunately Google is more forthcoming. As with CompTIA, exams can be taken at any Vue or Prometric centre.