Starting LFS201

gijohnny

Hi I'm John and starting this course. I've been working with Solaris and Linux for my job for the past 3 years and figured it was time to deepen my knowledge as my team which usually does software and patch installations plus mid level troubleshooting is being merged with our company's UNIX admin group and assuming their duties.

I made several bad assumptions coming in and am hoping to ask some questions to avoid making more. I bought this course and exam on last year's Black Friday sale. Since i work heavily with Linux and Solaris, I figured it would be easy and didn't look at the course all year. I took two weeks vacation, this being week 1, figuring I'd breeze through the material and exam in these two weeks. I am finding how little I know of Linux.

When I started the course this past weekend, II came across the strong suggestion to take LFS101, which I thought would be simple. Six days later, I am finally ready to start this course. It made me realize how little I knew, shell scripting in particular kicked my butt hard.

To have a working system to work with for LFS101, I downloaded and installed Oracle Virtualbox as we use it for a side project at work. I couldn't get the Centos package for the course to work with Oracle Linux, as Virtulbox does not offer a Centos distro. I finally installed openSuse and used it for the course.

The LFS201 image for openSuse worked fine for taking LFS101, but I made many changes to it, playing with it and figuring things out. Am I best off making a new virtual box for LFS201 or stick with the one I used for LFS101 which is now optimized for my home network and has printing to my home network printer working?

Also, my company uses a mix of Sun Solaris, Oracle Linux and RHEL. I am probably better off studying and certifying in the Centos distro, but couldn't figure out how to make this work with the options available in Virtualbox. What's the best way to get the Centos image for this class up and running?

Also, I'm starting to realize that getting certified by the end of my vacation next week is probably a tall order if not impossible. I know if I let the year run out on my 1 year to accomplish this without a cert in hand, my wife will kick my @ss for wasting money, but what is a reasonable time for completing LFS201 and being prepared for the exam?

Sorry for the wall of text. I just wanted to drop in and introduce myself. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, John

 

coop

The CentOS image stored on our web site works perfectly with VirtualBox and plenty of people use it, so I can't help you with that problem except to tell you to either try again, or do a fresh install and run the ./ready-for.sh script afterwadrs as described at https://training.linuxfoundation.org/cm/prep.  There are some steps to install it that are identical to the ones you used for openSUSE so you seem to know how to do that.  If you explain *how* it doesn't work maybe we can give advice.

There is no reason you can't keep using the images you already have -- if you run into any troubles they should be minor and a good homework exercise to fix.

LFS201 has 10 times the material that is in LFS101x and is far more difficult and has many more labs, and is not meant for a complete novice.  Which you are not.  However, to think you can do it all in a week or so is not realistic.  I'm sorry you waited a year, that was a miscalculation we can't do much about.

gijohnny

Hi coop,

I went back and looked at the CentOS build I abandonded. I had used the Red Hat 64-bit distro from Vityualbox and used the LFS Centos image as the optical drive, just I had in my successful openSUSE build. The reason I abandoned it was that I was unable to get the VBox GuestAdditions to install on it, getting the error below:

Could not mount the media/drive 'C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso' (VERR_PDM_MEDIA_LOCKED).

Result Code:	E_FAIL (0x80004005)
Component:	ConsoleWrap
Interface:	IConsole {872da645-4a9b-1727-bee2-5585105b9eed}
Callee:	IMachine {b2547866-a0a1-4391-8b86-6952d82efaa0}

I'm not sure if this is because I'm using a CentOs image with Red Hat and should be using a different distro (Oracle or Fedora maybe? CentOS is not an option).or if it is a different problem. Not having GuestAddidtions is making the virtual machine much clunkier to deal with (display, input, inability to mount a share drive to the host machine) but usable.

I'm wondering if I am better off with this build because it matches the build family I use at work or my fully functional openSUSE build I used for LFS101. I may try building another Virtualbox based on Oracle or Fedora and see if my results differ.

I do realize that waiting this late in the year to begin the course is entirely on me and am not asking for any special consideration. The only saving grace here is when I informed my boss I had purchased this package, he told me that due to all the comapny acquisitions and department mergers our whole team needed more Linux training and he would have looked into getting us a course of training if I hadn't have bought this on my own already. So maybe I can get them to pay for the inevitable renewal of the course in November.

Thanks for your input,          Regards, John

gijohnny

Ignore the above error message, that was because The ISO was still being used by my openSUSE build. Now I am back to the original issue I had when I started this, CentOS build doesn't seem to be able to handle an iso9660 filesystem, as I get the following error when trying to read the CD within CentOS:

status 32:mount: unknown filesystem type iso9660

Has anyone run into this and if so, how did you fix it?

Thanks, John

 

gijohnny

OK, I was able to fix the iso9660 issue by using yum to update CentOS. It is slowly sinking into my thick skull that it doesn't matter which base build I use for Virtualbox, if I am booting from the class iso. The problem with not being able to mount iso9660 was with the class image image CentOS build and had nothing to do with Virtualbox.

So I'm all setup in my updated CentOS build and ready to start, wish me luck.

luisviveropena

Hi,

This course have many labs and I strongly recommend you go through all of them, so you can get real practice on Linux. Now, setting up a distribution should be a very easy task, or at least you will find more complex tasks during the course, so you will need to improve your skills quickly.

Best of luck.

Luis.

jengel

In regards to "wasting" the money. If you can take the exam, even if you know you'll fail. That way you at least get a feel for it and maybe get sympathy (rather than rear end kicked) for it



I've had no problem installing CentOS fresh or using images provided for this course. I also specify RedHat as OS to VirtualBox. 

coop

When using the VM you download from us, make sure you are using the stock kernel, not the updated vanilla one, which is meant for kernel classes.  I'm sure the 3.10 kernel Centos chips can handle iso9660

 

 

luisviveropena

Hi,

Well, I think that there will be no money wasted if you learn. Many times we want to win something, but if you are serious about Linux system administration, the main purpose should be learning.

So, you can keep trying with our image, and also get your own from the distro's website, as you will need to do it soon or later.

Regards,

Luis.

gacanepa

gijohnny

I agree with @luisviveropena and @jengel. Take the exam even if you know you'll fail. Been there, done that.

Also, you should be able to get a free retake. If the time has run out already, I'd contact the training support team by raising a ticket via https://rt.linuxfoundation.org/ and explain what you've said here. These folks are super helpful, and may be able to help you find a solution.

Best of luck!

acher

Hi Coop (and others),

You mentioned "to think you can do it all in a week or so is not realistic" - what's the realistic timeframe to take and complete the LFS201 course? How many hours, or days, or weeks would you say would be appropriate amount of time?

As far as my background, I have basic Linux experience from some years back and am currently a Windows/VMware/Networking engineer with about 10 years experience. 

What about prepping for the exam after the course? How much time? Is the course itself sufficient for prep, or do I need additional material?

I need to know how much time to set aside realistically for this training as nothing in the course description mentions that.

Thanks

 

coop

You are given a year to take the course.  If you were to take this material in a classroom with a human being as instructor and do all the labs it would take 4-8 days depending on your level of previous experience.  This is a *long* cousre with a lot of material.  Realistically, that means 30-60 hours of your time probably.  You can take a day a week or a couple of hours a day etc.  Strategies for doing this are discussed in the introductory chapter.  Keep in mind that if you have little Linux experience, you realy need some of the subjects discussed in the free course LFS101x at edx.org first.

acher

OK, thanks for that info.