LFCS Administrator exam

linuxskiba

Hi all,
I know I am a long way behind a lot of you but I am just coming up to completion of the LFS201 course and while I have learnt so much I still dont feel ready to take the LFCS exam.

I am just wondering if anyone has yet completed/passed the LFCS exam and if so did you find the information and content in the course enough?

I was thinking of after completing LFS201 to then take and complete LFS253 course to give me more information tools/knowledge to then complete the LFCS exam.

Just wondering what other peoples experience has been so far?

GSQS

I feel where you're coming from. I've completed the LFS201 and the LFS211, and I don't feel ready to take the LFCS exam either. I've been reviewing the practice questions today, and there are a lot of things in there that I know we've touched on, but I don't remember how to just do them without going back and looking up a lot of material over again.

linuxskiba

@GSQS

Thank you for your feedback, its good to know that I am not alone.
Reading through some of the other forum posts it seems everyone already has a significant exposure to the Linux world.

I understand that not everything can be taught in any course and a lot of it is self learning, I have worked in the IT industry for quite some time to know that but I feel the course could provide more labs close to what the exam would be like to provide us with experience of what to expect and what mindset to go into the exam with.

coop

Hi: I hope you do well on the exam and don't over stress before taking it. Please keep in mind:

1) LFS201 helps prepare for the LFCS exam but it is not an "exam preparation course". We always make this distinction and the syllabus takes into account what is publicly said about exam coverage, but is not designed completely around it.

2) It is assumed you have the knowledge equivalent to taking LFS101x at edx.org as a precursor to LFS201. If this material were in LFS201 as well it would be insanely long as it already is by far the longest LF course.

3) Technically, you do not need LFS211 (or LFS253) to prepare for LFCS. Those courses, especially LFS211 will help givce you more depth, but LFS211 is considered essential for the LFCE exam which is a lot more difficult than LFCS.

4) You get a free re-take if you do not pass, so it is best to view your first exam session as a practice exam and the better you relax for it the better you are likely to do. I've seen a lot of students over-stress on preparation and then have trouble. You don't need 100 percent to pass and there are no multiple choice questions, so use common sense about what is a likely thing to need on a performance-based exam, not a multiple choice quiz.

Good Luck!

linuxskiba

@coop - Thank you for your detailed response.
I guess as someone new coming into the Linux world I still feel like I have only touched the surface and still have so much to learn (both of which I know still to be true) I guess the best thing I can do is to continue learning and growing.

pawel33

Hi
I have an exam on August 31 and I'll tell you that the more I train every day, the more confident I feel. Unfortunately, the LFS201 course itself does not contain everything that is included in the exam, so you have to learn a lot on your own.

For me, the road looks like this:

• I have completed the LFS201 course
• I have completed the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) pluralsight course which has the entire range of LFCS and RHCSA, it's great
• many hours spent in the terminal, every day I spend about 2-3 hours creating tasks and solving them only with the help of man or help. An example of my task is to create an LVM, then increase or decrease the size of the LVM, mount it permanently, and create a swap on one of the partitions. Another is, for example, create a RAID and add 1 disk, then delete, simulate a failure, etc.

It is only when I spend a lot of time on the terminal and rewriting the documentation that I see progress and gain self-confidence. I spend a lot of time training grep, sed, find: D Apart from all that, I have experience in Linux because I have already set up a lot of servers.

Yesterday I noticed on the website with the exam details that a new point has been reached, i.e.

System Design and Deployment 25%
Define a capacity planning strategy
Conduct post deployment verifications
Create and maintain software packages
Create, configure and maintain containers
Deploy, configure, and maintain high availability / clustering / replication

I'm just wondering if it's not a mistake, because it's the same with the LFCE and this point fits better there. The only thing I can advise you is to read a lot and train even more in the terminal to feel confident.

Regards Paweł

coop

There is overlap between the domains and competencies specified for LFCS and LFCE, and in both areas there are things mentioned which I personally feel are unlikely to appear on the exams because they require too much time in a limited time window with multiple questions to do a significant amount of work in a performance-based exam. Additionally, while one could ask a multiple choice type question on the area, the exams don't do that.

I think it is kind of inevitable that when a committee of disparate people design the list of topics, it will wind up being somewhat expansive in scope, as everyone has certain experience and beliefs about what is important. In my opinion, there are definitely topics (or at least ways to interpret them) in the LFCS list which are more likely to get fuller coverage both in the LFCE and in the courses that follow LFS201, in particular LFS211. I am not involved in the exam construction, but I think that is just common sense.

Apprehension on these kinds of issues has affected students as long as the LFCS and LFCE exams have existed; I do not believe that in reality it has caused issues with exam takers; at least I have never seen such complaints either on the forums or directly expressed to me. So I can tell you not to be scared, but of course the more you prepare the better sys admin you will be so no work is wasted in reality.

pawel33

Personally, I am most concerned about tasks like LVM configuration, raid, DNS configuration with adding zones, some selinux stuff, virtual machines, containers for all of this in my opinion, there is definitely not enough time considering how many questions there are and what percentage needs to be done correctly .

Of course, I am trying to learn the entire scope of the exam. And on August 31 I will see what the effects of my learning are: D

linuxskiba

@pawel33 - Thank you for detailing your journey so far.
I very much agree the only way to be more confident in the exam is as much practice/labs and reading as possible before I take the plunge to take the exam.

I guess what I was hoping from the course was a more real world experience of building and configuring servers and then breaking them and trying to fix them but I guess this is something I will have to do more so on my own then what is provided in the training material, which is a real shame as I have found other sometimes free material on the net that goes through building out a lab and running "real world" scenarios.

All in all though I am happy with the material that has been provided for this course and very much enjoying learning new things in the Linux world everyday.

pawel33

@linuxskiba Hi,
The course mainly covers the basics of navigating the system, unfortunately you have to learn things like DNS, e-mail, web server and other services configuration on your own outside the course.

coop

Well these courses (LFS201/LFS211) just have so much material to cover in breadth, they simply cannot go as deep in content as a website that has covered one particular "howto" for some kind of set up of something etc. So you really do have to explore other resources. However, keep in mind that this is a performance-based exam and setup of things can take a lot of time, so I would expect if you get questions on some things it would be to fix a configuration rather than set up. But I have no special knowledge. Also LFCE is known to be considerably more challenging than LFCS. Good Luck!

pawel33

@coop Personally, I focus on things like find, grep, sed, awk, selinux, firewall + network basics, user and group management, and file permissions because that is going to be done quickly, so there can be quite a few tasks from this: D

Of course, some basics from the configuration, e.g. dns, will be useful I have an exam on August 31, so now I train as much as possible to pass it. Mainly selinux configuration, firewall, storage, but my brain stops cooperating: D

linuxskiba

@coop - Thank you as always, you have a lot of helpful and insightful information.
I appreciate all your time and effort you put into the course material.

@pawel33 - You sound very informed and with all the time and effort you are putting in, I am sure you will pass!
I look forward to hearing about your experience from the exam itself.

pawel33

@linuxskiba I moved my exam to 25.08.2020 at 10am. The exam will verify how I am prepared

amiyapradhan

@pawel33 - All the best for your exam mate! You'll sail through easily.

linuxskiba

@pawel33 Best of luck mate, you have been preparing and working hard for the exam. I am sure you will pass.

pawel33

@amiyapradhan @linuxskiba I'm after the exam, the exam is generally very nice and a very nice proctor I did not do 5-6 tasks, due to lack of knowledge in this field, unfortunately it seems to me that I did not do well. The fact that I did some of these tasks, the question is whether it's okay.

Now I am waiting for the results within 36 hours

amiyapradhan

@pawel33 All the best for your result and I am really a little curious to know more about the LFCS exam from your first-hand experience.

coop

Please be careful not to post any exam specifics as it is not allowed, so please keep observations rather general

pawel33

@coop Yes i know

linuxskiba

@pawel33 - I hope you passed mate but dont worry about it to much. You have done your best and you should be proud.

pawel33

@linuxskiba I am still waiting for the result, but I have a strange feeling that it did not go as I wanted: D I could have done many things better, but it is difficult to think rationally under stress.

pawel33

@coop Maybe you know how it works in the exam, how do you have a 4% task with 4 subtasks and if I do 3, I will get 3% or 0% because I didn't get all the points? Unfortunately, I have not found such information anywhere.

coop

I do not know and exam questions should be asked of the exam people, who will gladly provide authoritative information. You can always email training@linuxfoundation.org

pawel33

I wrote a week ago and still silence

fcioanca

Hi @pawel33 , yes, we do give partial credit for correctly resolved subtasks.

pawel33

@fcioanca Hi, great news for me Thanks for anwers.

pawel33

@linuxskiba @amiyapradhan I passed i had 73%, 66% is required for pass

coop

Congratulations!

amiyapradhan

Many Congratulations on your passing the exam@pawel33 and Goodluck for the upcoming CKA exam.

pawel33

@coop thanks
@amiyapradhan Thanks, i think CKA is not for me, to many material to learn :P I need to take a break from learning Linux and think about what to do next. I made LFCS on CentOS, I'm thinking about RHCSA