My Exam experience with LPIC Exam 101 and 102

I have been using Linux for at least more than 10 years now, however I am not an expert at all (I realized this especially during the exam I gave for LPIC-1 101 today morning at a Prometric center in Tampa, Florida – anyways one cannot be an expert in this vast linux world). I am just a beginning UNIX system administrator try to learn and understand how it works. I am interested to do a IT certification in Linux. There are few Linux certifications available in the market. However, I chose LPIC due to its vendor neutral offer. Other certifications are normally vendor specific, such as RHCE (which is redhat based)...

The exam was difficult than I expected. Until today morning, I thought it will be an easy exam, and will be a cake walk for me. But it is not. The exam was comparatively difficult than I thought, with "fill in the blanks" questions, specific command options asked etc. However I passed the exam today with little more than what is needed to pass. So I am planning to write my lessons learned here...

I used following study materials for the 101 exam:

LPI Exam in a nutshell

IBM DeveloperWorks Study Material

LinuxIT Tutorials

Some practice tests I tried:

http://www.gnosis.cx/publish/tech_index_lpi.html

http://www.linux-praxis.de/lpisim/lpi101sim/index.html

Practice Test on the LPI Exam in a nutshell book

As of December 2008, the LPIC1 101 exam objectives are divided into five topics. The objectives are expected to be changing in coming months. Please check the LPI website for the latest information. For my exam, the five topics are:

Hardware & Architecture

Linux Installation & Package Management

GNU & Unix Commands

Devices, Linux Filesystems, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

The X Window System

I thought I can easily get 100% score on the GNU & unix Commands section. But no luck....! There are questions which make you to think, unless you are sure about it, it is not easy to pick the correct answer(s).

I am planning to write more about how to prepare for this exam - Good news is there are a lot of tutorials on the INTERNET - this, sometime makes it tougher - I made a mistake of not taking notes during my preparation.

My preparation started with installing Linux Operating systems on my Dell Latitude laptop. I re-partitioned the hard disk and installed one Redhat based system (Fedora 10) and a debian based system (Ubuntu 8.10) along with Windows XP Professional. I was running GRUB on them with three operating systems.

I prepared a lot of stuff, playing with Laptop... I am happy that I passed my 101 Exam.

Then, I prepared for a month for the LPIC1 Exam 102. I passed the exam last Monday with “comparatively” higher score than the previous Exam 101. I was really happy about it because I really prepared well this time... I took a lot of notes this time (lessons learned!). I don't want to fail such an entry level exam like this. Now, I am LPIC1 certified. I am happy that I am able to get the LPIC1 certification now. I checked the LPI web site about my certification, they confirmed it the next day on the web site that I am LPIC1 certified now.

Apart from the reason that I prepared well for this Exam, one another reason I think is the exam center is really good this time. They had this 19” flat screen monitor and it didn't itch my eyes like it did last time. Another reason is probably I slept very well before the exam day. Also, I reached the exam center 15 mins early and had been asked to wait for around 20 mins. I really took that time to relax ( I didn't touch my notes at that time).

More about the exam, I prepared from the book “LPI LINUX Certification in a nutshell” - 2nd Edition. This book is a valuable resource for the preparation. Along with this book, I used all the tutorials listed on the IBM Developerworks website. Also, one more book is from Alan McKinnon and

Michel Bisson. You can do a quick search on google with the author names, you will get a pdf link. Also, I borrowed a book called “Linux for Dummies” and found interesting to read about some fundamental stuff described on that book.

There are totally 9 topics for the exam 102:

1. Kernel

2. Boot, Initialization, shutdown and runlevels

3. Printing

4. Documentation

5. Shells, Scripting, Programming and Compiling

6. Administrative tasks

7. Networking fundamentals

8. Networking Services

9. Security.

Please note the the LPI Exams Objectives are going to Change after April 2009, so please refer the LPI web site LPI.ORG for latest objectives if you read this after April 2009.

I have totally two laptops setup in my home. I installed Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10 and Windows XP in one of the laptop for the exam preparation. The other laptop runs Windows Vista. I need to get some other Linux flavor running on this Vista laptop soon.

I prepared Samba, Apache, Sendmail and DNS topics very well. Also I reviewed the complete Network fundamentals very well. Items like UDP, TCP, ICMP and IP are important from the exam perspective.

Also, iptables is important as well. If you are good with bash shell along with networking, it will be very easier to pass the exam.

Now, time to prepare for the Exam 201. I will write more about the preparation in coming week. Until then.

Vijay Chinnasamy