[lug] LPIC-2 exam (1st one)

[Bear Giles]

In case anyone is interested I just took the first LPIC-2 exam after
watching the (excellent) video on acloud.guru. LPIC-1 is analogous to RHCSA
(and in fact LPI will/would give you a LPIC-1 based on your RHCSA) and
LPIC-2 is roughly analogous to RHCE. The main difference is that LPIC-x is
OS-agnostic, esp. LPIC-1, and you're asked a number of questions specific
to RedHat, Debian/Ubuntu, and SuSE. E.g., I think it's 3-4 questions each
requiring knowledge of yum and apt, or being able to "select 2 answers"
where when asked where certain files are kept since the different distros
don't always adhere to the LSB.

In the test exams i scored right around the passing score so I thought the
videos would be enough to guarantee passing. I was wrong - I got 500 and
the passing score was 500. I've never been remotely that close to failing a
cert exam before, not even in ones where midway I wondered if I should just
walk away and save myself a lot of stress since there was no way I would
pass. The videos did make a difference - they definitely let me answer some
questions - but not as much as I expected.

(It was the CASP, if you're curious, and it was because of questions with
things like setting up CISCO routers. I never need to do that and had read
a summary but hadn't played with a simulator.)

The main omission in the videos was IPv6. It covered a lot of networking
stuff but (in retrospect) didn't cover IPv6 at all. It didn't stand out
since I don't use IPv6. I should - at least on my home network - just so I
start to become familiar with it. I know comcast didn't provide IPv6 to
residential users a while back but maybe that has changed.

The main thing missing in the course at large is a list of practical
exercises - he demonstrated everything on a virtualbox instance and I did a
lot of it myself since I know that dramatically improves retention. But I
should have gone through the full lifecycle on everything on filesystems
and RAID devices. Create, label, resize, etc. for ext4, brtfs, and xfs, and
for RAID 0, 1, and 5.

I'll take the second exam tomorrow. I need to stop procastinating... In
some ways it will be easier for me since I've set up each type of server -
no need to worry about RAID or iSCSI or other things that I've never used -
but in other ways it will be harder since the test covers multiple
implementations. E.g., I think the email server questions cover sendmail,
postfix, and exim. Maybe more. I only know one (postfix).

BTW if I were doing this now I would probably go with RHCSA and RHCE
instead of the LPI certs since the former better known in the US. I had
good reasons for going with LPIC-1 five years ago, and it's not critical
since my probably job requirements aren't system administration, but
overall it's enough of a difference today that I've been debating whether
it's worth the cost to do the RH certs as well. If I fail the test tomorrow
and my LPIC-1 expires I'll definitely do the RHCSA instead of the LPIC-1
after verifying that the former will still be considered acceptable for the
LPIC-1. Stupid work demands that kept me from taking the LPIC-2 exams until
the week before the required prereq expires.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/pipermail/lug/attachments/20181113/88ab3969/attachment.html>