Linuxworld Feature: Am I Certifiable?

It's surprising, I feel the very same as the author. Also got roughly the same score, and finished it in less than half an hour (okay, I used a computer instead of a pencil).

I never even used the rpm tool (heck, till a month ago I didn't even know it doesn't handle dependencies automatically from a central repository, like emerge does), neither did I ever touch something RedHat, and I also had half of the rpm questions wrong, and the other half I gambled.

I wondered why someone should use apt-get ór rpm to be a Linux-sysadmin, because there are other tools available. I mean, if you have emerge or slackware, you really don't need rpm; you can be a good sysadmin without mastering apt-get or rpm. The rpm questions were very in-depth, so much, that my learning-book (LPIC1 in a nutshell) didn't cover it in that detail. Also, there were questions about firewalls, but because my learning book didn't include this topic since it was 4 years old, I knew nothing about it, just gambled again.

In contrary, since I only had worked one year with Linux, only as a sysadmin of my own desktop (never touched a server), I had to learn some stuff by head from my book. Especially some nasty CLI-switches.

So, you might think, since I passed, I know those command line switches. Well, I forgot most of them within one month. But the good thing is: you know other ways to do stuff, only forgot the CLI-switches, so you can look up when you think: "Hey, in my book was a smart way to do this".

So instead of testing your knowledge of CLI-switches, they could better 'time' how much time you need to look it up in man pages, which would be more like in practice. In my opinion, they should also test how fast you can solve a problem using google, linuxquestions, and some wiki's. Also, they should give you some 'errors', and ask you to use some bugzilla to find out if this is a bug, or your fault.

For example, last week I tried to make a reiserfs with blocksize 512. This didn't work. Now, you can read the manpage, but this doesn't help. Just quoting the whole error in google (put the whole error between double quotes) and searching a bit, reveals that the blocksize-commandline-switch doesn't work yet.

They could also give someone some softlinks pointing to themselves, or non-existing dirs, and ask whats wrong. Also, which might be interesting, is solving library-issues (wrong version), and simple compile-errors, and lost files using find, this would be really usefull. Or getting a real '1994' laserprinter to work (without spitting out over 100 pages with only 10 chinese chars on it).

And, more difficult, (Level2?) get Linux Samba to work with Windows XP SP2 SMB shares, while Windows XP contains some shareware (so not all options available) zonealarm firewall and has a 'random' (SP30490943534, since most people installing windows don't care) host-name, and xinetd configured with libwrapper (TCPwrapper) support without you knowing it. Or updating from devfs to udev, which also gives a big bunch of errors, especially if you have nvidia, lvm and evms stuff. Or how to use Paulie's Batchlogin for disabling autplay in Firefox when viewing SYS-CON articles. (Just sarcastic!)

That sort of things are practice, the errors you come across in day-to-day work with Linux. But probably this is too difficult to test.

Anyway, LPI especially tests your ability to learn CLI-switches and config-file options by head. Which means the certification tells you are able to master something else than windows, but it can't ensure you really could solve problems as a sysadmin.

BTW LPI should include bonus points for getting a nvidia-driver to work.