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Before the time I started thinking about taking the LPI exams, I explored the web in order to find some info about studying materials and how everything is done.

so what needs to be done? and where do I start?

First, take a look at the LPI roadmap, from the entry certificate till the very last senior certificate:

Basically, you MUST take the LPIC-1 (Junior) exam at first, in order to stay on the road, without a valid LPIC-1 certificate you cannot move on to level 2.

After obtaining LPIC-3 (Senior Level) you may take one of the special exams (Mixed Environments, Security, or Virtualization).

First thing you need to do is register yourself at www.lpi.org, afterwards you will receieve an LPI ID which you must write down/remember, it’ll be necessary when you register for the exam ( so LPI will be able to identify and assign the grade you get to your profile )

Level 1

good books are the ones i have mentioned before so in my blog, I may as well add Sybex where you can purchase over here .

there are some videos of VTC and CBT Nuggets available as well, but those do not cover all of the subjects.

Level 2

same goes for Level 2, Sybex and Linux in a nutshell both have editions for Level 2 exams. and the CBT videos are also available for LPIC-2.

note: changes are to be expected at July 2012 for exam 201, ext4 and ipv6 subjects will be added.

Level 3 and additional specialities

this is where things get a little tight, there are no books around that cover the topics, I contacted LPI regarding that issue and they suggested to look around the web googling “LPIC-3″

you will find out there are few pages available with material, In my opinion, it is necessary to learn LDAP from a book/ebook to get things covered in more detail. the links can be found at the links page under the top banner of my blog.

After passing the exams you will be glad to see this email waiting for you:

Dear Candidate, LPI ID: -ID NUMBER- Congratulations on obtaining your LPIC-1 certification and joining the world's largest community of Linux and Open Source professionals. LPIC-1 is globally recognized as the leading entry-level certification in Linux skills and knowledge.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Dear Candidate,   LPI ID: -ID NUMBER-   Congratulations on obtaining your LPIC-1 certification and joining the world's largest community of Linux and Open Source professionals. LPIC-1 is globally recognized as the leading entry-level certification in Linux skills and knowledge.

then you will receive the following to your mail:

so to sum everything up:

1. sign up at LPI site and get your LPI ID
2. gather studying materials and look for corriculum changes
3. study hard
4. register with your LPI ID, pay & take the exams at VUE/Prometric centers.

good luck ;)

LPI has made some changes lately (April 1st 2012):

The added topics:

added basic coverage in the configuration level for Grub2 and ext4 filesystem

Basic feature knowledge in Systemd & Upstart

Basic knowledge in IPv6 & LVM (Logical Volume Manager)

 The removed topics:

Coverage of LILO has been removed.

LPIC Level 1 combines two exams as I mentioned in previous posts, this is the second exam that you must pass inorder to be Linux certified.

Exam 102 covers topics such as System Architecture, Package Management (dpkg,rpm), Kernel and Module manipulation, Compiling a custom kernel, text editing and Printing (with LPR), Basic knowledge in Shell scripting (if,then,else,break case and more), X Windows system, Networking Fundamentals ( Which includes some TCP/IP basics and networking related tools ( traceroute,dig,route,dhcpd ), Networking services such as inet and xinet, NFS, basic knowledge in apache configuration files, of course, detailing about each and every topic is way out of the scope for this post, but I will try and collect all the important commands and subjects i came across with at my exam.

Please notice, these are highlights only, there are many things you need to know, this is just an overview on some of them and I’ve collected things I came across with during the tests! this isn’t enough to get prepared.

System Architecture: I came across questions regarding the interrupts of serial and parallel ports. pay close attention to IRQ numbers for the possible devices, also, try to explore some regarding the 1024 cylinder limitations and how it works out with Lilo (actually, it doesn’t work properly – it must be installed below that limit).

Linux installation and Package management: you should be familiar with the hierarchy of the top level directories and how to plan an installation of an operating system, the advantages of giving some of them a partition for themselves, such as the /var directory and size for swap partition compared to the HDD. a good & planned installation architecture will simply give you better performance and will make your life much easier if you find yourself in a position where you need to troubleshoot your system.

An important subject is knowing the extracting and compressing tools such as tar and gzip. you will need to know the options available for each of them, also, get to know how to compile software from source with configure and make. and their order.

Another very important and common subject ( Notice! there WILL be at least 3-4 questions about it ) is the rpm and dpkg commands with their options, try to suit yourself a good way of remembering them because they might be a just a wee bit confusing at first, but they really aren’t.

Reconfiguring, building and installing custom kernel, there will be at least 2 questions about how it’s done, sometimes in the form of “What is the order of customizing a new kernel” with given commands.

Printing: get to know how to handle print queues with lpc,lpq, also ,lpr,lprm will be involved in the questions.

Shell Scripting: in my opinion, the best way to understand bash is to just take a look at pre-made examples of simple bash scripts, get to know the if then else , and some looping, there will be at least 1 question about it, notice : you are not asked to script something yourself, it’s a matter of knowing if the command is going to work according to the given code or maybe to type in the missing syntax. get to know the /etc/profile /etc/bashrc and the users .profile .bashrc .bash_login files, and how changing them affect users.

X server: X display manager is necessary to understand, termination of X applications and customizing a windows manager environment. get to know gdm kdm and xdm. in addition, X Fonts is also necessary to get familiar with. (X fonts topic has been dropped from the exams and it is only necessary to be aware of it)

Networking: TCP/IP, that’s how I sum it up, know the differences between UDP and TCP, port numbers, some ip addressing and Classes, converting from an ip to binary WILL show up on the exam (that’s  at least what happened to me anyway).

troubleshooting network problems with ping/traceroute/dig/nslookup. get to know the available tools out there. also setting up an ethernet card with the command line (with ifconfig) is required.

NFS – /etc/exports is the file you need to read some about, how to get your files shared across a network, be sure you to install the required packages;

apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

apt-get install nfs-common

the ports you need to open for it are 2049 and 111.

DNS – Very important, there are few files you need to be aware of, /etc/hosts , /etc/nsswitch.conf , /etc/resolv.conf and each one of them does something unique of its own, there will be at least 2 questions about those files and how the syntax should look like in each of them. for example:

in /etc/resolv.conf, it’s necessary to know that a DNS server will look like this:

search your.domain

nameserver 10.0.0.1

nameserver 10.0.0.2

Security: services over the system must have some defense, the more running services the easier it is to compromise your system, TCP Wrappers /hosts.allow /hosts.deny, tcpd logging are all things that should look close to familiar before you decide to take the exam, some SSH security configuration is also good for your knowledge not to mention good for your own computer if your computer serves you remotely (FTP,ssh,telnet,home based domain)

Before taking the exam, consider in mind to give braindumps a try, use www.examcollection.com and navigate to LPI page, to get a clue of what kind of questions may appear on the examץ

Please notice, these are highlights only, there are many things you need to know, this is just an overview on some of them and I’ve collected things I came across with during the tests! this isn’t enough to get prepared.

• Be sure you know what environment variables are and what do we need them for, use echo $PATH to find out your own, set some of your own to get a clue how it’s done with PATH=$PATH:/your-environment-variables or with the export command.

• Get sharp with the bash shell commands, text editing (vi) and streaming with sed, piping with |, redirecting sterr stdout stdin with >  and more.

• Get familiar with text processing filters such as cut, grep , head, tail, join, uniq, paste split, tr, wc, diff.

• Get familiar with copying, moving, creating , deleting files and directories with rm,cp,mv,mkdir,touch.

• Understand the linux system hierarchy system and understand what goes where under the top root directory and the sub-directories like  /usr/ ,logs and mail at /var , /proc , configuration files at /etc and the rest of their friends.

• Perform basic search with locate (updatedb), find and whereis, whatis, apropos

• monitor, kill, re-nice running processes with top,kill,renice,nice,ps,pstree and more. get familiar with the differences between the killsignals.

• job control with bg, fg, jobs (&)

• Partitioning commands and creating partitions with mkswap, fdisk, mkfs. 

• Maintain integrity of the filesystems with df, du and fsck and get to know the types of existing filesystems (ext2,3,4 nfs, swap, vfat and more)

• Set disk quota with quotaon, quotaoff, repquota, edquota, quotacheck and check quota for users.

• Know the file permissions differences, and octal formats (e.g  777, -rwxrwxrwx) how to change the file owner / group with chown chgrp command and how to change permissions with chmod.

• Know the differences between hard and soft links (ln command)

• Lilo and Grub boot loaders (Lilo is planned to be dropped or may have been dropped already from the corriculum)

• Boot time messages and kernel loggings (/var/log/dmesg /var/log/messages)

• Runlevels 0 to 6  and their startup/kill scripts.

• How to use the man pages properly (pipe with less or more)

• /etc/passwd and /etc/group ( and /etc/shadow,/etc/gshadow)

• Adding & deleting new users with useradd & userdel, changing existing parameters for an exisiting user with usermod , same goes for adding new groups and with groupadd and groupmod. and change user aging and expiration settings with chage.

• Know the differences between /etc/profile and /etc/bashrc, and know that changes to them affect users all over the system.

• Automating tasks with at and cronjobs (/etc/crontab and crontab -e)

• Get familiar with system backups with mt and tar