(λ (x) (create x) '(knowledge))

LFCE

Lessons Learned · December 21st, 2021

So I sat for my LFCE (Linux Foundation Certified Engineer) certification exam on the 19th, and it's safe to say that I don't think I did particularly well. In fact, I got my official results today, and they definitively say I need improvement. And you know what, while that sucks, I'm okay with it.

The exam is challenging, and the expectation is that you know the domains inside and out. If you are not prepared to spin up an LDAP server, with clients authenticated against it, as well as user and groups configured, and you cannot manage all of that in 15min without thinking about how you need to go about doing it, then simply put you aren't ready. And I'm certainly not that level of proficient with services I don't use regularly in my home-lab, or at work. It's easy enough to change some of that, but you won't get anywhere just reading content, or practicing some of it and hoping nobody asks you to configure an SMTP service. The exam is just not designed to be that forgiving to someone who wants the title.

So what's the plan? Obviously double down on the domain topics and really brush up on the things I feel I was weakest on. The domain topics are pretty honest, anything listed is fair game and they expect you to have a decent level of knowledge about the services listed, so that's what I need, but to speak in specifics you'll likely see some blog posts about the following things in the coming days/weeks as I use the blog as a way to drill these topics into my head. Maybe that'll help it stick, and help me brush up on my technical writing skills.

  • Iptables
  • LDAP
  • Clustering
    • pcsd
    • Corosync
    • Pacemaker
  • DNS
    • Authoritative DNS
    • Cached DNS
  • Apparmor

With documentation none of these topics are too terribly difficult to deal with, but being able to inherently remember and instinctively know the exact iptables arguments to perform a given task, or being able to throw together a Zone file without thinking are just not things I do regularly, so that's what I'm looking to fix.

Honestly though, had I just had more confidence with iptables and LDAP going into the exam I likely would have passed. So stay tuned, we'll be getting real technical over the next month with a retake scheduled for early February 2022.

Bio

(defparameter *Will_Sinatra* '((Age . 31) (Occupation . DevOps Engineer) (FOSS-Dev . true) (Locale . Maine) (Languages . ("Lisp" "Fennel" "Lua" "Go" "Nim")) (Certs . ("LFCS"))))

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