Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) Exam Experience

Recently I passed another exam - LFCS, and decided to share a bit of my preparation and exam experience

There is a lot of different information on the internet, here I’m describing my own experience

What you need to know about the exam:

• it is a practical exam, not a test
• you need to work through a browser, where a Linux host system will be available, and then you connect to different virtual machines via ssh
• you have 120 minutes for everything
• answers will be checked by automated tests

I started preparing in advance, with a practical course https://learn.kodekloud.com/user/courses/linux-foundation-certified-system-administrator-lfcs

There you can practice right away for better memorization, and as a bonus - at the end there are 4 mock exams, quite close to the real one

Then I used AI capabilities - I asked ChatGPT to come up with different questions and completed its tasks

Sometimes I even just wrote commands in a notepad and asked it to check me, some of them I literally had to memorize

Here is a short list of what I practiced with ChatGPT:

• find
• sed / grep / awk
• tar
• redirection
• LVM
• iptables
• fstab / mount
• systemd
• SSH config
• Nginx
• Docker
• certificates
• sudoers
• ACL / umask

Also, when you purchase the exam, they give you two sessions on the website https://killer.sh/

I mistakenly thought that they would give me different mock exams for 36 hours and that I could seriously level up during that time... But no)

In reality, they simply give you one mock exam, even the second session launches the same one again, with the same questions

The plus side is that you can get familiar with the interface in advance (it is almost the same in the real exam)

You can see my version here http://image.lifeblog.pro/u/toX4s5.pdf

So overall, it’s all about practice and memorizing key commands

All the mock exams I took turned out to be about 2 times harder than the real exam

During the exam, I immediately started going through the questions quickly; if I encountered something difficult, I flagged it right away and postponed that question for later.

This way I managed to return to one of them and solve it 10 minutes before the end, while two more questions I couldn’t finish; they had simple commands, but I kind of froze there))

In the end, out of 17 tasks I completed 15, the result:

You need to understand that the tasks are graded in parts, with several checks for each one, so even completing something partially can already earn you points, and the tasks also have different weights depending on the topic

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You can also install TLDR during the exam - a cheat sheet for commands https://tldr.sh/


apt install pipx

pipx install tldr


To be fair, it wouldn’t install on the main host for me and I gave up on it, but later I still tried installing it on one of the remote virtual machines, and there it installed without any problems, apparently some kind of “foolproof protection” )) but in the end I managed without it anyway

Good luck with your studies and passing your exams 👨‍🎓