I recently took and passed my Linux Foundation Certified SysAdmin certification. The certification examination consists of SSHing into a remote machine and performing a set of tasks. The tasks cover all the basic operations you would be expected to perform while working as a system administrator; creating and configuring file systems, using SELinux/AppArmor, adding users/groups, setting up RAID, etc.

I believe practical examinations are an improvement over written examinations at demonstrating the holder’s knowledge of Linux. However, I have a singular issue with the LFCS exam, that being the maximum time allowance. During the examination, you are asked to perform specific exercises, with no access to the internet, you can easily spend ten or fifteen minutes scrolling through the man pages. Yet you could find the specific argument/flag within seconds via a search engine.

Allowing the usage of the internet to search for command arguments/flags quickly, this would stop capable system administrators from being bogged down and failing just because they could not remember a specific command/argument. This would make the examination easier but they could counter-balance this by increasing the complexity of the questions, so someone just using Google not understanding what they are doing can not copy and paste their way into becoming certified.

Because of the specific nature of the questions, I would not advise anyone who has not already used Linux and had years of experience as a systems administrator to take the exam. Without already having any experience, you would need to memorise a lot of different commands and arguments to be able to keep up with the exam’s pace to achieve a passing mark. Online I have seen numerous people with no prior experience saying they have re-take it four or five times to pass.