Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS)
What the LFCS certification is, how its hands-on exam works, and the full scope of material covered by the LFS201 course.
Published 1 min read
- LFCS
- Linux
- certification
- sysadmin
Linux is the number one operating system for network servers, cloud computing, smartphones and consumer electronics. Handing administration to people with verified competencies translates directly into whether an organisation runs reliably.
What makes LFCS different
The Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator certification targets people at an advanced stage of working with Linux and open source. The key difference: the exam is not multiple choice. It consists of tasks performed live on a running system, simulating situations an administrator actually encounters at work.
Certificate no. LFCS-1900-002547-0100, obtained on 26 November 2019.
Scope of material (LFS201)
The exam requires fluency with the material of the year-long LFS201 course, covering 44 chapters. Grouped by theme:
File systems and disks: filesystem tree layout, disk partitioning, filesystem attributes, creation, checking and mounting, swap and quotas, ext2/ext3/ext4, XFS and btrfs, disk encryption, LVM, RAID.
Processes and performance: processes, signals, system and process monitoring, memory monitoring and tuning, I/O monitoring and tuning, I/O scheduling.
Packages: package management systems RPM, DPKG, yum, zypper and APT.
Kernel and devices: kernel services and configuration, kernel modules, devices and udev.
Virtualization: virtualization and containers overview.
Users and permissions: user account and group management, file permissions and ownership, PAM.
Networking: network addresses, network devices and configuration, firewalls.
System startup: system startup and shutdown, GRUB, systemd, SystemV and Upstart.
Security and recovery: Linux security modules, local system security, backup and recovery methods, basic troubleshooting, system rescue.
Why it matters in practice
A hands-on exam verifies what a quiz cannot: whether an administrator can bring a system to the expected state given a terminal and the documentation. That is precisely the skill that determines how long service restoration takes during an outage.