[Wolves] LPIC?

[Barbie]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 11:36:02PM +0200, Lee Parkes wrote:
> Hi folks,
> Has anyone had any experience of the LPI certs? Are they worth doing? I know 
> that certs are sometimes seenas being irrelevant or worse, but I'd like to get
> some certs for future employment prospects. So, are LPI certs:
> 
> * Worth the time taken to study?
> * Expensive?
> * Relevant?

The short answer is Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV).

The long answer really depends on the experience of those who have taken
the courses and exams.

Personally I found the courses were good if they are given by LPI
recommended trainers. They know their stuff and in my experience have
been good at explaining clearly some complex situations.

However, I have rarely met anyone who is a serious sysadmin ever look on
the exams in a favourable light. You may consider me bitter and twisted,
but I failed the LPI 201 exam because I didn't know who wrote the Linux
documentation manuals, and apparently using Google to find how to use a
particular command is not a valid answer. 

Some colleagues at work recently took the courses and exam, and the
course lecturers received a lot of criticism for the fact the questions
are based on an old version of Red Hat with a 2.4 kernel. No reference
to Fedora or even RHEL, which we are using.

Many of the questions are just memory tests of command line options,
without really understanding what the options actually do. In the
computerised version I took, I added lots to the comments for each
question because they were so badly worded. 

A friend of mine, who was expected to walk the exam, as he is probably
the best sysadmin I've ever met, found errors and ambiguous questions,
and consequently got less than 80%.

For some companies the actual exam is consider irrelevent, but the fact
you did the course may count for something. Unfortunately I don't know
how much the courses cost, as work paid for them.

You may want to investigate the Red Hat exams as they are held in higher
regard than LPI.

Cheers,
Barbie.
-- 
Birmingham Perl Mongers <http://birmingham.pm.org>
Memoirs Of A Roadie <http://barbie.missbarbell.co.uk>