From an Email to an Exam: Developing LPIC-2 Version 4.5

The news that version 4.5 of the LPIC-2 objectives for the 201 and 202 exams was released on February 13th 2017 means that we can already congratulate our first candidates on earning their LPIC-2 certification based on the new objectives.

LPI certification and exam objectives are a community-created, global standard that document the skills required by a Linux professional at each respective level.

Certification objectives describe what we expect a candidate to know, not only for their career aspirations, but also in order to pass our exams.

They set the scope of the exam and guide our candidates through their studies; helping them to make decisions about which topics to prioritise and to fill in blanks in their knowledge. Additionally, they help courseware authors and training partners to allocate pages and time to specific subjects.

Setting this standard requires a lot of involvement from the open source community and the development of the updated LPIC-2 certification started almost ten months before its final release.

The updated exam versions would not be possible nor credible without the engagement of our community. Everyone who took a beta exam, participated in online and local discussions and took our surveys did a great job in providing us with feedback and ideas which help us maintain our certification standards.

There were many more people who helped to prepare the new version of LPIC-2. To name a few of them, our German and Japanese translation teams worked hard to get their translated version ready; publishers and authors adapted their books and materials to match the new objectives; subject matter experts reviewed and ranked the questions to ensure that they are fair and appropriate.

In case you’re about to take an LPIC-2 exam soon, you should make yourself familiar with the updated exams. Our wiki hosts the new LPIC-2 version 4.5 objectives as well as a summary of the changes in version 4.5. If you’ve been studying against the 4.0 version of the LPIC-2 objectives, previous versions of exams which cover the prior version of the objectives are available for six months after a new release.

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LPIC OT DevOPs Engineer - Request for help in the Job Task Analysis (JTA)

Some of my readers may know that I am the Chair for the Board of Directors of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI).  Like many things I do, this is a volunteer job, and I could not do it without help from many other volunteers.

Founded in 1999, LPI was created as a Canadian based non-profit to “certify users of computer software programs” and “facilitate the exchange of information between computer users”. Since that time LPI has delivered over 500,000 tests, and currently has over 200,000 certificate holders in over 180 countries.

The certifications so far are on four major levels, known as “LPI Linux Essentials (LE)”, “Linux Administrator (LPIC-1)”, “Linux Systems Engineer (LPIC-2)” and a variety of advanced topics at the LPIC-3 level such as “Security”, “Virtualization and High Availability” and “Mixed Environment”.

LPI separates the function of “certification” from “learning”, allowing potential job seekers to study the objectives for each test and to pick the method of learning that suits them best, whether it be self-study, reading articles on the Internet or from magazines and books, or taking a formal course from one of LPI's many partners.

LPI is a community-based model for developing its certifications. LPI first creates a “Job Task Analysis” to see what types of tasks and knowledge that someone needs to do a particular job. LPI reaches out to the community of people who are actually performing that job or managing those people. LPI then gathers these job tasks, analyzes them, and creates a list of these tasks. After the JTA is created, LPI then approaches this community of people and asks of them what types of questions would these people ask of a job candidate to determine that they could do those tasks correctly. Finally, give that list of questions, LPI approaches the community to find out what answers would be expected as “correct”.

After this procedure the test questions are put into beta tests, given to potential certification holders, and the tests and answers run through a process called psychometrics that uses statistics to help assure the quality of the testing procedure.

Recently LPI decided to create an LPI Certification Open Technology for DevOPs named “LPIC-OT DevOps Engineer Certification”. Unlike other LPI tests (which were GNU/Linux oriented), this certification is OS neutral, and therefore hopefully useful for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Apple and (perhaps even) Microsoft Windows DevOps Engineers. The certification will test the ability of the candidate to create a DevOps workflow and to optimize their daily administration and development tasks. One major concession to LPI's strategy, however, is to focus on “Open Source” and freely available DevOPs tools and procedures when available versus closed source tools.

Therefore LPI is asking DevOps engineers and managers to participate in defining the Job Task Analysis. If you are willing to help LPI (and in the traditional FOSS way, eventually helping yourself).

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LPIC-3 320.1 Avoiding the Heartbleed Bug by Installing from Source

LPIC-3 Objective 320.1

In this tutorial we look at the real need to work with the very latest version of software from the source when security is involved.

Even though it is most likely that recent distribution updates will include  later version of OpenSSL we need to make sure that we avoid version 1.01 through to version 1.0.1f as these are affected by the Heartbleed bug. Earlier versions in the 1.0.0 branch are fine as is 0.9.8. A quick check on my Raspberry Pi and it is running OpenSSL version 1.0.1e, not good.

The version of openSSL can be checked running:

$ openssl version

This is true in the Raspberry Pi up to and including the latest version of Debian Wheezy, 7.8 Image that I downloaded  during February 2016:

In any case, it is your responsibility to ensure your system is running safely and securely and often that does mean downloading from source.  The latest version from OpenSSL currently as this is written is 1.0.2 and this is what we will download and compile:

$ cd 
wget https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.2.tar.gz
tar -xzvf openssl-1.0.2.tar.gz
cd openssl-1.0.2
./configure
make 
sudo make install

Once installed we should be able to see the new version and relax knowing that our system is now safe from Heartbleed. To display more information about OpenSSL we can use the option:

$ openssl -a

There will be more tutorials following to help with this LPIC-3 objective but for the moment lets ensure we are are running 1.0.1f or later and watch the video:

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