I've been suspicious of professional certification exams for a long time. Part of it is that I've heard a lot of flack about Microsoft certifications. Specifically, that the best thing they test is how well you study for Microsoft certification. For that reason, I've resisted taking any of the Linux certification exams. Although I have 15 years worth of experience in Unix-related operating systems, I've always suspected that I wouldn't do well on a certification exam because I wouldn't have studied the specific exam prep materials.

I have heard good things about Red Hat certification. Bcause it basically consists of being handed a broken machine and having to fix it, it more accurately reflects the kind of day-to-day experiences that a Linux system administrator goes through. I feel that exams that depend on your memorizing commands and key phrases aren't very realistic, because in a real-world environment you're usually going to have access to things like man-pages. As a result, they reward people who have either crammed by taking preparation courses, or have naturally good memories.

However, the Linux Professional Institute's offer to let people take the LPI 101 Certification exam (the first half of the "Junior SA certification") for free at LinuxWorld in Boston gave me a golden opportunity to test my premise. I promised myself that I wouldn't do anything special beyond simply checking what material would be covered on the exam.

On the day of the show I chatted up the folks at the LPI booth and was assured that if I had really spent that much time working with Unix and Linux I shouldn't have any trouble passing the exam. At the appointed hour, I showed up in the room and was handed a paper exam, causing flashbacks to the college entrance exams I had taken 25 years ago. Sure, it's a little retro to be taking an exam using paper in this day and age, but what the heck. It probably keeps the cost down, and the LPI exams at around $100 a shot are certainly inexpensive as certification exams go.

The questions generally fell into two categories, command-line brain teasers like how to extract the middle 10 lines from a 30 line file; and questions that offered several possible commands to do a given task, some of which might not even exist. I was surprised how little "command argument bingo" there was on the test, questions like "is the correct argument to this command -f or -m."

Unfortunately, the last 10 questions on the exam are exactly that kind of thing. They cover using package installs, you select either Red Hat or Debian. Frankly, whenever I need to do anything out of the ordinary with RPM, which is what I normally use, I look it up in the man-page. Esoteric commands to query the status of installed packages aren't something I do every day. After the exam the exam author indicated to me that this section is going to be changed soon to reflect more realistically the kind of things a Unix administrator would know off the tip of his or her tongue.

I finished the exam in about 30 minutes, well inside the time allowed (in fact, I was the second person done in a room of 20 or so.) There was least one question that I believe was incorrectly worded. Talking with the exam organizer afterwards, he agreed but wouldn't let me go back and change the answer because if everyone got the wrong answer, having me answer correctly would skew the results.

So, how did I do? Basically, I squeaked by. You need a score of 500 to pass. I got 520 (out of a range of 200 to 840 on the day I participated). On the low end, I only got 57% of the package install questions right (not surprising). On the other hand, I got 86% of the "Devices, Linux Filesystems, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" questions right.

Now I have a dilemma. Should I study and take the second part of the test? Or should I try it cold? Part of me wouldn't mind having the certification. Part of me feels it would be selling out to study for the test. I think I'll compromise and do a basic review of the material based on looking at what's listed as categories covered on LPI's site.

Is the LPI exam fair, one that realistically tested my abilities as a system administrator? It's hard to say. Certainly someone who never touched Linux wouldn't be able to pass, but it doesn't really test problem-solving abilities. If I were an employer, I might use it as a first-level filter to see if the person is serious about the technology. It certainly doesn't replace an in-depth interview and perhaps some practical test of one's abilities. Until you see how someone deals with a real-life situation, you're not really going to know how in-depth his skill set is and you're not going to know how well he approaches problems.