Pass Linux Foundation LFCS Exam in First Attempt Easily

Introduction

1. Introduction

Hello, and welcome to LFC's certification exam course. Now let's talk about the exam. The LFCs certification exam is performance based.This means you won't have to memorise answers to multiple-choice questions like you might on other exams. This one is performance-based, meaning that you'll be tested online using a CLI (command-line interface) where you'll be typing in commands and performing tasks as you are asked to do during the exam. What makes this exam more unique or the certification more unique? Is it available anytime, anywhere? That means you don't have to be at a specific testing station in order to perform this exam or take this exam. You can take it anywhere as long as you fulfil the basic requirements for hardware, which, for instance, is that you have to have this specific hardware available. You have to have a webcam and a microphone so that the proctors can monitor you while you're taking the exam. This certification is also distro flexible.That means you'll have a choice at the beginning of the exams whether you want to take the exam in CentOS, Ubuntu, or maybe Susan Linux. So you have a choice of doing that. So that's why it's distro friendly.If you are more used to working on Ubuntu and you prefer that, then you can choose that. So you don't have to stick to a specific vendor or a specific flavour of Linux. This exam is always up to date. It's a community-based Linux foundation, which itself is community-based, and that's why the exam questions are real-life questions that are submitted by exam developers from all over the world. Now we're going to discuss the domain and competencies for version 3.18, which will begin in April of 2018. This is the latest domain and competency information available. This, of course, can be changed at any time without any notice. So it's a good idea to always check the Linux Foundation website. That's where you can get the most latest and up-to-date information about any kind of domain change. So this is how the exam is going to be formulated. There will be Essentials Command Sections, which will be 25% of the exam, Operation of the Writing System, which is 20% of the exam, and Group Management, which is going to be 10% of the exam. Service Configuration, which will be 20% of the exam, and Storage Management, which is 13% of the exam. Now we'll briefly go over each one of these to see what's going to be included. So Essential Commands, although it's going to have more than a dozen parts in it that we're going to cover, I picked just about five in each of those sections just to give you an idea of what each of the modules or each of the subsections of this exam is going to contain. So, Essential Commands How do you log in, log in, search for files, compare and manipulate files, create, delete, copy, and move files, and manage access to the root account? Next section which will beoperation of running systems. How do you boot, reboot, and shut down a system? How do you diagnose and manage processes that are running on a system? How do you schedule tasks to run at specific times, which is also called cron, which we are going to learn later on? How to change the kernel, runtime parameters, and how to manage software on the next machine User and Group Management How do we create, delete, or modify local user accounts? How do we manage a system-wide environment profile? How do we configure user resource limits, manage user privileges, configure PAM service configuration, configure caching DNS servers, how do we configure email addresses, configure an HTTP server, configure a database server, and how do we manage and configure virtual machines in a Linux environment? And the last section will be on storage management. We'll talk about listing, creating, deleting, and modifying storage. We will create and configure physical partitions for encrypted storage. We'll create and manage raid devices. We'll learn how to set up user and group disks, and we'll find out how to create and configure file systems. So this is how much and what we're going to cover in the upcoming modules. If you're coming from a background of knowing no Linux at all, you'll still be okay. I will go through every single thing, starting with how to install a Linux operating system in a virtual environment. So that way you have free software available, you don't have to purchase anything, and you don't have to buy any extra hardware except what you have, maybe a laptop or a PC, and we can just make use of that and install everything on that. So I look forward to seeing and hearing your feedback and comments about the course, and I'm very excited to teach it. So let's get started.

2. Linux distributions

Hello and welcome again. In this lecture, we're going to talk about Linux distributions, although there are probably dozens of them available. We're going to talk about the main ones, especially the ones that are used in production environments or in major companies or firms that are using Linux. So the first one, and the most commonly used, is Red Hat Linux. Red Hat is the vendor, and in order to use Red Hat, you have to have a license. It's not freely available software, but the best option available to use Red Hat without paying anything for it is CentOS, which is identical to Red Hat, but you don't pay for anything. It does not require a license. As a matter of fact, this does not even require you to register on their site; it simply takes you to the download, and I'll show you in a minute. Fedora is also the same thing as Red Hat and CentOS. However, because this is a developer operating system, I would not recommend it for a system administrator to use, especially in the beginning while learning Linux for this certification. So your best option out of these three will be Send, OS. And since I'm more familiar with and more used to using Sentos and Red Hat, the majority of my examples and hands-on practise are going to be in CentOS also. But I will definitely mention where it differs from other versions, like Ubuntu. And I'll definitely point out that when we're talking about package management, the commands are different in Ubuntu compared to Red Hat and are sent to us at Ubuntu. So we'll definitely make a point to let you know what the differences are. And last but not the least is another importantoperating system called Susan and that also comes intwo flavours the Sousa Leap which is the freeversion and then Susa Enterprise Linux which is SLAs. So again, for that one, you'll have to pay. But why do that when the Sousa Leap is available for free? We definitely should be using that. Okay, now let's check out the websites for each one of them. The first one is Centaus. This is the main site. You have a choice of downloading DVDs, ISO, everything ISO, or minimal ISO. So of course, when you're doing minimal ISO, you're not going to have the desktop and windowing environments; you'll have just a minimum server that you can download. So if this space is not an issue and downloading—which will take a while—is not an issue, I would definitely recommend that you download everything I saw. Okay, the next one is Ubuntu; that's Ubuntu.com, and the LTS is the long-term support version, and that's what we should be playing with when we are learning because the other version may be higher than this one. But the thing is that it's still under development and is still being tested. This is the stable version, so you can download that. None of these require you to register, so you don't have to provide your email address or anything. You simply click, and it'll start downloading. And most of these downloads are two gigabytes and above, so you are going to need some disc space. I would recommend it if the space is not a problem, and these days, discs are so cheap that it's really not a problem. If you could spare, like, about 20 GB, that will give you more than sufficient room to download all three of these in a virtual environment. Like giving about, say, ten to 15,about 10GB to each one of them. If you can do more, that's even better. The final one is open source. Again, this is why we're going to be using the Open Sousa Leap. The current version is 42.3. This also has the DVD image, which, as you can see, is 4.7GB. So that's a pretty big file as well. And then we're going to talk about VirtualBox. Remember, I've been talking about a virtual environment that we can install this in. So that way, you don't have to spend money on buying a new PC in order to pass the certification or install all these different flavors. You don't have to do any dual booting. Simply install VirtualBox on WindowsHost or, depending on which host you're reusing, on a Windows host. And then we'll install three virtual machines, each one with its own operating system. So it'll be like having three PCs within your PC or within your laptop, and we'll show you how to do that. It's very simple. So this is what we're going to do in the upcoming lectures. We're going to show you how to download them and how to install them, create a virtual machine, and then just go from there. So I hope to see you then.

3. CentOS download and Installation

Hello students. And in this lecture, we're going to cover the CentOS installation. So I'm at the Cento.org download page, and I'm going to click on a DVD. I want to install it because it will provide us with a graphical user interface. It's very similar to a Windows environment. So if you're coming from a Windows background, you'll feel more at home seeing that. So that's why I want to begin with that. As soon as you click that, it gives you a lot of mirror sites. So you have a choice of downloading from any of these, just depending on which one you are closer to. So, like, I can see in here. San Jose (SJC) is in California. So if you happen to live in California, this would probably be the closest site to you. So it will make a difference as far as how long it takes to download. I'm just going to click the very first one. And as soon as I click this, as you can see down here, it tells me that it's going to be a 4.2 GB file, which can be downloaded in the ISO format. So I'm going to click on "Save." This is a large file, so it will take up space on my system. They're talking about 30 minutes. So depending on your broadband connections, it may take more or less, but it will take a while. Right now, it's only at 1%. So I'm going to pause the video. This video is going to be paused quite often because I don't want to bore you with this waiting period. And also, once we start the installation, that will take a few minutes. Also, unless we come to a place where I want to show you the screenshot or the system is asking us a question before moving forward in the installation process, I will just pause the video and then restart it from where we should be starting from. So my download just finished, and now we're at VirtualBox. Let's create a virtual machine so we can install the central operating system that we have just e central operatOn my system, as I mentioned earlier, it took about half an hour, and that's when I paused the video. So let's click on New in VirtualBox, and we'll call this machine Sent OSLFCS. Click Next. This is where you apply the Ram. So in my case, I'll assign it four gigs next. Leave the rest as it is. Don't change anything. same on this screen, dynamically allocated. Then here, we're going to do the hard disc space. So its default is eight gigabytes. I'm going to give it about 20 on my default is eiright about there. And click on "Create Machine." as you can see at the bottom. Sorry about all these other machines because I work on other software as well. I do classes and other things. That's why you see all these other virtual machines that I've created. In your case, if you have just installed a fresh copy of VirtualBox, Then, of course, the sentence "Virtual Machine" is going to be the only one in your case. So on that, let's see if I can bring it up so you can see it better. Okay, now it's on the top. So I'm going to click. I can either click right-click on it and go to Settings, or I can just go to Settings like this. And the main thing here is storage. I go to this empty CD here, then click on this CD here, and then go to the location where I have downloaded my Sentas operating system. And if I go to Downloads, you'll see Santos X86 64-bit DVD. That's what I've just downloaded. and you can also see the size is 4.4 GB. So I'm going to click on "Open." As you can see, my disc is already attached. and then a couple of other things that I need to change here. In general, I changed nothing under "systems." I'm going to uncheck the floppy and bring up the optical drive first and then the hard drive display. I changed nothing. Storage: we already dealt with audio. I'm going to uncheck it because there's no need for an audio network. We are going to change it. But for now, since we're just doing the installation, I'm not going to mess with it. USB, unchecked that as well, and then click okay. And then as soon as we're done with that, as you can see, it says "Powered Off." I'm going to click on Start, and they'll start the installation. And this is our main menu. And don't test the media because the media is good and it will just waste about ten minutes. If you do have the time, feel free to do it because the other option is to test this media and install it. I'm just going to go ahead and click on ou do have thOnce the installation is started, the first screen that you're going to see after the installation process goes through, don't touch any of the keyboard buttons, don't stop anything, and it'll automatically come to this page where you're going to select the language. In my case, I'm going to just keep it at United States and English here and click on Continue. Okay, there are a couple of changes I'm going to make here. So first we'll come down to installation media, which in our case is already showing that it's selected the installation media. And I'm just going to select Done here because there's nothing to be changed here. And then I'm going to come to software selection. And here I'm going to click on the server with the GUI. That's my software selection. I'm going to click on "Done" here as well. And then I'm going to click on InstallationDestination, which is my 20-gigabyte hard drive. And I'm not adding any more hard drives to it. So I'll just click on "done here." And as you can see, this exclamation sign or this yellow triangle that you were seeing earlier has disappeared from all of them. That means they have been checked off as "good" now. And I can click on "Begin installation," and this will start the installation process. There are a couple of things I can do here as well. I can set the root password, and I'm just going to give it a very simple password test. And as you can see, it's telling me it's a weak password. So of course, if you're doing this in a production environment, you've got to use a more encrypted password. But I'm only doing it to demonstrate something; you can see it at the bottom. Also, the password you have provided is a weak password. So what happened in this case is that when there is a weak password, you have to click Done twice. Basically the system is asking you are yousure you want to configure this week password? So click on "Done" and click on "Done" again. So it asks you twice for user creation. So let's create a non-root user also, although we'll do a lot of our things with the root user, and we're going to create a non-root user as well. I'm going to call him Larry just to keep it simple. Same password, and I'm going to click on Done and again on Done. And now it's going to go through the installation process. As you can see on the screen, our installation has finished and it's asking us to reboot. So we're just going to go ahead and select the Reboot ne and againOnce you reboot, don't touch anything; let it go through the core installation, which is defaulted, and you don't need to mess with any of those ongoing messages. And when it comes to this message, you just click on "License Information," and it's a very simple two-line license. It's basically telling you that you're agreeing to this end-user licence agreement. Just click Accept on this and clickon Done and click on Finish Installation. And then you'll come to the prompt—the login prompt. Our user is Larry. So I'm going to hit Enter here and the password, and we should be seeing the windowing environment pretty soon here. This is it. So now we have deployed CentOS, and it's showing our default language is English, which is already selected, and we're going to click on Next here. When you start typing, it's already set to "English," "US," and you can change it depending on where you live. And if you want to change your keyboardselection, keyboard layout, you can change it here. I'm going to click "Next location surveys." This allows applications to determine your geographic location, so I have it on by default and connect to your online account. You can connect to any of your online accounts here. I don't want to do this. And now it's going to say that you're ready to go. Basically, this is it. This is how you install it, and we did it successfully. And this is the main page. just going to go ahead and minimise it or actually close it. And as you can see on top here, you have applications. There are different kinds of applications that you can access from here. just like you do in Microsoft Windows. Also. There's also another option that says Places. So I click on "Application," and there's System Tools. under system tools. You see a terminal. So I can click on "terminal." And this gives us the Terminal. This is where we're going to type in most of our commands. This is where we'll do the majority of our preparation for the exam and certification. Okay, so this is it for now. We'll just leave it here, and we'll continue with the installation of Ubuntu in the next lecture.

4. Ubuntu download and Installation

Hello and welcome again In this lecture we're going to download and install Ubuntu. I'm on Ubuntu.com right now. So as opposed to To.Org for CentOS, Ubuntu's website is To.com/sogo to download, and then you have the option of getting either cloud, core, or server or desktop. So we're going to go with the server, and when you click on Server, you have Ubuntu Server 16/4 LTS, which, as I mentioned before, is the long-term support. It's the stable version, although you have a newer version available, but we're going to go with the stable version, and since we are in 2018 now, March, most probably there's going to be another version of Ubuntu coming out pretty soon. But as far as our class is concerned and the training for our certification, it should not really affect that much. Even if the newer version does come out, it's not going to change a whole lot. It's going to have new features, but Linux is still going to remain the same. So I'm going to click on Download, and then, as you can see down at the bottom here, it's going to be 848 megabytes. That's what the size of the serverISO file is going to be. So I'm going to click on Save, and it's going to save it in my Downloads folder. Okay, so our download has completed now. So now we're going to go to VirtualBox again to create another virtual machine like we did for CentOS, and we'll go from there. So we are at VirtualBox, and now we're going to create another new machine. I'm going to call this one Ubuntu LFCs, and as you can see, it already picked Linux as the operating system and version open to 64 bit. In case of your machine is 32 bit then you'regoing to have to switch it to 32 bit. Okay, the options are available. Next we're going to switch to 4GB of memory. We're going to keep the rest as it is, and I'm going to change all 10GB. I'm going to change it to 20 or close to 30. So depending on what your disc situation is, if you have to assign less, then you can go with just 10 GB, but if you can give more, that's fine; that's going to work out better. And click on "Create." I created it at the bottom of the screen, so I'm going to pull it up so you can see it better. Here it is. Ubuntu LFCs and CentOS LFCs These are the two machines. So now, if you remember, we'll go to Settings. The first thing is storage. Click on Empty, click on the CD, go to this link, and this is the download folder. It automatically takes you there. And now I'm going to search for Ubuntu, and here it is: Ubuntu 16 dot four R dot four, and I'm going to click on open it attached, click okay, and now we're going to start it. This is the first screen that we're going to get in Ubuntu, and it's defaulted to English. So I'm going to keep it at English, hit Enter, and then install. These are all the options available. So I'm going to keep it at Install Ubuntu Server and hit Enter. It's going to start installing. Okay. Our installation is at the point where it's asking for the host name so we can call it LLCs. Remember, the name we gave earlier was for the virtual machine. In Linux, this is the actual hostname, so click Continue. It's asking for a full name for the new user. Just like we created a user in Ubuntu, we're going to call him first. Call him Carly. Continue. Choose a password. Continue. Re-enter the password. It's saying my password is too weak. And we'll say, "Okay, that's fine, you can use the password." Encrypt your directory. I don't want to encrypt my directory at this point. It detected my time zone as being US Chicago.So is this correct? Or if it's not correct, I'm going to say it is correct. So I'll just take it. It's asking me to use the entire disc and set up LVM. We're going to set up LVM later on. So I'm just going to say to use the entire disc for now, trying to keep this installation as simple as possible. It's just giving you a final warning that if you take all of these settings, it'll erase everything on your hard drive. And since it's a virtual hard drive, it's really not going to affect anything on my PC. So I'm going to say yes. Okay. So in order to access the Internet, it's asking me right now if I need to put in any proxy, and I can leave it blank if I want to. So I'm going to leave it blank. Okay. And in the installation, you get the choice of automatic updates, security updates, installing automatically, or managing the system with Landscape, which is an additional add-on from a company called Canonical. and right now we don't want to use it. We'll just say install security update automatically. But it's up to you what you want to keep. Good. Then we are up to the software selection. The standard system utilities are already checked. These are all the other things that we are eventually going to install in this course. But I want to do it manually so that I can show you. Instead of having the system installed automatically, the only thing I'm going to pick here is the OpenSSH server. I want that to install.Okay. Now the installation is asking me to install the Grub bootloader to the master boot record. I'm going to say yes. And finally, we get this message that says installation is complete now. So I'm going to hit Continue. So after the reboot after the installation. The system is now at the CLI, and I'm logged in as the user currently on the system, so this is it as far as Ubuntu is concerned since we have installed the server version, which is why you're not seeing a GUI, and this is a server, so in a data centre you would not need a GUI anyways. I just wanted to show it in centimetres to show you what it looked like. So we are done with the winter for now, and we'll come back to it later on in the next lecture. We cannot talk about Susan Linux and how to download and install until then.

5. Suse Leap download and Installation

Students. We are going to download Open Sousa or Sousa Leap in this lecture. So the site is software.opensousa.org. and if you go down, you're going to see Tumbleweed, which is the non-stable version, which means there are changes made in it. Quite often new features are added, and the stable version is Open Source Elite. So we're going to click on that and then go down and click on the DVD image. I'm going to pick a mirror site, and depending on where you live, I'm going to click the very first one. And it's sitting right here. It's 4.32 Gigabytes. And I'm going to click on "Save." So, as you can imagine, this is a lot of download, so it will take a while for it to download. Okay, our download is done for open source. We are back in our virtual box. And this time I'm going to create our third virtual machine. and this is going to be SUSE. Susa and LFCs As you can see, it's already been picked apart. Sousa 64-bit Linux is an operating system. Click Next and then I'm going to increase the ramp to four gig. Next, keep the default like we did previously, Next.And I'm going to increase the hard drive size to 20 gigabytes and create it, so our third virtual machine is created. We'll go back to Settings, storage empty. Click on the disc and then choose "Let's see where we downloaded open source right here." Click on "Open" and then "System," and uncheck the "Floppy" general box. We don't have to change anything. USB unchecked and then Audio unchecked. Then we're going to click Okay. and we'll start the virtual machine. And we'll go with Installation from the options. Our first screen is about the licence agreement. We'll just go over that and click on Next, and then click on Next again. And now we can select our time zone. In my case, it's central. Click Next. KDE on the desktop or the genome on the desktop So we'll just keep it at KDE. User's full name Let's call this one MO. Password. A password is too simple. I'm fine with it. password for root. I'm going to keep it the same. I don't want to forget it during the class. So that's why I'm keeping it very simple. It's warning me again, and I'll say yes. It gives you a final list of what's going to be installed, and you can go over the software. And then I'm going to click Install. Okay. So our installation is done. And what I'm going to do is come back to VirtualBox. Right-click on the virtual machine. going to storage. Right click. I'm going to click on the CD, and I'm going to remove the attachment. I've seen this happen in some operating systems. It automatically gets removed after the installation is done. But sometimes you have to physically remove it. Otherwise, it's going to keep booting into the CD instead of the hard drive. So now we can go back to the system and uncheck optical and make the hard drive our first one, and actually recheck optical afterwards in case you want to use it later. Or I can leave it unchecked, and that's it. And you do all that while the machine is powered off. And how do you power off? Virtual machine in VirtualBox, this is how you do it. Start has all the options. Right now, it's got normal Start, then Close, although it's not visible right now, but Close is going to have one option. They'll say "power off." So I'm about to start the machine. One thing I noticed during the installation of Susan Linux just now is that a certain package sometimes stopped working and he couldn't install it. And you have the option of either ignoring it or trying it again. So just click on it, try again, or retry, and it will install it. I'm not sure why it happened, but it did happen a couple of times. So don't ignore it because that package must be a dependency, or maybe a dependency for another package that's going to be installed later on. So don't ignore it. Just try again and it will install. Okay, we are at the login pendency forWhen we are logged into our Sousa leap windowing system, it is a little difficult to start the console because there is no terminal or console option when we right click. So you press Alt + 2 and it will bring up this window, and in this window type console with the letter K. So as soon as I do K-O-N, it shows all the options. And when I try to do the first one, this console appears. And it's too small right now. I can view it in large font, and I can do it two or three times to bring it to the size that I want. There you go. And this is where you type in "command more." Let's see the password. And once you're done using it, press Alt-F4 and it'll disappear. And you can just kind of look around to see what else their applications have available and what home directory network options we're going to work with later on. So we'll work on all of this. You can feel free to browse around to see what else is in here. And so this is our installation of the third and final operating system that you're going to install in this course. And in the next section, we're going to start actually doing stuff from the command line.

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