On 20/06/2013 17:32, Bryan J Smith wrote: > On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Alan McKinnon <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > So it's like lilo then (recently discussed here)? > > > I concur on Ext4, it's the kernel module used for all Ext* file systems > since 2010 or so. > > > I too don't think fs attrs worthy of inclusion in an exam, they are just > > too seldom used and too narrow a use-case[1]. By all means mention in a > class that they exist and which man pages to read when the student needs > them, or even give the student 30 minutes of your time after class if he > does need the info. > > But I don't know how to examine a knowledge area of "know that something > exists" :-) I would *much* rather concentrate on things sysadmins *will* > run into, such as why is it that to prevent a file being deleted the > permission needed is applied to the containing directory and not the > file itself? Now that one goes right to the heart of how Unix works, and > a very worthy exam question. > > > And this is the case in the "real world." Most people don't know to hit > the "chattr" or "lsattr" man pages when a file seems to be immutable. > So there's a huge difference between "being able to look" and "knowing > where to look." This isn't only true in the "real world," but even on > hands-on exams too. > > E.g., Just another "perspective" ... > > The common difference between a candidate passing a Red Hat hand-on exam > and not passing is typically the candidate who _knows_ where to look > passes, and the one that is merely _searching_ through /usr/share/doc > and man page keyword searches does not, in the allotted time. > > So I'd argue that LPIC-1 should still test for immutable, as it still > happens in the "real world," and even many newer sysadmins "don't know > where to look." That right there is a good "litmus test" for inclusion, > even if it's only Bloom's level 1 or 2. Just my $0.02.
I could go along with that, especially if questions were worded something along the lines of "You can't edit a file you own but the permissions are 644, what's up?" and possible answers are "fs is mounted ro", "chattr was previously used" etc etc. IOW, know the name of the tool but no need to test how it is used. > > [1] I've used attrs twice in my life, both times to immute valuable > files, and both times I've undone it months later after hours of > frustrating debugging. Nowadays I use RCS instead. > > > Indeed. RCS is the "first, best" tool for sysadmin version control. No > repository or other configuration required. I've caught hundreds of > sysadmins making changes they weren't "forward with" thanx to RCS, > especially right down to the exact lines changed. > > "Oh, yeah, that was me," is almost always the response (or similar) when > I point out the exact lines/keywords changed in a file. > > But I'm sure if we included RCS, someone would say why not CVS, > Subversion or even distributed systems like Git, which are used by many > "recipe" and other systems too. These days rcs is primarily a sysadmin tool whereas CVS/SVN/Git are primarily developer's tools But I'm not advocating we test rcs as we really don't need to do exhaustive testing. It's after all a statistical numbers game. -- Alan McKinnon [email protected] _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
