LPI BSD Specialist study guide
LPI BSD Specialist · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Linux Professional Institute BSD Specialist is a vendor-neutral certification for administrators who work with FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. LPI describes the certification holder as a BSD system administrator with a solid understanding of BSD architecture and the ability to manage user accounts and groups, processes, file systems, installed software and client networking configuration, using standard BSD and Unix tools on the command line. The LPI BSD Specialist study guide has 5 sections and about 1,830 words.
01BSD Installation and Software Management
The BSD Installation and Software Management domain tests whether you can put a BSD system onto disk and then keep its software current using that platform's own tooling. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD share Unix ancestry but differ sharply in package commands and configuration files, and the exam expects you to keep them apart rather than answer from Linux habits.
365 words, about 2 min02Storage Devices and BSD Filesystems
Storage Devices and BSD Filesystems covers disks, partitioning schemes, the filesystems the BSDs create on them, and the configuration that mounts those filesystems at boot. Expect questions mixing device naming, labels and fstab syntax.
358 words, about 2 min03Basic BSD System Administration
Basic BSD System Administration tests day-to-day operation: boot-time service control, accounts, scheduled jobs, logging and privilege escalation, with FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD differences treated as first-class knowledge. The base rc system reads /etc/defaults/rc.conf for defaults (never edit), /etc/rc.conf for local settings, and /etc/rc.conf.d/ fragments.
342 words, about 2 min04Basic BSD Network Administration
Basic BSD Network Administration checks that you can configure interfaces, addressing, DNS, routing, wireless and a host firewall with BSD-native tools, and make the configuration survive a reboot. ifconfig em0 inet 192.168.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 up applies a live address, but only rc.conf persists: ifconfig em0="inet 192.168.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0" in /etc/rc.conf, written with sysrc so the variable name is validated.
342 words, about 2 min05Basic Unix Skills
Basic Unix Skills is the substrate for everything else: navigation, pipelines, text processing, permissions, process control and finding the right manual page. Questions are practical - you are given a task and must choose the command that performs it in a BSD userland, which is not GNU.
423 words, about 2 min