LINUXexpert practice labs

Hands-on labs to work through alongside the LINUXexpert study guides. Each lab sets up a scenario on your own virtual machine, gives you the tasks from a guide chapter's "Try it" section, and grades your work.

Grading is rough on purpose. It checks the result (is the user there, does the service answer, does the mount survive a reboot), not the commands you typed, so any correct approach passes. These labs are for practice. They aren't the exams, and they don't contain exam questions.

What you need

• A throwaway virtual machine. Labs add users, disks, services and firewall rules, and some tasks break the boot on purpose. le-lab refuses to run outside a VM.
• One of the systems the labs are tested on: AlmaLinux 10 (or another RHEL 10 relative) or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Each lab says which it supports.
• Internet access from the VM, for installing packages.
• About 2 GB of memory and 20 GB of disk. You don't need extra disks or network cards: labs that need them make loop devices and network namespaces.

Take a snapshot of the VM before you start a lab, so you can always go back.

Getting started

git clone https://git.coffeylabs.org/coffey-labs/linuxexpert-practice-labs.git
cd linuxexpert-practice-labs
./le-lab list lfcs
sudo ./le-lab start lfcs/5-1-user-group-accounts

Studying for one exam? Each guide chapter with a lab also offers that guide's labs as one download, such as lfcs.tar.gz. Unpack it and run le-lab the same way from its linuxexpert-labs-lfcs folder. Cloning gets every guide's labs and lets you update them with git pull.

start sets the lab up and prints the tasks. Work on them in any order, then:

sudo ./le-lab check     # grade your work; run it as often as you like
sudo ./le-lab tasks     # show the tasks again
sudo ./le-lab reset     # undo the lab when you're done

A check prints one line per task:

  [PASS] 1   carol: UID 2001, /bin/sh, home, group developers, change at first login
  [FAIL] 2   carol's passwords expire after 60 days, warning 10 days before
         not yet: maximum password age is 60
  [SKIP] 4   ... (RHEL family only)
  [SELF] 5   ... (not graded: check it yourself)

Score: 3 of 4 tasks (75%)

Some tasks ask you to write what you found to a file under /root/lab-answers/. Tasks that say "after a reboot" are only really done when the check passes after you reboot.

reset removes what the lab set up and undoes the tasks' usual changes, but it can't know everything you tried. For a clean VM, go back to your snapshot.

Labs

Guide	Labs
LFCS	labs/lfcs/, one per chapter

Each lab's README.md lists its tasks and links its study guide chapter.

Problems

If a lab grades something wrong, or won't set up on a supported system, please open an issue with the lab's name, your system (cat /etc/os-release) and the output of sudo ./le-lab check.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Copyright (C) 2026 Coffey Labs LLC.