LPIC-2 — Linux Engineer
LPIC-2 covers the engineer's half of Linux: capacity planning, kernel and boot, advanced storage and filesystems, networking configuration, and the core network services an administrator is expected to run.
Two exams of ninety minutes, and a prerequisite that is genuinely enforced.
Exam facts
- Exam code
- 201-450 + 202-450
- Level
- Professional
- Field
- Linux & open source
- Duration
- 90 minutes
- Questions
- 60 per exam, multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank; both 201 and 202 are required
- Passing score
- 500 on LPI's scale of 200 to 800, per exam
- Languages
- English, German, Japanese, PortugueseGerman and Portuguese only at Pearson VUE test centres; online proctoring offers English and Japanese.
- Price
- 400 USD (read 12 September 2026)
- Validity
- 5 years, renewable
- Exam delivery
- Pearson VUE (test centre or online through OnVUE); exam vouchers from the LPI marketplace or booking directly with Pearson VUE
Prerequisites: An active LPIC-1. The 201 and 202 exams can be sat earlier, but the certificate is only issued once LPIC-1 is current.
Renewal: Retake the current LPIC-2 exams, or pass an LPIC-3 specialty, which renews LPIC-2 (and LPIC-1) as well; LPI membership with 20 PDUs a year keeps it active without exams
Source: exam page at LPI · Price: Two exams at 200 USD (United States) or 176 EUR (Germany) each, per LPI's pricing page (read 2026-09-12); LPI sets a price per country
How to prepare
1. The vendor's free learning path
LPI publishes the exam objectives and a learning path free of charge — the authoritative source for scope and weighting. Open the learning path (opens in a new tab)
Book the exam
Delivered by Pearson VUE (test centre or online through OnVUE); exam vouchers from the LPI marketplace or booking directly with Pearson VUE. Schedule with LPI (opens in a new tab)
Unlike almost everything else covered here, the prerequisite is real: an active LPIC-1 is required before this certificate can be issued. That word active matters. A lapsed lower certificate does not satisfy it, so anybody planning a slow climb should check where they stand before booking, and anybody who let LPIC-1 expire has two problems rather than one. The upside of the same arrangement is that passing this renews LPIC-1 automatically, so a candidate moving at pace never pays for a renewal.
The content is where Linux administration stops being about a single machine. Capacity planning, kernel parameters, storage at depth, and running the services other systems depend on are the material, and it assumes you have been responsible for something in production rather than having configured it once. Candidates who enjoyed LPIC-1 as a structured tour of the command line find this considerably less forgiving, because the questions assume consequences.
Three things to know before you buy preparation
A draft of the next version of the objectives sits on LPI's wiki with the current version still in force and no announced date, so check which objectives your material targets. Our practice-test partner has no product for this level. And our English course catalogue contains nothing covering it, an omission unusual enough to be worth stating rather than papering over with a near-match. Between them, those three facts mean preparation here leans harder on the official objectives and your own systems than at any other level.
Two levels, side by side
| Aspect | LPIC-1 | LPIC-2 |
|---|---|---|
| Exams | Two: 101 and 102 | Two: 201 and 202 |
| Per exam | 90 minutes, 60 questions | 90 minutes, 60 questions |
| Item types | Multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank | Multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank |
| Pass mark | 500 on a scale of 200 to 800 | 500 on a scale of 200 to 800 |
| Validity | Five years | Five years |
| Prerequisite | None | An active LPIC-1 |
- Version 4.5 is current, with exam codes 201-450 and 202-450; a 5.0.0 draft exists and has no date.
- Test centres examine in English, German, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese.
- Online proctoring examines in English and Japanese only, so a German-speaking candidate who wants to sit from home sits in English.
- Both exams are required, in either order, and the 201 and 202 papers can be sat before LPIC-1 is current; the certificate simply waits until it is.
Five years, and three ways through them
Renewal is by retaking the current LPIC-2 exams, by passing an LPIC-3 specialty, which renews this level and LPIC-1 beneath it, or by LPI membership with twenty professional-development units a year, which keeps the certificate active without another exam. The membership route is the one working engineers overlook, and it turns a five-year cliff into an annual habit. The climbing route is the one to plan for if a specialty is in your future anyway, because a single higher pass resets the whole ladder.
Typing the answer, rather than picking it, is what makes this paper feel different from the multiple-choice papers around it. There is no option to recognise; you type the command, the file path or the parameter, and a near miss scores nothing. That is the closest a written Linux exam comes to a performance-based one, and it rewards exactly the preparation the record has already described: your own systems, the published objectives as a checklist, and enough repetition that the commands arrive without being reconstructed.
What a question looks like
Written by us in the exam's style. It is not a real question from any question bank, and we do not publish those.
A server begins refusing new connections to a service under load while the process remains running and the machine shows ample free memory and idle processors. Describe what you would examine, naming the limit most likely to be responsible.
Everything the candidate would normally blame is eliminated in the stem, which points at a configured ceiling rather than an exhausted resource. This is the characteristic shape of the engineer tier: the system is behaving exactly as configured, and the skill being tested is knowing which configured limits exist and where they are set.
What it costs to get and to keep
| Item | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Exam 201-450 | 200 USD | LPI's United States pricing; one of two required exams (read 12 September 2026) |
| Exam 202-450 | 200 USD | the second required exam (read 12 September 2026) |
| Each exam, Germany | 176 EUR | LPI's German pricing, again per exam rather than per certificate (read 12 September 2026) |
| Prerequisite | not published | an active LPIC-1 certification. If yours has lapsed it must be current again before this certificate can be issued (read 12 September 2026) |
| Renewal after five years | not published | retake the current exams, or pass an LPIC-3 speciality, which renews this level. Passing this also renews LPIC-1 (read 12 September 2026) |
How much preparation, from where you are
- You run production Linux systems
- The intended candidate. Expect the gaps to be whichever services your organisation buys rather than runs, since the exam assumes you administer them yourself.
- You hold LPIC-1 and want to continue
- A bigger jump than the numbering suggests. The first level tours the command line; this one assumes you have been woken by something and had to reason about why.
- You administer at depth without certificates
- Probably the strongest position, with one caution: check your LPIC-1 status first, because the prerequisite is enforced and experience does not substitute for it.
What passing this does not prove
- Automation or configuration management, which is how this work is now done at scale.
- Whether your capacity plan survived contact with an unexpected month.
- Containers and orchestration, which have absorbed much of this territory.
- Anything outside the vendor-neutral middle, which is both the strength and the limit.
Against the alternatives
- 101-500 + 102-500 — LPIC-1 — Linux Administrator
- Required, and required to be current. Passing this renews it, which makes the sequence cheaper than two separate purchases suggest.
- EX200 — Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)
- A practical exam at roughly the level below this one in scope and above it in credibility with hands-on hiring. Different claim entirely, and worth holding alongside rather than instead.
- CKA — Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
- Where much of this territory has migrated. If your systems are increasingly containers on somebody's cluster, that certificate describes your work better than this one does.
201-450 + 202-450 — quick answers
Is the LPIC-1 prerequisite really enforced?
Yes, and it must be active rather than merely once held. That is unusual among the certificates covered here, most of which recommend a background without checking it. Confirm your status before booking, because passing these two exams without a current lower certificate leaves you holding neither.
Should I wait for the next version?
No. A draft sits on LPI's wiki with no announced date and the current version remains in force, so waiting means waiting indefinitely. Do check which version your preparation material targets, since the draft is public enough for third parties to have started following it.
How do I prepare with no course and no practice test?
From the published objectives and your own systems. That is a real disadvantage compared with the lower level, and naming it beats gesturing at something roughly similar. Work through the objectives as a checklist, building and breaking each service on a machine you control.
Can I sit the 201 before the 202, or in any order?
Either order. Both are required and each stands alone, so most candidates sit the one closest to their daily work first and use the pass to pace the second. The certificate is issued once both are passed and LPIC-1 is current.
How does the membership route work?
LPI membership with twenty professional-development units a year keeps an LPIC certificate active without a resit. For an engineer who attends a conference, reads and teaches, the units accrue from ordinary work, and the five-year expiry stops being a deadline. Check the current terms with LPI before relying on it.
What comes next
Concepts this exam draws on
Glossary entries with the reason each one matters for 201-450 + 202-450.
- Web Server
Exam 202: Apache and Nginx configuration, HTTPS, reverse proxying.
- DNS
Exam 202 starts with BIND: zones, security, resolution.
- Load Balancing
Advanced network configuration and service resilience.
- Containers
The draft 5.0 objectives add container material; 4.5 touches virtualisation.
- Routing
Exam 202 network configuration includes routing on a Linux host.
- Firewall
Configuring the host firewall is a 202 security objective.
- VPN
Setting up VPN endpoints on Linux appears in the 202 network services topics.
- DHCP
Running a DHCP server is a 202 network services objective.
Last reviewed 12 September 2026 · Getting Digital