An old runbook instructs you to bring a server to runlevel 3. On the systemd machine in front of you, which target is the equivalent state?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 101. System architecture easy
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct multi-user.target
Correct. multi-user.target is the full text-mode multi-user state, and runlevel3.target exists as an alias symlink to it for exactly this kind of translation.
Not correct graphical.target
Wrong. graphical.target corresponds to runlevel 5. It pulls in multi-user.target and adds the display manager on top.
Not correct rescue.target
Wrong. rescue.target is the single-user equivalent, runlevel 1: root shell, local filesystems mounted, no networking or general services.
Not correct basic.target
Wrong. basic.target is an internal synchronisation point that units order themselves against during startup. It corresponds to no runlevel and is not something to switch to.
Why
systemd ships alias targets so that runlevel names still resolve: 0 is poweroff.target, 1 is rescue.target, 2 to 4 are multi-user.target, 5 is graphical.target and 6 is reboot.target. The mapping is many-to-one, which is why runlevel numbers cannot be recovered exactly from a target name, and why the numbering survives only as a compatibility layer. Targets are also composable in a way runlevels were not: graphical.target requires multi-user.target rather than repeating its contents.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page systemd.special(7)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 101 and space the ones you get wrong.
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