Hands-on labs: common questions

If you’re a learner with a Skills Everything plan license, ACG Business plan license, or ACG Personal membership, you have full access to the Hands-on labs library.

If you’re a learner on a Skills Starter, Professional, or Enterprise plan with the labs add-on, you’ve been granted access to a select number of ACG’s Hands-on labs at no additional cost.

You can take a Hands-on lab as many times as you want. To take a lab again, simply revisit the page and start the lab again. The Your Lab History section shows any previous attempts you’ve made at the lab.

Yes. Our Hands-on labs will typically come with a scenario to resolve, and include video lessons and guides. This lets you follow along at your own pace and with your preferred learning method.

You'll be guided through the lab by an expert so you can see how they do it. Once you’re comfortable, you can try the lab again on your own without referencing the videos or guide to check your understanding.

Some Hands-on labs have restrictions to cloud services outside our standard cloud restrictions. You can still complete these labs, but you may receive an abuse notification if you attempt to complete other tasks outside of those outlined in the lab guide or objectives. Excessive network traffic using lab resources may be flagged as lab abuse/misuse.

If you feel you’ve received an abuse notification in error, contact Pluralsight Support.

Some of our most popular Hands-on labs allow you to choose between Guided mode and Challenge mode.

Guided mode gives you access to instructional videos, guides, and diagrams. It also gives you the ability to run progress checks to see if you’ve completed the objectives correctly during a lab.

You can check your work an unlimited number of times, giving you the opportunity to retry any failed objectives. No score is provided at the end of a Hands-on lab taken in Guided mode.

Challenge mode allows you to test your knowledge and your ability to apply your skills in Hands-on labs without instructional videos or guides. You can't check your work until you submit the lab. See Hands-on labs: Challenge mode to learn more.

Most Hands-on labs are standalone and intended to be used to perform a specific exercise or task. However, some are intended to be completed while following along with a course video.

If you come across a hands-on lab with no lab guide, read the description. Return to the course to see if there are videos that are meant to be followed instead of a lab guide.

Hands-on labs have a built-in timer, and the time limit varies from lab to lab—usually one to four hours. After the timer expires or when you complete the lab, the lab will close and the resources will be cleared. You can restart the lab from the beginning at any time by returning to the Hands-on lab page.

All Hands-on labs have a timer that starts counting down immediately after starting the lab. If you don't complete the lab before the timer reaches zero, you'll need to restart the Hands-on lab from the beginning.

If the lab has time remaining and you navigate away from the lab, the Hands-on lab will remain active and the timer will continue counting down. Click Resume Lab in the banner to continue the lab where you left off.

If you start a Hands-on lab and it immediately times out, this is because your local system time is out of sync with the network time. If you choose the option to set date and time automatically in your machine's system settings, you'll be able to successfully start and complete the Hands-on lab.

This process varies depending on your operating system:

• Instructions for Windows (external site, opens in new tab)
• Instructions for macOS (external site, opens in new tab)

If you're connected to one of the Cloud servers and your terminal session ends, you may receive the message Write Failed: broken pipe. This can occur when the server doesn’t receive a keepalive message after a period of non-use.

Windows users

To manually set the keepalive message:

1. Open PuTTY.
2. Type your hostname or IP address in the field provided.
3. Click Connection from the list of configuration options.
4. Type 10 into the Seconds between keepalives field.

macOS/Linux Terminals

Update the ~/etc/ssh/ssh_config file to include:

If you don't want to modify your ssh_config file, you can append your ssh command: