Actual, useful, Linux stuff to learn

Curio

Curio

Curio

Soldato
Joined
14 Mar 2004
Posts
8,040
Location
Brit in the USA
Hi Y'all

Here's the deal. Just starting out in the I.T. world. Aiming for level 1 support type jobs. Just got my A+ and a CCNA entry level certs. Although I have a lot of experience on the Windows side, I know frack all about Linux :(

I would like to be able to walk into an interview and say I at least know the basic day-to-day system admin stuff that is actually used "in the field" and that I should know.

I've thrown up a couple of VM's running Ubuntu and Slackware. Now what should I teach myself? What things do you system admins out there find yourself doing in Linux on a daily/weekly basis? What essential stuff should I concentrate on? There's obviously a ton of guides on the net, but I'm really interested to hear what those of you on OCUK who actually have to use it have to say :)

Cheers!
 
I would look at CentOS or Redhat (maybe even Scientific) as a lot of production *nix servers will be running these. Otherwise they might be running Debian or Ubuntu. You don't get many places running beigebox Gentoo rigs as a mail server. Although they do exist.

General workload for a Linux admin is about as broad as you can get. A lot of monitoring and automating. Squid, Apache, Nginx might be some stuff that you deal with. Chances are you will live in Chef or Puppet if it's a big Linux place. You'll be looking at lots of log files and man pages, as well as playing with things like Nagios.

Shell scripting will be a big part of your life, Bash, Zsh if you're feeling fancy but on a production environment perhaps not. Python, Perl whatever floats your boat.

It all depends - you can pretty much be doing what a Windows admin would be doing, setting up accounts, administering a mail server, doing file system stuff, checking logs, doing general network stuff, IP addressing, subnetting etc.

I don't really know what a level one Linux guy would do - but I would certainly become familiar with the terminal, SSH, Vi, Man pages, log files, services etc. Giving the RHCSA book a good thorough reading would probably be fairly helpful, although they're quite the challenge.
 
Download Linux distro, CentOS is my choice.

Install web server, SFTP etc, don't just auto install them though set them up step by step so you understand the config's etc.

Learn Bash.
 
Learn how to navigate around the shell.

Learn vi (vim). While there ar einfinitely better fille editors out there, just about any unix/linus system out there will have a versin of it.

Learn about mounting file systems.

How to stop and start processes and identify how much memory and cpu is being used.

Learn to install common application server components like a webserver, a database such as mysql or the personal edition of Oracle (do they still do that?) and a Java application server such as JBoss.

Also learn about user administration and permissions (ir adding users, how to grant permissions on files etc.
 
Get arch. I pootled along with Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS for a while. Learned how to use vim, about file systems a bit of networking.

Installing arch taught me more in an afternoon than a few weeks of college ever did. Then configuring it so that it works exactly as I want it (still an ongoing process) has built on that even further.

Also arch is the best linux distro...just sayin' :p
 
Not many businesses use Arch as a production distro though - I never really understand the whole Arch install taught me loads argument either, it's a fairly simplistic installer albeit fully terminal based you can't really go wrong if you follow the guide.

Getting fully to grips with a Redhat based distro would probably serve someone better, and the idiosyncrasies' of the YUM package manager etc. Also correct me if i'm wrong, I only do a few things with quite an old RHEL distro but isn't it still init whereas Arch is now fully systemd? Not sure if it makes too much of a difference though. I agree with everything else there though.
 
my daily routine as a sysadmin is adding/removing cron jobs, mysql and pgres editting, grepping through apache logs and deploying svn updates from developers, id agree with others if your looking at taking a qualification the RHCSA is the one to go for.
 
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Enough said :)
Everything else (Even Gentoo) uses some form of automation, this will teach you to roll a system from the ground up.
99% of the time you'll never need most of this stuff, but when you're stuck trying to fix something which requires more thought than a package update, rolling from scratch is an invaluable skill to have.

-Leezer-
 
while i dont entirely disagree, lfs is hardly something for someone with zero linux experience like the OP to be looking at.
 
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Things that I found invaluable when learning *nix:

Vi!
Where everything lives. /etc /opt /usr/bin /usr/sbin /var etc..
File manipulation, copying/moving etc.
Basic shell scripting (while true, or for x in) for the above
OpenSSH, installation and key config. Be secure, from the start. :D
Run levels /etc/rc*.d etc and start up scripts.
Mount points and filesystems, fstab

Once you've got your head around that lot, take a look at:

Mail relay (sendmail, postfix etc.)
SSH tunnelling
Software raid (mdadm)
LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP)

If you want a box to learn on, then get hold of one of the HP Microservers. They've got just about everything you could want to cross the desktop/server class divide with Linux.
 
I would definitely recommend a book called The Linux Bible by Christopher Negus. ( not posting a link as not sure of link policy to bookshops )

I bought one of the earlier revisions a good few years ago when I was in the same position as the OP and now I am an RHCE and a sys admin of a large HPC cluster.

The book gives good clear instructions and generally shows you how to do things both ways through the GUI and the CLI.

Its the best £20 I ever spent :)

I would also say that most of the businesses I have worked with use either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or one of its variants (Centos, Scientific Linux) so that's probably the best learning pathway for you.
 
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