Help me learn....

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

Soldato
Joined
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Gloucestershire
Linux for starters, the reason i'm asking this in here rather than the linux forum section is due to my interest being of linux in a server capacity (personally have no interest in it as a home OS)

I've read up on the most used distros for enterprise etc. I'm going to hopefully be playing around with red hat and fedora. Fedora we use for our gateway, proxy servers and mail filters at work so i think i'll start there (they're well overdue a good update so this will hopefully be my first port of call once learning enough to do the task)

What i need from yourselves is some useful tips, guides you can point me to from the basics and upwards. At work all our servers are CLI only, no GUI installed at all so i'm straight in at the deep end in that respect. A fairly vague post i know but to be honest i'm not even sure what advice to ask for :p
 
It's a rather broad subject to cover. The way I started out at first is by looking at a particular task I wanted to accomplish, i.e configuring a web proxy using squid for example or a mail server using postfix and then learning how to implement them properly.
 
AlexD said:
It's a rather broad subject to cover. The way I started out at first is by looking at a particular task I wanted to accomplish, i.e configuring a web proxy using squid for example or a mail server using postfix and then learning how to implement them properly.
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That sounds like a good place to start, i'm looking at a website called packt at the moment and for £150 a year you get access to all their E-books, my managers having a look now as he might get it paid for by work as a lot of the books there will be useful to all of us in the office :D

Last night i installed a minimal net iso of fedora 16 as a VM on my home machine, but i very quickly broke it (haven't a clue how, all i was doing was installing vmware tools lol)
 
How about RH courses?

Btw, Fedora for enterprise security-sensitive systems (gateway, proxy, mail) is nuts, unless you keep them upgraded by moving to a newer version.
 
FirebarUK said:
Btw, Fedora for enterprise security-sensitive systems (gateway, proxy, mail) is nuts, unless you keep them upgraded by moving to a newer version.
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These were setup by someone else so i'm holding my hands up as not guilty their :p These are minimal installs running spam assassin, named, squid ..... not sure what else.

We are a network inside a network though if that helps, our proxies, mail filters and gateway and NAT are all inside the LEA (South west grid) network. Which i'm fairly sure will have it's own pretty strong protection as they'll be required to be fairly secure i'd imagine, our proxies then face on to an ISA server.

Admittedly though while I'd consider myself a professional when maintaining a network internally, once i go past the ISA server outwards, my knowledge goes downhill some what.
 
Is there an easy way to find a list of the packages that are installed on a minimal install machine? EDIT: never mind sorted that bit

I'm pretty sure we're running postfix or used to be, i'd like to find out a list of the programs that i'd ideally get my head around first though for work purposes.
 
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To start with I wouldn't spend any money on e-books, courses or paid resources. There is so much free information out there that it's just silly, once you know what your doing then it's always worth looking at some of the redhat courses but that's just for the CV :)

IMO don't waste any time doing anything with the linux GUI, never used it on a single server yet across all the companies I've worked with.

If you've done a base install of anything based around redhat you can use yum list installed or rpm -qa *
 
Also just to add that if I was you i'd focus on something based on RHEL such as CentOS or Scientific Linux as from my personal experience all 3rd party apps we've placed on our infrastructure have been recommended & certified to be deployed on RHEL.
 
Yep, you're right about how to approach. I'm teaching my little brother how to use it so he can add another string to his bow early on in his career.

I started by saying to him: "pick 10 things you do day to do in Windows, and we'll find the CLI versions of those tasks".

The best way to understand on the CLI is to do. I think we're going to start off with:

File system structure (/var /etc /opt /usr etc..)
File copies/moves/renames
Mounting file systems
Important system files
vi (critical imo!)
Disk formatting and partitioning
Setting up network interfaces
Checking logs
Hardware querying
Drivers (modprobe etc..)

Once he's got a good understanding of the above, we'll start looking at shell scripting.
 
Ok Thanks folks that's some good advice :) Maybe CentOS will be where i begin then instead. Though i guess fedora is going to be fairly similar.

As for the e-books, it's so cheap and has so much available i think we'll get it anyway, a lot of useful stuff for other aspects and other people to use (only 3 of us but we'll all make good use of a whole range of them, from sharepoint through to microsoft application virtualisation)

EDIT: thanks randal brilliant idea :D Luckily i've also had some experience of vi for changing settings on our spam assassin box, and installing vmware tools gives me an idea of copying files, creating folders and running and installing a program so i'm alreayd half way through that list :p
 
I can navigate Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint and Jolicloud enough for daily usage, and updates, but for a long term it just annoys me.

I learned by installing Ubuntu on my netbook and just playing with it
 
Further to the linux based learning I'm looking to get some qualifications.....as much as i can say "i can do this this and this" on my CV i don't have any official qualifications to my name. So i'm looking at MCTS/MCITP and compTIA ones as well as eventually doing a VCP and CCNA (or things closest to them)

Question is, is it worth doing the MCTS prior to doing the MCITP? I consider myself quite knowledgeable when it comes to windows server, my down fall though is that i can "do" things but i feel i don't fully understand some basic principles that connect things together (hopefully that makes sense) for example i can be changing a set of settings, and i'll know which setting i want and what that setting does, but i may not know what the other setting(s) are for or do.
 
Well you need to do MCTS exams to get the MCITP.

MCITP = pass a specific set of MCTS + take a pro exam usually.

Look at which MCITP you want to do (I hate it when people just say they want to do MCITP, which one??? :) ) and see what the requirements are, which MCTS exams you need to pass to get what you want and go from there.
 
Ev0 said:
Look at which MCITP you want to do (I hate it when people just say they want to do MCITP, which one??? :) ) and see what the requirements are, which MCTS exams you need to pass to get what you want and go from there.
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haha well i'm interested in the exchange 2010 and the enterprise administrator 2008R2 ones, though i need to have a proper look through what is entailed in the enterprise administrator ones as to the specifics i'm interested in learning.

EDIT: oooo one MCITP exam is geared completely towards OS deployment, i could do that one with my eyes closed :D
 
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Well just take a look through the ones on offer and pick what you want to do :)

I believe with the server and enterprise admin ones the SA is not necessarily inferior as they are pitched at different type of people.

SA is more your windows 2008 sysadmin, EA is more involvement with other products such as system center. What I've been lead to believe from the likes of the certforums website anyway. Pop over there and have a nose, whilst I don't always agree with their opinion on things there is a lot of advice on certs available there from people who have done them.

But I'm not the best person to speak to about details, I've got the one MS cert to my name and don't plan on doing any others :p
 
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Cheers Ev0 :)

Curious though, the wording is making me wonder; when they say "Windows server 2008" are they covering both 2008 and 2008R2 or is it specifically driven towards the cack that was 2008 pre R2?

As the virtualisation one is specifically listed as R2
 
Centos as suggested is a good O/S for server operations.

I Learned Linux from scratch about 10 years ago and did this by buying the right book.

If you are planning to run Centos 5 or 6 I would suggest buying the latest fedora bible by Christoper Negus. The book is brilliant and shows you how to do most things both way through the GUI and on the CLI.

It covers most of the popular server service settings , and will give you a good all round Linux grounding.

As has been said make a list of the things you are likely to want to do and seta task list and learn to do those things from the book or from the web. Here are a few i would look at not an exhaustive list but will give you some ideas. Sure a few people on here will add a few more to that.

Installation - partition layouts, Logical volume manager, filesystem types etc.
General command line usage - commands and where to find what you need.
KVM - becoming a must for linux admins now as virutalisation is a hot topic.
Samba file server
Mail server
ftp server
Apache web server
LDAP server.
MySQL
PHP
IPTables firewall.

Linux is my full time job now and it takes patience at first but once you start to gain an understanding it becomes a lot of fun to work with.
 
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