Help me learn....

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

Soldato
Joined
7 Jun 2003
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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
 
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)
 
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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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
 
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.
 
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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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
 
If starting learning for an MCITP of any kind do you have to do anything besides the exams? Can you just buy the self learning books then freely take the exams whenever you wish, or are there any other things required like signing up to a company to take the course?

Also when we see windows 8 and server 8 come out do you think they'll redo the exams with no ones? as the current ones have been there since 2008 or something now, worth me waiting?

EDIT: i should probably add that I'm the sort of person that learns best by doing things, things stick for longer when i'm doing. Reading i generally need to read things twice, videos aren't too bad either though.
 
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