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Linux Admininstration Resources?
shadfc asks: "I'm starting a new job as the system administrator for a small company in Tampa. They currently have 10 Red Hat servers (they are open to distribution change) that have not been actively maintained for a few months. I'm a Junior in College with a decent amount of Linux experience, but this will be my first job in this kind of position and responsibility. I'm asking for resources that can help fill in the holes in my knowledge and help make me a better administrator. Quality books on the subject would be preferred, but any advice is welcome. Thanks!"
O'Reilly publishing has listing of all Linux commands, at least those that are expected to behave in a conformist way from distro to distro.
but "The Practice of System and Network Administration" is very, very handy. Full of best practices and day-to-day scenarios and how best to handle them. See it here at Amazon. I have found the advice contained in there to be indispensible as I am maturing as a sysadmin.
First link on Amazon. Indispensible.
Check out the "Linux Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemith, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein et. al. It's published by Prentice Hall and is a pretty good overview of the tasks you'll be expected to do.
Also, check out the books in Sybex's Craig Hunt Linux Library series - he doesn't actually write all of them but most are pretty good. (Don't know how O'Reilly let him escape after writing the excellent "TCP/IP Network Administration".)
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Linux Administration Handbook by Nemeth et al. Her Unix System Administration Handbook is a classic. This one is targetted at Linux. Very nice. Great artwork too.
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Gentoo is a wonderful distribution... It's the only thing recent that I could get to install on my sparc64 box.
That said, I would never run it in a production environment. It's tendancy to encourage bleeding edge packages WILL come back to bite you at some point.
RedHat is an excelent choice for production systems, if for no other reason than easily available and proven support contracts. I know that it's 'leet' to be able to look up things in google, but if you get hit by a bus, it will let the company survive while they find your replacement.
Having a support contract is also wonderful for getting to REAL support. If you're dealing with something really esoteric, you will often be much better off with a support contract. Let them fight to find the answer out of some kernel developer in New Zealand. You have the rest of your job to do too.
For your desktop box, I would urge you to do at least a gentoo stage 1 build, if not a Linux From Scratch install. These will take you forever to finish, but your knowledge of the linux as an OS will skyrocket. And while you're learning, you won't be affecting the company's bottom line, which ultimately provides you with the paycheck.
As for books, the armadillo book from ORA is wonderful, as is the 'purple book' (the successor to the highly acclaimed 'red book'. King of unix system admin books). The purple book will run you about $60-70, but reading through it will help you learn a lot.
Let's see: General notes:
1) Run postfix rather than sendmail. More secure, and easier to deal with. Less hair loss is to be encouraged.
2) Ban telnet, and use ssh.
3) Learn firewalling. Become hyper anal.
3a) Learn DMZ's. Limit exposure. There are some people who have 1 firewall interface per application (my company is moving that way). It's great for fine grained access control.
4) You don't and can't know everything. Admit this often. It's part of the key to learning.
Zapman