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Best Training in Linux Administration?

Posted by Cliff on from the fast-track-to-a-Linux-education dept.

Love to Learn Linux asks: "My company is making the move to Linux. I've been a Windows admin the last 5 years and have been asked to learn Linux. I've got some O'Reilly books but I need some hands on experience. My company will pay for any Linux training I choose. I'd prefer an online course to one of those 4 day classroom courses since I'd like to take my time and really learn it. So far, I've been recommended the Red Hat eLearning course and the O'Reilly Learning Lab. Would you recommend either of these over the other, or are there some better choices?"

41 of 467 comments (clear)

  1. Use it at home by SonicTooth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Install Linux at home. It's the best training you'll ever get. And then switch over your best friends and finally your grandparents. You'll be a pro in no time.

    1. Re:Use it at home by zangdesign · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Set up a small, representative network at home - don't bother making it work like you would use a home machine, but rather concentrate on how the company would need it.

      --
      To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
    2. Re:Use it at home by nomadic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually the best training is at work; home networks just don't typically have the complexity you find in a business environment. Unfortunately most people can't just hang out with a linux admin team for a few months to pick up stuff.

    3. Re:Use it at home by antirename · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oddly enough, everyone I know who is good at Linux administration (or programming in general) is self-taught. Yes, you wind up with holes in your knowledge, but they are usually small. Take a class, you think you know it all, and all of a sudden you are in over your head when you see something new. I see it all the time in new hires. (I only bring up programming because config files really seem to confuse MCSE's, since there is nothing to click on and you actually have to type.)

    4. Re:Use it at home by damiangerous · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Take a class, you think you know it all

      Exactly, you hear that a lot here about "paper MCSEs". Yet that's just the converse of the typical proposal here: "You don't need a class, you can learn it all by running Slack on your old 486." Yet somehow one is sage advice and the other is mocked. You can't learn without doing, but you can't learn in a vacuum either. Neglecting either one will lead to sometimes critical (from a business standpoint) holes in your knowledge.

      Just like you shouldn't take a class and think you know everything before you have real experience, you shouldn't think you've seen it all already "in the wild" and structured learning is beneath you. It's the same personality flaw. It's just manifesting itself in a different way.

    5. Re:Use it at home by Confessed+Geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As an actively employed "Linux Systems Administrator" (my real job title) I must concur with "damiangerous." While I was a windows admin I set up multiple linux boxes out of curiosity, slackware, rh5, and it was interesting and educational, but once I was done I just sort of looked at them and was like "Now What?"

      Only after I attended a 3 night a week month long class did it all come together.

      Don't disregard the classroom setting. A online course or reading o'reilly books (and even the Linux for Dummy's book) are good but for your first introduction a classroom (with hands on training) is the best place to start. If you have a good instructor you won't just learn "the Facts" but will get a better grasp of the implications and how to use the tools, and get some real practical advice.

      Your milage may vary as some people are much better book learners while others do better with lecture, but a good class does a really good job of giving a good foundation to start from so additional online or deadtree training is more approachable and rewarding.

    6. Re:Use it at home by mindstrm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Every good sysadmin that I know has learned chiefly on their own. They may have had some schooling in some facts of computing.. but NONE of them learned OS skills in a class.

      Classes generally don't give you the WHY of everything either.. they cram as much as they can into a short period of time. What gives you the WHY is work experience.

      Yes, of course, there are things at home you just can't learn at home.. you can't learn them much better at school either.

      Granted, a good course can help you fit some things together.. and I'm not saying you won't learn something..... but it's not the answer.

      The real reason many suggest learning on your own is because requests for "what is a good course to learn linux so I can do sysadmin" generally come from those who DON'T learn on their own, and think a course is the answer, and will promote them up a level. A course will teach you things, and depending on the course, might teach you some really good facts.. but in the end, if you don't learn quickly on your own, you are going nowhere.

    7. Re:Use it at home by adaminnj · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Installing a home PC with distro de'jur and then using it to read about all the things you don't think you can do anymore because the tools are unfamiliar then learning the tools to accomplish the same things you use to do with a M$ box is a very good way to learn. But then it doesn't sound like this guy has a few years to get up to speed. As I've see from paperer MCS* if you don't follow-up with a full time use of any OS then your just end up with a cert and no skills then end up back at berger flippen or what ever.
      I recommend
      Start by tossing out your Windoughs box completely at home (or at least unplugging it and hiding it) and if you can get away with it at work get a second box and using it for everything you can!
      and then loading a Linux box at home (MHO is stay away from the Fedora project) and then just picking any training that would fit you schedule to start (it will still take years for you to be any good unless you have some UNIX skills now) and focus on the comandline tool GUI's get you in trouble. if you don't understand commandline you will probably will never recover from even small probs.
      Then get some deprogramming help and off the M$ wagon.

      Your going to learn more about Linux administration at home at your darkend desk trying to do or install something than in a book or a classroom and you will keep thous lessons in your head longer but you'll need reading material try
      http://www.google.com/search?q=linux&ie=UTF-8 &oe=U TF-8

      --
      I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
    8. Re:Use it at home by Nailer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, you wind up with holes in your knowledge, but they are usually small.

      As someone who learnt Linux at home, then took some classes, then became an instructor, I think most people who learn from home's knowledge holes are gaping.

      Basic stuff like quotas. How the kernel knows where the root partition is. What the difference between the exire time in an SOA record and the TTL in the zone file is.

      Most self-taught Linux users are no worse than the self-taught NT admin who has no idea what a port is.

    9. Re:Use it at home by rnturn · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ``We ran across this once before when Tidwell was here. How'd he do it?" And everyone stands around with their thumb up their ass making a bunch of grunting noises trying to sound like they remember how to do it.''

      And, of course, while they're grunting, they all recall that the reason that Tidwell isn't around to fix the problem is that his boss got sick and tired of his not documenting his procedures. :-) As much as everyone bitches and complains about it, documentation is important; especially for the odd little things that Tidwell knew how to do. Even if it's only an email, it's better than nothing. And, finally, I'd be wondering why none of the guys never had the curiousity to ask 'ol Tidwell what it was that he was doing to solve that problem. (And if he refused to tell you, then you know that management had another good reason for getting rid of him.)

      --
      CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
    10. Re:Use it at home by maxpublic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "See those 30 comps?" your in charge now and we don't know how they work.

      And this will teach more than any college course or class in existence.

      This is much how I learned, right from the beginning, e.g., "we don't know how this here mainframe actually works. Figure it out. If you can't, we'll fire you and hire someone else to give it a shot."

      This should be a degree requirement for everyone in CS. It would do a lot to weed out the often-useless trash passing themselves off as CS majors these days.

      Max

      --
      My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
    11. Re:Use it at home by zerocool^ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's because the most important aspect of being self taught isn't knowing the information, it's knowing where to look for the answer. There's still volumes about linux that I don't know, but when I run into a problem, I have a good idea where to start looking for the answers. It's kind of getting the zen of linux.

      ~Will

      --
      sig?
    12. Re:Use it at home by CountJoe · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You'll be a pro in no time.

      Ummm ... I hope you intended this to be a Joke.

      Learning Linux simply by using it at home will be a timely process. And you only really learn something if you have to deal with it. So there is no way you could learn enough about Linux to support your company in a reasonable amount of time.

      If your company is willing to pay for it, take a course!

  2. Set up a home system first by AJWM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Set up a firewall, web server, mail server etc, play with the hardware, reconfigure the things, set up raid, lvm, etc.

    Nothing beats hands on, and nobody I've interviewed for a sysadmin job (and I've done quite a few recently) who didn't have a setup at home was any good.

    --
    -- Alastair
    1. Re:Set up a home system first by mo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Just to add to this, I'd like to point out a reason why this is a good idea.

      In taking a class, the instructor tells you directly how to do something. You may or may not retain the information long enough to reuse it the next time you have to, say, install qmail.

      However, doing it yourself at home will teach you that all-imporant skill of how to google for linux howto information on the web.

      I've done a couple of qmail installs in my lifetime, but any knowledge I've gained has long been forgotten. Except for the fact that I know that qmailrocks.org is the place I go to re-learn what to do.

    2. Re:Set up a home system first by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not only that, but get a few PCs, some switches (don't have to be good ones) and some wifi gear, a couple of windows clients at the very least if not some macs and stuff, and figure out ways to get maximum connectivity between all of them. A bunch of 486s will probably work for most of your linux systems, especially if you're willing to work with older versions of Linux for most of your clients.

      Set up ALL the major software packages in every category you can come up with. Learn to configure both primary desktop environments. Install everything ISC has written and use it for something. Learn apache! Install php with it. Do something with perl. apache with php is your ultimate quick-and-dirty web tool, unless you elect to use apache with perl cgi or mod_perl. perl is your quick and dirty everything tool.

      Do something that requires patching your kernel - PPTP VPN with MPPE/MPPC (For windows PPTP VPN clients) is one example, and the thing that I have to patch my kernels for. Install something from cvs, including compiling it. Set up both sendmail and qmail (probably not at the same time.) I found qmail+vqadmin+vpopmail+qmail-scanner to be an enlightening exercise and I've been using linux religiously (though seldom exclusively) since about kernel 1.1.47, a fair while.

      The more machines you have the more relevant your knowledge is likely to be in the end. After all, the network is the computer, right? :)

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:Set up a home system first by Fred_A · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I absolutely second that. Knowing how to do things is mostly useless (by the time you do it again, the syntax will have changed anyway).

      Knowing how to find how to do things is the useful talent.

      Knowing how to find how to do things without an Internet access is an even more useful talent. It takes longer to aquire it though. And often several catastrophes.

      --

      May contain traces of nut.
      Made from the freshest electrons.
  3. just a thought by wrinkledshirt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In addition to whatever training you want to do, audit your office for its current tech needs. If time is short, you might not want to spend too much time studying minutiae unrelated to your future tasks -- some of that time can be put to better use preparing for the switch away from Windows.

    Just a thought.

    --

    --------
    Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...

  4. Are You Crazy!?! by eSims · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Take the offsite training!

    These days it is difficult enough to get training (at least in the corp America I work in) let alone offsite. A whole week to do nothing but dig in and learn. Take it... then on your own you can always do self paced work and such... it's a win-win.

    Good Luck!

    --
    I .sig therefore I am!
  5. Just a thought by drgonzo59 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ask a friend o someone else you know that has some experience to share it. People who love linux often love it because they learned it as hobby and those are the people who usually like to share the knowledge and help others learn it. But if the company has the money to spend, give that a try. Also read through the HOWTOs those helped me.

  6. Ummm, where do you work? by hendridm · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...and are they hiring?

    If I even mention "training" where I work the laughs can be heard clearly from the other side of the planet. Funny how an organization that is so gainst paying for anything is staunchly anti-Open Source.

  7. Vendor-specific vs. Vendor-neutral Training by base_chakra · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If "someone" recommended Red Hat eLearning, I assume your company is adopting Red Hat? At the outset eLearning might be a reasonable choice, but if you really want to understand Linux, you'll probably want to laern more than just the Red Hat way of doing things. Experiment with Fedora or Red Hat 9 at home; then, after a few months, test a distribution that doesn't rely centrally on RPM and you'll gain a new, edifying perspective.

  8. Install Gentoo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I agree that installation and hands on is the best thing...You will blow up an install 20+ times before you get it down pat, but after that you can do it in your sleep.. The thing is that your a admin allready, meaning you know what you want to do just not how to do it. http://www.gentoo.org/ they have THE BEST INSTALL MANUAL and the BEST FORUMS I have ever seen for any OS. and right off the bat you are installing linux from scratch so you can get a real hands experience. After that you can tailor that experience to your linux installation of choice.

  9. LPI? by psyconaut · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Might be a good career choice if certifaction rocks your (or your employers) boat.

    http://www.lpi.org

    -psy

  10. Be careful by hdparm · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Admining Linux is not easy. Learning how to do it is, given you have plenty of time on your hands. You need to do huge amount of reading (howto_s, man pages, some good books) while actually DOING all that stuff on (at least) 2 connected computers. Once you're able to setup most common services without constantly refering to docos, you're well on your way.

    I am not sure what distro is your company's choice but if you have an opportunity to do so, suggest Red Hat. Product is stable, support is unbelievably good, contains fair set of tools/facilities to ease sysadmin work, there are lots of resources around and there is a decent training/certificaton program available for it.

    Whatever the choice though, make sure you do your advanced learning with the distro that will be installed at your place. And good luck.

  11. Re:Real life by eric_ste · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yep, parent is right. And you have the Gentoo forums to help you if you are in need. Installing gentoo will certainly teach you lot's of stuff. But if you are to become a Linux sysadmin, your first step, IMHO, should be to drop windows and start using Linux on your work computer and on your home computer. Also, get him to give you a few old PC's to play with. Like 333Mhz which you can get for about 50$. On these PC's, don't use gentoo, compiling everything will be much too long. Use a precompiled distribution and preferably the one your Boss wants you to use in prod.

    Set up the networking, play with apache, PHP, postfix, Openldap. Create and delete useracounts, explore /etc/init.d, read the rc script to understand how your server boots.

    Instead of going on a class, get him to buy good books. I like wrox and Oreily books but others may be good also.
    Learn to use man, the sysadmin's bestfriend.

    Learn vi. Vi may be hard at first but it is very useful. the linux version is generaly vim. You may also use gvim but it's better to kick yourself in the ass and learn it if you are to become a Unix sysadmin.

    Also, a good source of info is generally included in /usr/share/doc.

    Finally, http://www.google.com/linux, I could not live without.

    I do not know many sysadmins that understood Linux and wanted to go back to windows.

    Have fun!

  12. Learn how to get help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This is probably the most important skill you will need to learn after going from Windows world.

    * If you go with a comercial distribution like Redhat expect to pay for support. Redhat is a support company, that is their business model.

    * If you go with something like debian, learn how and who to ask for help. Join your local tlug, get on IRC and mailing lists, start googling. There is a wealth of support just not in the forms you may be use to. If you contribute people will be far more willing to help you.

  13. Linux From Scratch by BroadbandBradley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Roll your own using http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

    I've found most distros have thier own GUI tools to simplify configuring your system but all these tools simply mask what's going on underneath where everything is really just shell commands and scripts strung together. When the GUI fails what you want to do, you're lost without knowing what goes on underneath. Beyond that, if you become familiar with Redhat tools and GUI and your work installs Debian you're starting over. I'd also reccomend learning Bash shell scripting which is the ultimate in telliing your Linux system what to do.

    for an example of what's been done with Linux from scratch check out ByzantineOS

    --
    "The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
  14. Do both by dpilot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I honestly can't recommend a training program, though perhaps others can. I would keep it in line with the Linux your company plans to deploy.

    But *in addition* set up a small network at home. Set it up as a mini-professional network, not a slapdash home network. You never learn like you do when you're doing, too.

    But managers like Certifications, so I wouldn't suggest shorting out the course. Besides, some problems are related to scale, and you won't touch that on most home LANs. Book learning and practical learning can work together.

    I'll second what someone said about Gentoo. While you want to deploy what your company uses, it wouldn't hurt to install a Gentoo box. Gentoo has very little handholding, and the install teaches you more than other installs. I wouldn't make Gentoo your first install, or even a particularly early one, though.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  15. Don't forget about the time investment by damm0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, everyone I know who is best at Linux is self-taught. But how much time did that take? Valuable lessons can be learned alone, but you can reduce the time it takes by a factor of 10 or more with structured lessons.

    I'm talking years here. You can reduce 10 years of lonerdom to 1 year by using structured learning tools. No class is going to teach you to be a guru in 4 days.

    1. Re:Don't forget about the time investment by mindstrm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Courses augment self teaching.. they don't replace it.

      I firmly believe that to be a good sysadmin, programmer, technologist, etc, you have to be able to learn on your own.. that is the primary skill you need... and this is why almost every single skilled person you meet in this field will tell you they really learned it all on their own.

      School, however, is a source of knowledge.. and not every course is there to teach you a bunch of narrow-minded BS.

      If you really want to bean up on a specific area, for instance, you are getting more into Linux, taking a couple courses your employer is willing to pay for is certainly not a BAD thing to take advantage of... especially if you feel you will learn something out of it. Especially if you are a learning on your own kind of guy.. you will absorb a lot from the course. Make sure the instructor is someone who can actually add knowledge to you.. the entire course could be worth it if a handful of your unanswered questions are answered.

      I think most of us just suggest "do it on your own, courses are silly" because we want people to realize that learning on your own is the most important skill.. that courses are just a brief foray into some new knowledge.

    2. Re:Don't forget about the time investment by maxpublic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Valuable lessons can be learned alone, but you can reduce the time it takes by a factor of 10 or more with structured lessons.

      That's rather amusing, given how useless a college degree is in most professions - CS included. Structured learning often does very little to teach CS students anything of actual, real-world value.

      I'd argue for self-learning (the way most of us have done it, I'd imagine), with liberal doses of research on the internet and question/answer sessions on the newsgroups. There are a lot of people out there who'll lend you a helping hand if you ask for it.

      Some - a very few - current administrators and programmers are also good at apprenticeship situations. Many aren't; not because they lack some indefinable skill, but because they're too busy with other things to be bothered with training up a newbie.

      I'd say take a class as a very last resort. Avoid a college course as if your professional life depended on it.

      Max

      --
      My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
  16. Re:Real life by DrNibbler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I figured everyone installed gentoo the way I do... boot the livecd, start sshd, goto my laptop, ssh in and install in a screen session. This way I have all the resources you mention without the overhead of X on the machine I'm installing from. If the CD autostarted SSH and had a pre-defined root password I could do the install headless.

    --
    Sean.OutaHere()
  17. Re:Real life by AJWM · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Every sysadmin I know uses vi. Hell, I even use it as an interview question ("vi or emacs?"), not that I'd base a hire/no-hire decision on it -- but so far everyone has said "vi". (I've been asked that question too.)

    I've used about every editor out there at one time or another (including teco), used emacs for a while, but "vi" (or vim) is my first choice. Heck, for a long time I used "ed", and still do occasionally.

    Mostly it's a matter of guaranteed availability. Every Unix or Linux system will have "ed", nearly every modern 'nix system will have vi (or a workalike). You're unlikely to find emacs on a server, it's usually considered too heavyweight and maybe a bit too powerful to be running it as root (as you'd need to do to edit the files a sysadmin is likely to need to edit).

    Come to think of it, the Certified Sys Admin for Solaris exam includes questions about using vi.

    --
    -- Alastair
  18. Re:Pick the hardest Distro by jburroug · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is one situation where I'd really recomend Gentoo since the installer is pretty much just a series of commands you have to run it's a good intoroduction to the "Linux Way" of doing things. Sure it won't teach you everything and will be radically different than more corporate distos in some ways but ultimately you'll learn a lot of basic, low level Linux shit just by doing the install. Hell I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 1997 or so and even I learned a couple things during my first Gentoo install about two weeks ago.

    Course for a production (public) server it's all about the FreeBSD in my book ;-> Linux is still my choice for desktops and internal utility servers but that's besides the point for this guys question.

    One final note. Once you've done your install and get ready to start installing your mission critical apps (Apache, Postfix or whatever) don't use emerge or RPM or Yast etc... grab the source tarball and follow the README/INSTALL directions. It's often a little harder but gives you more control and you learn more about both the app and your OS in the process.

    Good Luck!

    --
    "Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
  19. Re:Pick the hardest Distro by tunabomber · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I agree with this approach in general, but I think that Linux From Scratch is really the best "hard" distro to learn from. Unlike Slackware, LFS is set up specifically with learning in mind, with very explanatory step-by-step documentation. Just about every aspect of the installation is done by hand- the instructions even show you how to write your own boot scripts.
    It takes a long time to get an LFS distro up and running, but by the time you do, you will know your system inside and out even before you've started experimenting with different configurations.

    --

    pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory71 ...
  20. don't learn it, UNDERSTAND it. by ehanuise · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you come from a windows background, and have a few years of experience, the biggest hurdle you face is not learning the technicalities of linux, but getting a grip of the overall unix philosophy.

    The worst error someone in your position could ever do is learn linux system administration, then "try to do the same thing" as was done using windows.

    Linux (and unix, bsd, ...) is a diffeent beast. The main concept you'll need to grasp is that programs and utilities have a limited scope by design. That's unix atomicity : one program that does one and only one thing, but does it well. Every single utility is a lego building brick that you'll use time and over again in various circumstances (especially in shell scripting)

    That alone is very diffrent from windows 'all-in-one', monolithic, approach.

    I strongly suggest you get involved in your local linux user group. Helping out people solve basic problems and mixing with more experienced admins is a very good way to learn the non purely technical aspects.

  21. IBM by SlashDread · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Take their distro agnostic Linux courses. I have never been better educated than by IBM (That was in the OS/2 days)

    Anyway, the disto agnostic approuch seems more usefull to me than a red hat cert.

    "/Dread"

  22. Start with a hard distro... by KermitJunior · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would recommend you start with Gentoo and move to Debian or Suse.

    Before I'm modded flamebait, here's why:
    1)Gentoo has some of the best install documents in the Linux community
    2)It requires that you set up a lot of things by hand (system logger, kernel if you choose expert, etc)
    3)It has some of the best forums/support around. Even Gentoo critics admit this.

    After you get gentoo working on your box, wipe it and reinstall. After the fourth or fifth time, you'll actually have learned something. Then wipe and install Debian:
    1) Debian has the largest volunteer following.
    2) Deb has one of the simplest updgrade paths
    3) If you choose stable, its old but very secure.
    4)Suse is pretty darned awesome, too.
    5)Then make a customized patched kernel for the heck of it.

    Just my two cents. I took the Gentoo->Debian Road for the simple reason of learning and it helped.

    --
    There is a Universal Life Value Check it
  23. Three words: LFS by toolshed7 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Linux from Scratch. I learn more about linux and which commands to use than any other tool. You learn the actually commands, because there is no X at first, there is no distro tools. You learn the terminal and how linux works...but let me tell ya...it is not hard, but time consuming..if u think u know linux...try lfs.

    --


    Deserving got nothing to do with it.....shuffle
  24. Linux learning by flipperman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Having just gone through your exact situation, I feel at least somewhat qualified to give my opinion. I found lsf to be very useful. If you are like me (just in my forties) then you probably have some ancient experience with the DOS command line. I would strongly recommend going cold turkey and not using the GUI in whichever distro you choose as your learning environment. I also strongly recommend a subscription to the O'reilly safari bookshelf and the following three books: the infamous 'cowboy' book, "running linux" and the pocket guide of same, and the "essential system administration' pocket reference. I fouund the sys admin ref book to be especially useful because of it's task based format. This is stuff that we do on a daily basis with a straightforward way of doing it. Anyway, just my two cents. Best of luck to you.

    --
    I'm not here anymore, but I'm still not quite all there