Best Training in Linux Administration?

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?"

Comments

Use it at home

[SonicTooth]

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.

Re:Use it at home

[zangdesign]

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.

Re:Use it at home

[nomadic]

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.

Re:Use it at home

[antirename]

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.)

Re:Use it at home

[damiangerous]

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.

Re:Use it at home

[Confessed Geek]

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.

Re:Use it at home

[Nailer]

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.

Re:Use it at home

[maxpublic]

"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

Re:Use it at home

[zerocool^]

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

Set up a home system first

[AJWM]

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.

Re:Set up a home system first

[mo]

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.

just a thought

[wrinkledshirt]

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.

Are You Crazy!?!

[eSims]

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!

Just a thought

[drgonzo59]

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.

Vendor-specific vs. Vendor-neutral Training

[base_chakra]

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.

Re:Real life

[eric_ste]

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!

Linux From Scratch

[BroadbandBradley]

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

Do both

[dpilot]

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.

Don't forget about the time investment

[damm0]

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.

Re:Don't forget about the time investment

[mindstrm]

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.

Re:Don't forget about the time investment

[maxpublic]

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

Re:Pick the hardest Distro

[jburroug]

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!

Re:Pick the hardest Distro

[tunabomber]

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.

IBM

[SlashDread]

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"

Start with a hard distro...

[KermitJunior]

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.