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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?"

52 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 damiangerous · · Score: 5, Informative
      Install Linux at home. It's the best training you'll ever get.

      No, it's not. When you just install a distro at home and start using it you'll learn a lot, sure. But what you'll learn a scattershot and mostly just what you need to do to get a functional system, because that's what your incentive is to do. You won't learn best practices and you won't learn why things are they way they are. Heck you probably won't even learn about some fairly basic tools just because you didn't happen to need them. You really need the formality of a structured learning environment (not a class, specifically, but a structured curriculum at least) to make sure you cover everything you need to know.

      I know it seems to be the number one recommended method here on Slashdot, but it really has some serious flaws that everyone seems to conveniently overlook. Following your advice leads to sloppiness and "good enough"-ness. Not exactly skills that will endear you to an employer.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.)

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. Re:Use it at home by tverbeek · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Following your advice leads to sloppiness and "good enough"-ness. Not exactly skills that will endear you to an employer.

      Depends on the employer. For many, "good enough" is... good enough. After all, it's why one former employer of mine is (by now) switching to Exchange and IIS on Windows, instead of Postfix and Apache on Linux: they're "good enough" and have the advantage of being from the same software vendor and consultants they (now) buy everything else from. And (setting aside my perfectionist tendencies and principle for a moment) for some businesses, anything better than "good enough" is a luxury... one they can't afford.

      --
      http://alternatives.rzero.com/
    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: 4, Informative

      ``Slackware is a "hard" distro? I think the installer and package manager aren't too bad. It's no portage or apt-get but it's alright.''

      I started with Slackware back in the mid-'90s. I'd have to agree that it was a hard distribution to work with. At least back then, anyway. (Getting X set up took several evenings and a few scary sessions where you never knew whether your monitor would survive.) Since those days of yore, some friends have switched to Slackware from other distributions and they find it fairly simple. Of course they're not newbies tackling it any more, so...

      Getting back to the original question: I'd suggest, if his employer can see that he's covered for the week and not getting yanked out of class to respond to a pager, that the fellow take the week-long class. Immerse yourself in it. Back when I was beginning to get into UNIX, I found that what worked best for me was to convert my system to run nothing else. It was DOS, Windows, VMS, and a bunch of other OSes at work but at home it was all UNIX all the time. (Technically it was Coherent but you get the idea.)

      If he can swing it, I suggest getting a hold of a system that he can dedicate to use with his distribution of choice. Highly recommended. You wouldn't want to be screwing around and experimenting with dual booting the home Windows box and risking the wife's Christmas card list and the kids' term papers. (Not if you want to stay off their sh*t list, that is.) That way you can mess that system up, troubleshoot it, and fix it.

      If you're not interested in fixing fouled up systems right off the bat, try doing some projects. I found several semi-work-related projects where I do some of the work at home on the new system. For example, we had some old FORTRAN code that some coworkers wanted converted to C. Heck, writing web pages for the intranet at work could be done at home on the Linux system. You'll learn one or more text editors along the way and most likely pick up some basic administrative skills at the same time. Anyway, I found it helped to have some goal when learning the new OS rather than just flipping around and trying things out randomly. Of course, YMMV.


      --
      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 Skweetis · · Score: 3, Informative
      Basic stuff like quotas.

      Learned everything I needed to know in an hour from the man pages the first time I needed to set them for users.

      How the kernel knows where the root partition is.

      Learned this the first time I had a disk array fail and had to restore from backup. I don't remember where I found it, probably in the LILO documentation somewhere.

      What the difference between the exire time in an SOA record and the TTL in the zone file is.

      Haven't set up a fresh DNS server since I switched to djbdns a few years ago, so I didn't remember this one. Ten seconds of googling refreshed my memory.

      I guess my point in all of this is that it doesn't matter if you have holes in your knowledge. Instead, it is important to know that you do have them, and to know where to find the information you need. And, for what it's worth, I'm mostly self-taught, but I've taken some classes. Both are valuable.

  2. Real life by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, some people mock Gentoo, but installing it is once of the best linux learning experices I've ever had. Even if you don't end up running it, it'll teach you a good bit about the internals. The documentation is pretty good as well.

    1. Re:Real life by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, some people mock Gentoo, but installing it is once of the best linux learning experices I've ever had. Even if you don't end up running it...

      Still waiting for it to finish compiling, eh?

    2. 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!

    3. Re:Real life by Curtman · · Score: 3, Informative

      What amazes me about Gentoo is how aweful those LiveCD's are. I've been a Gentoo user for over two years, I'm not knocking the distro whatsoever. But if you're new to Linux, do yourself a favour and install Gentoo from Knoppix, instead of the Gentoo LiveCD's. The process is the exact same, except you have FireFox, X-Chat, and many other helpful resources available to you. I think those CD's are a terrible way to introduce people to Gentoo.

  3. 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 Bistronaut · · Score: 4, Informative

      I totally second this.

      I'll add that I think that the best distro to learn the guts of Linux on is Gentoo. Go the full compile-it-yourself route. There are easy to follow, step by step instructions, and they take the time to tell you why you're doing everything. By the time you have it installed (and it will take a while), you'll be a virtual expert on Linux.

      Of course, you shouldn't limit yourself to just one distro, and Gentoo probably isn't the easiest to manage. I like Debian stable for server things because it is so easy to keep up to date.

    2. 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.

    3. Re:Set up a home system first by Wugger · · Score: 3, Informative
      For an office sysadmin, using it at home is a start, but not the end of the journey. Get yourself a lab. You will need three computers, a linux to be your "server", a linux to be a "client" and a windows to be a "client". (If you have more than one Win32 OS in your office, add one client of each type to your lab.)

      Now, start playing. Basic install on your server, play with the interface for a bit. Get out the "Linux Network Administrator's Guide" and read it cover to cover. Read the Samba documentation in equal detail. Make a checklist of all the services you will need to support (DHCP server, DHCP client, Samba, Mail, WWW, FTP) and try them out. Get your test lab working with them.

      Now, play harder. Try to make Samba a domain controller. Set up RAID on your Linux server. Do some NFS to your Linux client. A big stack of Linux books, a personal lab, and a workplan of things to try and make work will get you fully trained up, probably several years faster than I took learning a little at a time. :)

  4. TrainingCamp for LPIC by Semireg · · Score: 5, Informative

    I did a 6-day bootcamp style training session with TrainingCamp. I successfully attained my LPIC-1. Out of the 6 people in my class 2 (including myself) had previous Linux experience and we both passed, the others failed. However, having many coworkers and friends that are teaching themselves linux, this would have given them one of the best starting points around. Highly recommended no matter what your skill level.

  5. Go RedHat by buchalka · · Score: 5, Informative

    Personally I'd recommend the RedHat training.

    This will be more of benefit to you if you actually are going to use RedHat, but of course the general principles will apply.

    If I were you, I'd also get Linux on a home machine and start "fiddling" to get up to speed.

    Maybe install Vmware or a similar product so you can try different things.

    Personally I took a leap and went from Windows to Gentoo linux and never looked back!

    Good luck with it.

    You could dual-boot an existing Windows machine or run VMWARE so you c

    --
    Games Programmer And Designer
  6. Online courses... by chrispyman · · Score: 5, Informative

    If I were you I'd stay away from an online course. From what I've found, they usually aren't much better than just reading and doing reseach on your own, the only diffrence is that they have exams and it adds to your GPA. Perhaps you should find a real class of some type (perhaps one of those weekend campy type deals) and get some real world hands on experience.

  7. 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...

  8. 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!
    1. Re:Are You Crazy!?! by barzok · · Score: 3, Funny

      Not only dig in & learn, you get to go on a trip on the company dime! Once class is over for the day, check out the city, meet up w/ friends for dinner, catch a baseball/basketball/hockey game, whatever. Turning a company-sponsored trip into a mini-vacation is what offsite training is all about!

      No, seriously. If the class starts on a Monday, fly out Friday and stay with a friend for 2 nights. You'll actually save the company money on airfare by staying over a Saturday night.

  9. 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.

  10. Hands on experience by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    It seems quite a few geeks are recommending hands on experience as the way to go for learning linux. At risk of sounding like an offtopic troll, I would also recommend hands on as a way to learn about girls. No, not hands on *that*! Hands on the girl!

    I bet that I now lost my reputation for being a geek.

    --
    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
    1. Re:Hands on experience by Master+of+Transhuman · · Score: 4, Funny

      "I bet that I now lost my reputation for being a geek."

      Why? Have you established you've ever had hands on a girl?

      You have, however, established a reputation for being unable to communicate in correct English...:-) (Okay, it was a typo, relax.)

      --
      Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
  11. The kind they have in Hawaii by Xoro · · Score: 3, Informative

    Seriously, get your co to pay for training in the most interesting setting they'll allow, where you can score a free lunch.

    If you have time to "take your time", where you'll really learn is by installing at home. Have the co fork over for VMWare, and set yourself up with a nice virtual network on your home machine. You'll learn way more than through any online training course. You may even want to do this for a few weeks before starting the official training course.

    This is a little off beat, but if you're totally new to unix, it might be helpful to nab a copy of Solaris x86 and put that in a vmware machine. I hate to admit this, but when I was starting I had a hard time understanding the linux man pages. The Solaris documentation was just luxurious, and the main options for commands pretty much the same. It used to be (maybe still is) free so you can probably get a copy someplace.

    Good luck.

    --
    Kill, Tux, kill!
  12. Pick the hardest Distro by Dark+Coder · · Score: 4, Informative

    By picking the hardest distro such as an older Slackware (don't knock the new ones), you've essentially master-micro-managed all aspect of Linux administration in virtually no time.

    It's no different than mastering the DOS 3.3 command set and scripting; just [infinitely?] more commands scripting, languages and widgets at your disposal.

    1. 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
    2. 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 ...
    3. Re:Pick the hardest Distro by MoThugz · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's not the best way... that's overkill. Hard doesn't necessarily mean best.

      But hey, don't think that I'm knocking off LFS. I went through it myself... but after a year plus of using Slackware (following a year of using Mandrake consistently).

      LFS is really useful if you want to understand how to build a Linux distro. It's technically not even a distro. It's more of a commando-style survival training, whereas a distro would be summer camp.

      I also doubt the "you will know your system inside and out" argument. I believe "you will know how to build a working Linux system" is a better description of the LFS learning process.

      Bear in mind that the poster is a Windows admin for five years... and he wants to have working knowledge of adminning Linux... not building a distro. Moving from Windows, and getting an introduction to Linux via LFS is really not something you'd want to go through.

      My recommendation? I live and breathe Slackware... but the poster should really try out a few distros. Fedora Core & Mandrake would scratch that need-some-GUIs-to-get-me-going itch for a start. After that, you might want to try some of the more traditional distros... Slackware and Debian would be my recommendation then.

      In the end, Linux is about choice. Just sometimes, the choice isn't yours... just your company's. Take a course on whatever distro they've decided upon... but play with a different distro at home for a different "feel".

      --
      Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
  13. 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.

  14. Set up a small net in your work lab by SCHecklerX · · Score: 5, Informative
    As many others have suggested, you should play on your own. I'd still take the class though. Set up a small network BEFORE going to the class, though. Then you will have intelligent questions to ask, and you will have some goals in your training.

    In your work lab get 2-3 computers. Set up a linux box as a DHCP and DNS server, then maybe add apache, samba, etc. These are the things that you'll likely be using linux for in the enterprise, right? You can play with firewalling and IPSec if that is your thing too.

    After the initial install, go here to learn the rest:
    The Linux Documentation Project

    The basic sysadmin guide there will give you the basics, and the specific howto's are great for setting up DHCP, DNS, etc.

    Another good guide:
    IBM Linux Newbie Guide

    Set up that small net, play, learn, then go to your class and learn a lot more.

    Have fun!

  15. 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
  16. you need to set up a network by wobblie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    and sandbox your activities in it. If you can get your hands on 3 or 4 pc's and a cheap hub, you can get very far.

    What you want to concentrate on are
    *auth services (pam, unix, nis, samba, ldap, etc)
    *mail (set up a few MTA's and try some different configurations)
    *name services (dns - probably where you should start)
    *shell usage (this takes a while)
    *routing and firewalling
    *printing (cups, samba)
    *samba

    Set aside a few tasks for yourself and star trying to do things. Stay simple at first, then work your way up to bigger things.

    Though I don't see how the boss asking you to learn linux is much of a motivator.

  17. Building "scale" networks is great by GoClick · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Depending on how complex your network is you might even be able to get the company to fund a "model city" at work in a spare room.

    You can use local sources to buy outdated computers, used switches, hubs, routers and etc to build a "dumbed down" low cost clone of your current network which will allow you to learn using it just like the real network, heck even the same IPs if you're going to put that much effort in. You can practice deploying software, using the systems etc. You might also want to get exact (sans-serial-numbers) clones of key servers if possible so you can test things very carefully.

    It's a great way to learn but it'll really help to have a guru to get you going.

    Find the local Linux User Group and get involved, make friends and then pester them on IM.

  18. 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.
  19. Welcome aboard! by NtroP · · Score: 4, Informative
    As a Linux SysAdmin who came from the Windows world I'd have to echo many of the earlier senitments:

    • Take advantage of an off-site "bootcamp". They won't make you a Linux SysAdmin, but they will give you a very good head start and are a good introduction to Linux. Let someone coach you through the first installs in class - you'll get plenty of opportunity to beat your head against the wall on your own later.
    • Definitely set up systems at home. The best way to learn is getting your hands dirty and using it every day. I'd also recommend using it as your primary workstation right off the bat at work; drink your own champaign, so to speak. With tools like rdesktop, smb4k, webmin and OpenOffice.org your should be able to do everything you need to do while you learn.
    • Build a good reference library. You've already mentioned O'reilly - they're great, but also build up a library of bookmarks and make friends with google!
    • Try many different distros. Everyone you ask will tell you difinitively which one is best. Don't take their word for it, find out for yourself. Besides, my recommendation for a desktop distro for my budy isn't the same as the distro I'd use for myself, and that is different still from the distro that I'd run as a web- or file-server, etc.
    Personally, I'd not spend my time, initially, on an online course. In my experience, you're better off starting out in an environment where you have someone in meat-space to bounce questions off of and get answers immediately. Once you know your way around Linux a bit, then pick some specific goals or projects (set up a mail server with DNS, set up a webserver with secure areas and cgi scripting, etc.). Just going through the process of downloading the latest apache and compiling it from source (and forgetting to compile in certain functionality or having to go hunting for supporting libraries for a function you're missing) will give you invaluable insight into the whole process of fine-tuning and customizing your Linux boxes to really make them perform as you want.

    And if you don't know perl and php, learn them! Windows admins don't naturally think of scripting something right off the bat, at least I didn't. Now, "how can I script this?" is the first thing I ask if I find myself doing the same thing more than once. I've even loaded ActivePerl onto my Windows Servers and have my entire user and group management process scripted. over 18,000 users are created, placed in groups, have their home directories created/moved/archived, etc. based on data gleaned from HR's databases. I used to get lists of hires, fires and transfers and have to manually manage their accounts and data. Not any more. A couple of perl scripts and an Active Directory perl module with a little Win32::OLE thrown in and I spend my valuable time doing more important stuff (like post on /.)

    Anyway, this is free advice, which means you get what you pay for ;-) Welcome to the club!

    --
    "terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
  20. 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 SealBeater · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I disagree. I am all self-taught, and I belive that taking a class only
      teaches you how to think the way the teacher thinks. I have seen countless
      IT people with formal skills approach a problem the exact same way, go through
      everything they can remember, once they have gone down the list, they are
      stumped. I would much rather be in charge of the training of my brain, esp,
      since you can study what you want, it's always "play" and never "work". My
      self-teaching has been of tourrmendous advantage, since I, having not
      undergone the grinding down of formal education in computers, have developed
      novel and unique ways of looking and solving of provblems.

      SealBeater

      --
      -- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
    2. 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.

    3. 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?
  21. Gentoo not relevant to sys admin by kuom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I run several machines at home, one of them is a gentoo machine. I like Gentoo, but it will *not* teach you much about being a system administrator. It will teach you about some basics about linux (installing one, to be specific), which I don't believe have much to do with sys admin. For example, bootstrapping your kernel. During the gentoo installation, that's just one command, you run the bootstrap script (I believe it was bootstrap.sh), and off it goes (for the next few hours). You don't really learn anything from that except typing in that "bootstrap" command.

    I recommend that you read about real TCP/IP networking, as most Windows sys admins I know don't have the correct knowledge about networking (they only know it in Microsoft terms). O'Reilly's TCP/IP Network Administration is a good book, so is Linux TCP/IP Network Administration by Scott Mann.

    Get comfortable with command line. I know many Windows sys admins who fear the command line tools. Most linux programs now have GUI counter parts, but to really get the most out of a tool, command line is still your best friend. It also will make remote administration a lot easier for you.

    Find out what distribution you will be using, and join the user mailing list(s). Also get familiar with package management of your choice (RPM, DEB, or source). As a sys admin, you will quickly find out that custom compiling everything will become a nightmare to maintain. For me, I build everything into RPMs, even if it's just a single file script. This makes administering multiple machines much easier.

  22. A good friend by tyler_larson · · Score: 4, Informative
    I see you mentioned the O'reilly books - they are the best. I found Unix Power Tools and System Administration (Alein Frisch, sp?) to be the best books you can buy.

    There's nothing that even comes close to having a hardcore hacker as a good friend. Information is quickest gained through other people's personal experience.

    I've done it all. I've read a whole series of O'Reilly books (don't even bother with any other publisher) on various Linux and Network related subjects--I've read at least 25 of them cover-to-cover in the last 4 years. I have a whole bookshelf lined with them.

    Then I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari online program, and will never again be without it. I'll never have to buy another tech book again. If you can tolerate reading books online, getting a subscription is an ABSOLUTE must. And if you buy (or would like to buy) an average of more then two or three books a year, this will save you loads of cash. You can read up to about 60 books a year for $10/mo.

    However, when you need to come up to speed as quick as possible, by far and away the best resource is a friend who knows it all. Install Linux on all your computers, and play with every piece of software you may be even slightly interested. Read all the books, read all the man pages. Write a few scripts in Bash, Perl, Sed, Awk, and anything else you hear about. And when you get stuck (and believe me, you will), call up that friend or drop by his desk. You'll be an expert faster than you can immagine.

    It's the little things, you know, that make you an expert. Anybody can copy files to another computer, but if you can come up with something like

    tar cf - dir{1,2} | (ssh host2 'cd destdir; tar xpf -')
    off the top of your head, then people will start feeling the respect.
    --
    "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
    RFC 1925
  23. try linux from scratch by karmester · · Score: 3, Informative

    I cannot recommend LFS highly enough... http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ 'nuff said

  24. 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"

  25. Pick an old book by iNiTiUM · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In addition to choosing a difficult distro to start with, pick up an older unix book. Something mid-80s or earlier. Why? Those books have more useful commandline tricks, simple stuff that is often overlooked in the modern day age of pointy-clicky. Scrounge your used book stores for a copy of "A Practical Guide to UNIX System V" for starters. I also scored a whole accounting box full of HP-UX manuals awhile back, many many neat tricks, mostly forgotten shell script kung-fu. You'll quickly pick up what still works and what doesn't. Basic commandline zen goes lightyears, especially if you plan to work with other variations of *n?x...

    Hell, just install FreeBSD and bookmark the online handbook...

    --
    When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
  26. 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