Server Optimization For Newbies?

supaneko writes "I recently took a new job as a network and server administration for a small IT company. I am absolutely shocked at how much is taking place within this company that I have little to no experience with. To help bolster my experience, I purchased a used server to use for hands-on training and practice. My ultimate goal is to have a complete, secure LAMP server available to the public running CentOS. I have been browsing the Net for various guides and tips on setup, optimization, security, and maintenance, but nothing I've found really gives me a hands-on approach to the topics I want to learn about. When you all started out, what route did you take to pick up the server setup and maintenance skills you have now? Is there anything in particular that you would recommend to someone who has excellent skills with consumer PCs and servers but is a total newbie to corporate and enterprise networking and servers?"

Comments

Re:One question

[perlchild]

You forgot c) they fired the mentor with the junior barely trained and now the junior has to do the whole job by himself

Happens a lot more than you think

My Approach

[severoon]

I'm actually a software developer, but I work at a place with a lot of small projects and we do our own IT...meaning that we don't get budget for a dedicated IT staff and we end up doing a lot of it ourselves.

So, the way I learned what I need to know was to mess up a lot and get yelled at a lot. :-)

In all seriousness, we have finally landed at a place where we host and run our projects on Amazon's EC2. Some projects are even sophisticated enough now to leverage the EC2 platform and third-party services such as Rightscale for truly distributed cloud computing...but this isn't absolutely necessary if all you want is a place to run your production system. Best of all, since it's all virtualized so it's foolproof to learn new tech. When you're going to make significant changes you just save a snapshot of the current system, use it to start up a new instance off to the side, and screw it up any way you want to figure out a solution, and you can always easily revert to your previous snapshot if necessary. Just make sure you keep organized on which snapshots are configured with what, and be diligent about removing old snapshots that no longer have any purpose (again, purely organizational).

We've found in our business that the cost of doing this is vastly less than maintaining a rack of servers...so even though most projects don't leverage the cloud, we still benefit. (And of course there's room to grow into the cloud, which is also very beneficial.)

Get started by reading up on EC2, S3, and get the ElasticFox plugin for Firefox.

Re:Virtualization

[COMON$]

It was not off topic, the guy is a noob and had the wrong title for his question. Read again:

When you all started out, what route did you take to pick up the server setup and maintenance skills you have now? Is there anything in particular that you would recommend to someone who has excellent skills with consumer PCs and servers but is a total newbie to corporate and enterprise networking and servers?

The guy is asking how to work with serving apps in general, he is light years from optimizing them. Like most noobs they post something not knowing what the hell they are doing, way over their heads, asking about something trying to be smart by saying I am trying to set up a PDC in server 2008, but cannot get my exchange 2007 running because it says I am getting a conflict with another IP. Reading things like this and the question in this forum make me shiver and want to scream because there are so many things wrong with the statements I barely know where to start. And in my example the guy was thinking there was just an IP problem, when in actuality "Can open, Worms everywhere".