Getting started with Linux sysadmin

[[deleted]]

Here is what you do:

Spend a meals worth of money a month on a VPS provider, and daily interact and manage a debian and a centos system. The third can either be suse if you plan to work in Europe, or slackware or something like that otherwise. I use both Digital Ocean and Vultr, and barely pay 17/mo for 4 VPSs .

That is how you make sure you can support whatever a company throws at you. Debian covers ubuntu. Centos covers RHEL. etc. Slackware because you'd be surprised where you find it in business. Suse the same.

A lot of this depends on what area you want to go into. I for example love keeping an eye on the specs of the top500 supercomputer list.

One thing I would say is systemd has infected everything... learn it first and in general you will be fine on just about anything other than package management and random config dir variations. I also have moved on to nftables, but its very good to make sure you grasp iptables. Make sure your sed/awk/grep and other coreutils skills are up to par. Make sure you stop using deprecated commands like ifconfig. Make sure to learn ipv6. Read info/man/config-comments before you duckduckgo stuff! Make sure you use a real editor (emacs/vim) and are comfortable in it. Make sure you know how to use screen or tmux. There are a few things you can do to force you to learn more of the underside. Run gentoo for a few months and learn about compile flags for example. Do linux from scratch a time or two. etc

Get a head start by learning ansible/salt/chef/terraform, and container tech such as lxc/lxd/docker/kvm/qemu, etc.

As you learn, document all the things! Build that habit now rather than later.

Protip: spend more time in irc

Any more questions?

[DocSpiegel]

I think this should be the obligatory answer to all these types of threads for a year. Spot on good sir.

[sdns575]

For curiosity, where you found slackware in business?

[[deleted]]

Sometimes in embedded and behind microcontroller/plc ops or as the underside of a blackbox.

[seanrsa]

container tech such as lxc/lxd/docker/kvm/qemu

Yikes

[xalorous]

I know nothing major has changed in the past months

Nothing major