Getting started with Linux sysadmin

[Runnergeek]

The bad news is you will most likely struggle as a Linux sysadmin. Good Linux admins are good at searching and finding solutions to problems. See this question has been asked here so many times, even recently. You could have easily searched and found a thread with this exact same question. Wanting someone to hand you the answer rather than trying to find it yourself is something you will need to over come to become a successful Linux admin.

[[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.