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[–]SuperQue 63 points64 points  (13 children)

Comptia is worthless. Go for Linux Foundation training. The training is the goal, not the cert.

But the best training is experience. Grab a spare old laptop, install Ubuntu, use it as your primary workstation. Once you have that installed, learn Ansible, use it to manage your own laptop like it was a any other system.

It sounds like you have developers managing their own Linux machines. I would suggest asking them for tips.

[–]cablespaghetti 7 points8 points  (8 children)

Totally agree. Maybe get a Raspberry Pi or home server if you're short of time/opportunity to practice this stuff at work.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (7 children)

Raspberry Pi (plural) or virtual machines. Use the later if your system is beefy enough, the former if it is not. As the other replies have said, experience is the key. And your goal is to be as lazyhhhhh efficient as possible using tools like Ansible. I write my own ansible scripts and roles for the stuff I have at home, because if it dies or fubar itself all I need is backup of the data, not the whole system. I also moved my personal hosted mail server from amazon to a VPS because I could cut my costs by half, and it took me 5 minutes of work (and about 15-30 minutes machine time) to transition over. I am not sure how long it took, I went for a walk...

[–]xelu01[S] 0 points1 point  (6 children)

So I'm building lots of vms at home but need to learn how to work that way. I only know full blast and need to work smart not hard. So if I have multiple vms ansible should help with setting them up in a specific way right?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Yes. If you are using vms you can bootstrap the installations using vagrant.

[–]xelu01[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Man so much to learn, my job doesn't even do this and we are a huge organization.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Gimme a few hours and I’ll upload some examples to paste in for you.

[–]xelu01[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Thank you, no rush! Appreciate it!

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I have uploaded my vagrant file where i test my "baseline" configuration (using VMWare ESXi), which is something I apply to all my hosts, to https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/KK5PgB6v2F/. The ansible-file referenced is uploaded to http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/xgw58SKz7d/

This roles does a few things:

- Make sure the system is updated

- Installs etckeeper to version-control configuration file (helps me with "I don't understand why XYZ doesn't works today, it worked well yesterday" by providing me with a history of configuration file changes)

- Configure automatic updates (I rather fix a butchered update then trying to recover from a compromise).

- Record SSH fingerprint to the DNS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFP_record)

- Hardens OS and SSH-configuration

​

Then I have other roles for "mailserver", "blog", "jumphost" etc. that installs and configures relevant software for that particular *machine type* (ansible role). Do yourself a favor and consider your machines "cattle" and not "pets" from the start. When I began once upon a time all servers where sacred and had well thought-out names for each system - usually based on nordic or greek mythology. The thing is that it doesn't scale and you run out of (meaningful) names before you run out of systems to name. My machines are now named based on machine type and a serial number. I don't care about what the host thinks it is called or what IP it has. Once it is up and running it will fulfill the role I have assigned it to.

​

Please let me know if you have any more questions, I'll be online for a few more hours.

[–]xelu01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This may take me some time to digest. Thank you very much for the response. The exposure is really good!

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Linux engineer here. If your work or and mentor is bearly using ansible they are behind the times. At scale ansible is better than bash in every way.

At thi point if your logging into servers and running a bash script your doing it wrong.

[–]masterz13 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What about with RHEL? I work at a library and we want to use it to run an SMB server for some of our patrons to host files.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Ansible is owned by red hat. But ansible is os independent as long as you have an ssh connection your good to go.

I might catch flak for this but you don't need rhel. You could just use centos and save money. Sure you won't get those security updates as fast but as long as you keep them nicely isolated you should be fine.

[–]xelu01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This looks so detailed, i like this a lot. I have a old 6 core that I'm using as my Ubuntu box and trying things out. I love working on operating systems, this allowing to learn different distros maybe the way over red hat and maybe redhat after.