The Linux Learning Path

tcofran said:
Last sentence....
What colour hat would that be?
Click to expand...

f7bf79abe5807d2aad6d45bb17886006.jpg

All of them?
 
static_sa said:
Are the specialist exams "easier" than RHCE? Individually speaking. Or is the course work similar in length?
Click to expand...
Mostly similar - however there are 1-2 that I'd consider easier due to their 2-2.5 hour duration vs the RHCE - which is a 4 hour exam.

Again "easier" is going to depend on your background - know Docker and K8s, cool when then Podman and some basic OpenShift is likely going to be a breeze (EX180 exam). Just like if you've done CKA, then EX280 (Openshift Administrator) is likely to be fairly straight forward as well.

It largely depends on your background tbh.

No Red Hat exam is particularly "easy" - but the specialisations aren't as broad as the RHCE - so that helps as you can focus on a small subset vs the huge breadth the RHCE expected you to know (at least for RHCE 7, which had LDAP, DNS, MySQL, POSTFIX, NFS, KERBEROS, APACHE, SELINUX, PERMISSIONS, ACLs etc etc etc)

As an example I've done the following COE's (certificate of expertise - 5 needed for RHCE):

Ansible
Puppet and Satelite
OpenStack
Podman and Openshift
Cloudforms
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV)

I'm in the process of doing another 2-3 to keep my RHCA (Architect) designation current.

It's hard work, but it's nice learning about things - especially items you maybe don't always get to touch on a day to day basis.
 
Last edited:
shadow_man said:
Mostly similar - however there are 1-2 that I'd consider easier due to their 2-2.5 hour duration vs the RHCE - which is a 4 hour exam.

Again "easier" is going to depend on your background - know Docker and K8s, cool when then Podman and some basic OpenShift is likely going to be a breeze (EX180 exam). Just like if you've done CKA, then EX280 (Openshift Administrator) is likely to be fairly straight forward as well.

It largely depends on your background tbh.

No Red Hat exam is particularly "easy" - but the specialisations aren't as broad as the RHCE - so that helps as you can focus on a small subset vs the huge breadth the RHCE expected you to know (at least for RHCE 7, which had LDAP, DNS, MySQL, POSTFIX, NFS, KERBEROS, APACHE, SELINUX, PERMISSIONS, ACLs etc etc etc)

As an example I've done the following COE's (certificate of expertise - 5 needed for RHCE):

Ansible
Puppet and Satelite
OpenStack
Podman and Openshift
Cloudforms
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV)

I'm in the process of doing another 2-3 to keep my RHCA (Architect) designation current.

It's hard work, but it's nice learning about things - especially items you maybe don't always get to touch on a day to day basis.
Click to expand...
Awesome, thanks for the info!
 
UrBaN963 said:
So I've decided to up my Linux knowledge. Previously I had successfully installed Ubuntu and gotten drivers etc. working. Basically called it quits there.

I'd like to embark on the journey though, I'd like my Linux knowledge to match my Windows knowledge as I feel it would be both interesting and useful.

However - where to start? Need some guidance on a path to follow or basic project to get my head around.

I've got a fresh Ubuntu installation and drivers installed, all updates done, etc. However, that was all just from following guidance on webpages and copy/pasting commands. Useful and effective, but limited on the learning side as I'm doing a lot of things without understanding why.

Could you guys please either recommend resources or, better yet, advise on a project/path to follow to up my skills? Obviously there are a million things to learn, so a good starting point would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

A great start that I found is this:

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com www.reddit.com

They run a 30day challenge every month. Plus, having access to a community and everyone working towards the same goal helps a lot when you feel stuck.
 
Thank you all for your suggestions.

A lot of it is beyond me at this point, largely due to nomenclature being completely unfamiliar to me. This is good, gives me a place to start.

I've started with www.linuxjourney.com and have been moving through those - a good starting place for sure. Will keep at it and look to your suggestions as they begin making more sense.
 
It`s good to have Linux knowledge but I think it`s not as valuable as it was before the cloud started abstracting OS stuff. I would rather study cloud before any OS.
 
Benedict A55h0le said:
It`s good to have Linux knowledge but I think it`s not as valuable as it was before the cloud started abstracting OS stuff. I would rather study cloud before any OS.
Click to expand...

The cloud runs on linux. If you really want to play around with free versions of cloud provider, you need to know some linux as well. Otherwise you can't do much. I'm pretty sure Linux demand has only increased with the onset of cloud.
 
ponder said:
There's always Linux From Scratch :sneaky:

Linux from Scratch - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
If one wants to learn how all the different parts of "GNU" Linux fits together and not just how to compile and install a kernel / kernel modules... LFS is the best practical learning resource IMHO.

Free VirtualBox/Vmware + LFS buildroot live media... was a invaluable learning resource for me...

And after that, if you want to go even lower... I recommend the Stanford/MIT online OS Engineering Youtube videos.
 
Last edited:
kidcolt said:
If one wants to learn how all the different parts of "GNU" Linux fits together and not just how to compile and install a kernel / kernel modules... LFS is the best practical learning resource IMHO.
Click to expand...

I've never tried it, too much pt for me. I
 
On a serious note, most of what you may want to do on Linux is free to learn on the net. Your best resource is a copy of the Linux Bible.

Its not a book simply read, its a guide/manual on how to do the most general sys admin tasks and its a nice to have.

It isnt going to teach you how to SysRq + REISUB (you need to actually enable this) but it will take you quite far
 
My suggestion is to use an old PC. Install proxmox on it and create VM's to make your life easier, pi hole, plex server, web server, VPN, nextcloud etc

Thats where 90% of my knowledge came from. I then went onto RH certs which was easy since I had a good understanding but then I realised a lot of things I did weren't up to standard. Then going back and trying to out issues is another learning experience.

Also a raspberry pi is amazing if you are tinkerer
 
Multipass is a nice tool for easily spinning up cloud style Ubuntu server VM's on your local machine. You can spin up several machines and pass them a cloud-init file to set them up. Nice for trying out something like setting up a Docker Swarm to play with.
 
SauRoNZA said:
If you’ve got some spare hardware install Ubuntu Server on an old machine or even a Raspberry Pi.

Now if you want to take it one step further setup Ubuntu Desktop on your main machine although not required it will force your hand a bit.

1. Go ahead and figure out how to SSH to the server.

1a. Learn to use vim from the very start to edit files. Don’t fall for the cop out of other editors and struggle later. Vi commands are built into many other Linux commands so just learn them now.

2. Once that’s done figure out how to make the SSH connection passwordless and more secure using SSH keys.

3. Maybe do something like changing the SSH port on the server to understand how editing works better and how to restart daemons/services without rebooting the machine.

4. Create a share on your server with both SMB/CIFS and NFS so you get to know both ways of working and then have your Desktop connecting to that. Can even let your Windows machines talk to it if that helps.

5. Take it one step further and learn how to make both shares connect automatically on boot up of your desktop using FSTAB.

6. You probably learnt a bit about permissions along the way already but did it the Google copy and paste way and probably made terrible mistakes. So now actively learn about permissions and tools like chmod and chown and what they do and how it all works.

7. Maybe make a second user on your server now and use the above permissions learnings to see how that actually works in practise.

8. Now you can start using things like tail and piping it into grep to monitor the logs in /var/log to see the above user logging in or failing their authentication etc.

9. You’ve probably cocked up mv and cp a bit by now learning how the paths and syntaxes work and how relative and absolute pertains to things. Maybe now you are learning the shortcuts and easy ways to get around the OS without a GUI.

10. Time to Cron - Learn what it is and how to use it. Maybe you make a small backup of something or write some log output or some such.

11. Now install something like Plex natively and make it work properly pointing it to some media folder with a movie or Tv show.

12. Install docker and then install Plex again from Linuxserver. Figure out what a bind mount is and get it to automatically fire on reboot etc.

12. Now take it further and install sonarr or radarr or even both in Docker and also some kind of torrent client. Make them all talk to each other and then push whatever to Plex.

You now have a functional Media server that can look after itself but probably spent a weekend trying to understand how the hell this Inception bullshit works with mounting paths and bind mounts.

Probably had some firewall or networking bullshit in between as well.

13. Take it further and install things like Nginx and Letsencrypt, DuckDNS and Fail2Ban and you suddenly have a web server secured on the internet.

14. Do it again and use Swag in Docker instead.

15. Host your own Bitwarden instance from said server.

16. Setup something like Uptime Kuma to monitor things and send you notifications via Telegram.

17. Setup a WireGuard server and connect to it from your phone or other devices and connect home to proxy your internet traffic.

If you haven’t learnt Linux along the way doing all the above I’ll eat my hat.
Click to expand...
Hahahaah vscode go brrrr.
 
One of the most rewarding experiences is compiling Linux From Scratch (LFS) and trying to turn it into something for specific use (webserver) or to get it being your daily driver.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X