Linux administration books?
Hey community!
Can anyone suggest a good book or e-book or something similar that goes about linux server administration?
I've dealt with servers for a long time now and know some basics and all that but I'd love to learn more. Maybe at some point even apply for an cert to widen my opportunity in the job market.
Thanks!
I'm the 85%. Also Elon likes memes hence he's an idiot.
Comments
https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Linux-System-Administration-Handbook-ebook/dp/B075MK6LZ7
The Red Hat docs are a good overview of things.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/
Installing Gentoo/Funtoo is eye opening.
Installing software from source is fun. For instance, setup a RHEL6 box, and install more modern versions of GNU utils, Vim, and Python in your user folder. Trying a couple of services from source, like FreeRadius or Bind, would be a good next step.
After that, integrating FreeBSD or OpenBSD into a mixed network is fun.
Then there is the devops route where buying products to fix problems or paying other people to maintain stuff is the prevailing methodology.
First:
Learn the basics. Use the Admin handbook to learn how to load modules, preboot, GRUB, all of that good stuff.
Then, as @FlamingSpaceJunk suggested, learn the distribution. The great thing about Linux is there are about 40,096 flavors right now and none of them are 100% compatible - except for, ya know, CentOS/RedHat which are pretty close for the time being.
Learn some electic distributions. I love Void, because it is so off the wall that you just have to retrain your brain that you can literally run a rolling distro as a desktop (if you choose), and Alpine, because running a distribution that is light for a router in 2020 for production is both useful for learning to use basic tools (static linked busybox, naturally), and compatible, but not 100% compatible tools.
Finally, as suggested, learn some basics of BSD. OpenBSD doesn't make you figure out C/H/S anymore, and FreeBSD even has a desktop distribution with 3rd party support- https://www.trueos.org/
There's a lifetime to go through. Decide what your employer's needs are and learn/focus on that. LEMP/LAMP/et al.
My pronouns are asshole/asshole/asshole. I will give you the same courtesy.
TrueOS is dead. GhostBSD is the premier BSD desktop now, which is/was based off of TrueOS.
Honestly, trying to run TrueOS as a regular FreeBSD install was frustrating. They channelled people to their own way of doing things, and their way wasn't like the regular FreeBSD way. This was true from when it was PC-BSD.
Others out there: NomadBSD is a live distro, MidnightBSD is similar to GhostBSD except forked from FreeBSD 6.1.
Thanks for the tips. Im currently running openSUSE as my driver and since its really close to SUSE itself then I guess Id feel comfortable learning the depths of that first, however I do distro hop a lot lately which probably isnt the best idea for getting any deep level knowledge.
May I ask tho, why the BSD suggestion?
I'm the 85%. Also Elon likes memes hence he's an idiot.
So you know how to take the driver's seat in other circumstances. A lot of Linux stuff is completely Linux specific. If you learn BSD basics, you'll have enough to fumble through most various versions of UNIX. Roots, and all.
openSUSE isn't widely used. It's common in Germany, but YaST and zypper are really not normal. You probably want to learn how to deal with the RPMs via yum and/or some Debian with apt.
@FlamingSpaceJunk Damn. Didn't realize it was dead; haven't tried it in about a year. That's a shame- it was nonstandard and did weird non-FreeBSD stuff but for most was at least a viable alternative.
My pronouns are asshole/asshole/asshole. I will give you the same courtesy.
Distro hopping is good. It will help when translating articles into you're distro of choice.
You don't really get deep knowledge until you're elbows deep in a server doing things most people on the Stackexchange sites haven't even dreamed about.
Setting up technology X is one thing, and running it proficiently in production is another. It's the running things in production that people don't really talk about in detail.
They're off beat, and they have their own quirks. Most people and companies are focused on Linux, and consequently, there isn't as much written on running a BSD, which makes it more of a challenge. It really does stress your chops more then some obscure Linux distro.
This is a good time to mention learning a programming language would be helpful in your quest. C, Perl, and Python are the dominant admin languages. Lua is a good little language. Go is also popular especially for network services, and Rust is interesting. Go and Rust are both easy to bootstrap without admin privs. There are other languages, like NewLisp, Nim, or Crystal which might be interesting, and I try to encourage people to go for languages which can be statically compiled.
Thanks guys for all the suggestions. I'll surely get my hands on some books I can find around these parts and read into them.
As for Zypper, not sure how is it much more different from yum or apt. But I guess thats the reason I made this topic in the first place. yast on the other hand, yeah it's something else.
I guess I'll try to "triple" boot myself into Debian and BSD of some sorts I feel comfortable with and just mess around as much as I can. If I f**k up, hey no harm done, fresh install and learn from my mistakes. And see how much beating this laptop can actually take.
Now one more question. Is Ubuntu really that "hated" by the server world? All I'm seeing on forums is bad mouthing it as being too "newbie" OS and so forth but every time I come across talking to people locally all the servers actually seem to run on it. Would I be better of learning Debian straight out or know the quirks of Ubuntu instead? Or both..?
I'm the 85%. Also Elon likes memes hence he's an idiot.
Suse packs alot more into zypper then Red Hat packs into yum or Debian into apt. Suse likes the one tool to do everything paradigm, YaST, and zypper has a lot more functionality then yum or apt.
Quite a bit that is elitism, and some of it is that the entire Debian tree has it's oddities.
Having run RHEL/CentOS side-by-side with Ubuntu, the attention to detail from RH is much higher then Canonical, and the tools to admin the OS from RH are better. My productivity is higher with RHEL/CentOS systems then Ubuntu, by quite a bit.
Ubuntu is fine, and I like it better then regular Debian. Learning one over the other doesn't make that much of a difference since Canonical repackages Debian testing.