Re: Thinking about devoting a serious part of my life to linux...
On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 03:13 +0000, blues wrote:
> I would really love to become a good sys admin; linux is very
> interesting to me as a popular alternative to the crap business model
> of MS.....i like the idea of using free software to monitor and
> protect a network, and I hope to make a career out of it...does anyone
> have any tips as to what i should concentrate on? Is debian a good
> distro to learn if I want to one day run a corporate network?
>
Try downloading VMWare server on the net. That is free and it can
emulate multiple boxes( I am not starting a fire here on the choice of
the virtual emulator but vmware is a good one to start with IMHO).
Install linux and run atleast 3 instances with no two on the same
network. Assign IP addresses and then try to do what all you can do with
the data. VMWare gives you ease of use to add a harddisk and so you can
just add another 2 hard-disks and try out DM-RAID or LVM, try occupying
one lvm, move lvm data from one disk to other, recover from a lost level
5 raid etc.,
On the networking side, you can try pinging the linux boxes in the other
networks using the linux box with 2 network cards as a router. Try
changing and playing with the ip addresses using iptables , putting
rules, blocking traffic etc.,
on the configuration sied, you can setup radius server, http server and
then try to make then secure by adding some firewall rules which allow
access to only one machine etc., and also setting up usernames and
passwords for accessing a site in apache.
But yes, make sure you are thorough with compiling kernels and making
them work. Sometimes compilation and adding to grub goes like a breeze
and sometimes you end up finding out what has to be put in the .config
to avoid the kernel-panic while booting ! After this you can try out
sysadmin things on the kernel side which may be something like
installing a new kernel, trying to play with SCSI disks, etc.,
You can work on the booting process and try writing a /etc/rc.X init
script which gets called during the bootup of the box from init
scripts.
Last but not least, get back to this group if you have isses and i am
sure many people in the group will be glad to help you with your issues
in linux.
>
--
Bhasker C V
Registered Linux user: #306349 (counter.li.org)
The box said "Requires Windows 95, NT, or better", so I installed Linux.
Reply to: