Re: Thinking about devoting a serious part of my life to linux...
On Sep 4, 6:50 am, "G.W. Haywood" <g...@jubileegroup.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 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.....
>
> Whatever you think about the way it does things, Microsoft is one of
> the most successful companies that the world has ever seen. Business
> world-wide has a truly enormous investment in Microsoft products and
> in the vast majority of business settings you can hardly avoid dealing
> with them.
>
> Your evaluation of a "crap business model" tells me that you know
> nothing about business, and you won't get far with businesses if you
> start by telling them that they invested in crap. In your post you
> mention 'corporate network'; it might not be what you want to do, but
> it will help a lot if you first figure out what businesses do and how
> they do it. Only then will you be more than accidentally useful to a
> business. If you learn well, you might even succeed in one yourself.
> There's a lot more to it than the tools and the products.
>
> > 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?
>
> Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read. Then read some more.
> Learn how to write English properly.
>
> Build your own computers from components. Learn about drivers for the
> various bits of hardware. Learn the differences between BSD and SystemV.
> Learn about packet filtering. Learn about 'bash' and 'vi'. Personally
> I don't use vi unless it's unavoidable, but it's all you'll have on many
> a system, so you need to be able to cope. Learn how to get a bash prompt
> on a Windows box and an Explorer window on a Linux box - both remotely.
> Look at system logs. Play around with SAMBA, CUPS and sharing printers.
> Learn how to use a number of email and Web clients, office productivity
> tools like word processors and spreadsheets. Get to know about viruses
> and all sorts of other malware. Become a security expert.
>
> Read as much as you can, particularly "The C Programming Language", by
> Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie, and all the O'Reilly books you
> can get your hands on:http://www.oreilly.com/store/complete.html
>
> Here's a selection from our bookshelf. Even though we have quite a
> few on machine-readable media, and some are available free online, my
> wife and I have two printed copies of several of them. That's great
> because we can read them by candle light if there's a power cut, and
> somehow my tired old eyes find a book much easier than the screen.
>
> "Learning the bash Shell"
> "Learning the vi Editor"
> "Learning GNU Emacs"
> "Essential System Administration"
> "TCP/IP Network Administration"
> "IP Routing"
> "DNS and BIND"
> "Network Troubleshooting Tools"
> "Sendmail"
> "Managing & Using MySQL"
> "Programming Perl"
>
> I've read all these from cover to cover - some twice, that last one
> even three times - and yet still find myself going back to them.
>
> Even thoguh I haven't even mentioned Apache just these few books will
> set you back quite a few ($currency_unit)s, so your friends and family
> need never again wonder what to buy for your birthday. You'll have
> had several more of those before you're anything remotely resembling
> an experienced system administrator. Incidentally I have absolutely
> no affiliation with O'Reilly, and I can't remember the last time that
> my business sold a book. I've found that not all O'Reilly books are
> really _great_ value, but I always learn something useful from them -
> definitely more than enough to cover the cost.
>
> > Is debian a good distro to learn if I want to one day run a
> > corporate network?
>
> No. Most of the Linux/FreeBSD/OSX/Solaris/Whatever products have much
> in common and once you're familiar wiith one you'll be fairly familiar
> with the others, but you'll probably find the differences frustrating.
> Slackware is commonly percieved to be a distribution used by those who
> understand the internals and is probably a good one to learn with, but
> from that point of view there are others, such as Linux From Scratch,
> which might be better. They may need more work. RedHat Enterprise is
> probably the top dog in the serious corporate environment. Debian is
> great if you want the easy life and a lot of packages. But it does
> take control, and it hides a lot of what's going on behind the GUI and
> the automation. Use something that doesn't by default start up a GUI.
> Compile and install everything from the sources, and configure it all
> yourself. This is what the people producing the distributions do, and
> most of them ultimately work with the same sources. Until you're very
> comfortable rolling your own packages from sources, avoid apt, dpkg,
> rpm, swaret, yum and all the other package managers. Google to find
> out what went wrong. Read "How to ask questions the smart way" and
> join a few mailing lists. I don't mean to imply that your post was
> especially badly worded but it could have been, er, more professional.
> If you want to be useful in a corporate setting you will need to work
> on that. And you'll need to look comfortable wearing a suit, even if
> you've cycled in.
>
> Oh, yes. Don't forget to read as much as you can.
>
> --
>
> 73,
> Ged.
>
> --
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQU...@lists.debian.org
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
I appreciate all of the advice...It was way more than I ever expected,
but then again, that is what makes the linux community so unique. As
for my questioning of MS, they do suck...and I am an English minor, so
don't worry 'bout me and communicating in the business world....I try
to make my posts informal and easy to read....ty again for all the
input...this is certainly the type of pointers I was looking for....
Reply to: