Jumped right In?

English Open Chat
#1

Good Afternoon All,

I made the move last night away from Microsoft and into the world of Linux. I’ll be honest I have never touched this OS before and I’m a little excited about the change. I would love some advise on tutorials, Courses, Qualifications that you would recommend for me to push to a server Engineer level like I am in Microsoft. Christ I even deleted my MS software off my laptop and installed open SUSE Leap.

Any advise would go a long way. Nice meeting you all

Dave

#2

Hi Dave, welcome !!!

First advice: take it easy, take your time to learn.
Second advice: get your info from the openSUSE wiki and SDB, not from third party tip-sites.
Question: “server” is a wide area, narrow it down to one thing at the time, f.e. start with setting up a LAMP server locally.
Third advice: take lots of time to get around YaST ( Yet another Setup Tool )
Fourth advice: don’t hesitate to ask questions here, community members will be glad help you.

And … enjoy and have fun !!!

#3

Thank you very much for your Advise, much appreciated

#4

The openSUSE parent company – SUSE – offers Certified Administrator training: <https://training.suse.com/certification/sca-linux/>.

There’s also the Linux Foundation which offers System Administrator training and certification: <https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses/system-administration-training/linux-system-administration> and <https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification/lfcs>. The folks supporting the Linux Foundation include companies such as:

  • AT&T
  • Cisco
  • IBM
  • Microsoft
  • Intel
  • Oracle
  • Qualcomm

TLDP (The Linux Documentation Project) publishes a System Administrator Guide: <https://www.tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/index.html>.

The folks at O’Reilly have a range of books for Linux System Administrators.

Amazing as it may seem, Microsoft is offering Linux System Administrator training and LFCS certification: <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/mcsa-linux-azure-certification.aspx> and <https://news.microsoft.com/2015/12/09/microsoft-offers-new-certification-for-linux-on-azure/>.

#5

Please note that, the TLDP SysAdmin Guide hasn’t been maintained for a few years but, it contains enough basic information for a beginning Linux SysAdmin.

Please note that:

  • Currently (SysV) ‘init’ is not “fashionable” – many Linux distributions such as openSUSE are currently using ‘systemd’ to boot and initialise the systems;
  • There are some newer File Systems currently being used, such as: ‘Btrfs’, ‘XFS’ in it’s newest incarnation and ‘ext4’;
  • NTP pool servers are currently the way to go for system time and, there’s a replacement for NTP coming soon;
  • I’m missing a mention of the SysAdmin “Swiss Army Knife”: the “Perl” scripting language;
  • There’s also no mention of the “heavy-weight” commercial SysAdmin tools such as the Salt-based SUSE tool (how to update a few thousand servers in at most a few minutes).

You may also care to take a look at the list of SUSE reference customers and the systems which are being maintained by means of the SysAdmin tools; my favourite is the Air India e-Mail system: 10 000 users, maintained by only 2 engineers.