Online linux administration course ?

October 7, 2014 8:47 PM

Anyone have a recommendation for an online linux administration course ?

I've used codeschool for learning Angular and I'd like something similar to firm up my *nix admin skills.

I'm not a complete beginner by any means but I feel like I have islands of knowledge and I would like a course which filled in the gaps.

I'm a developer and I'm not looking to become a fully time administrator but I would like to offer clients a more convincing package than ... "eerh, I know how to write a bash script" .

Having said that I'm really not that worried about certification of whatever sorts are out there - I just want to know myself that I've got the basics covered.

ps: in case it's not clear I am only interested in "server" type system. I do occasionally fire up a machine with a desktop but I basically live in the shell.

posted by southof40 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Are you open to books? Way back in the dark ages, before Linux was a major contender, a much older version of this book is how I learned everything about system administration. Enough to get a job running systems for a major internet company (I've since recovered) with no prior professional experience and a liberal arts degree. It still stands as perhaps my favorite technical book I've ever read. I don't know if the later editions live up to the same standards, but I suspect they do.
posted by primethyme at 9:29 PM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Seconding primethyme's dark ages recommendation for a book usually seems the way to go. I know there's tons of stuff to be learned on the web, I can't speak to this particular book from personal knowledge because I've read other O'Reilly books, but I think this is a good place to start: Linux Administration.Check it out, especially if you already have some knowledge and are wanting to make sure you got your basics covered.
posted by lunastellasol at 10:14 PM on October 7, 2014

Tried to edit, the link is to a different book than mentioned in previous comment because it is older so different packages, mostly Debian, and website seems inactive.
posted by lunastellasol at 10:22 PM on October 7, 2014

Thirding the Nemeth book which primethyme mentioned. I would supplement this with a known certification syllabus like LPI to ensure you systematically cover all aspects.

However, what you really need as an effective sysadmin are troubleshooting skills, you can't really learn these from a book.
posted by epo at 2:39 AM on October 8, 2014

Response by poster: Sorry for the slow response. I bought the "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" and am working my way through that. As part of that I've built myself a Gentoo VM and am starting in from scratch on that.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
posted by southof40 at 1:28 PM on November 11, 2014