Show HN: Linux sysadmin skills for anyone - a new online course
Kicked my course off today - grep101.com - with lessons starting Monday. I think I've got the pricing right to attract a good class of keen learners for this first run through...
you'll be expected to learn and use grep, ssh, apt-get, tail and man
I also see that restarting services is in there.. however I don't see anything that tells me any details about what the course actually covers.
You also don't mention what flavor of Linux you're using for teaching.
Also, launching this, and then starting the lessons only 1-2 business days later? You either don't want a lot of people to sign up... or I can't think of another reason to do that.
- big no-no - which flavor you will be using? RHEL? Ubuntu? FreeBSD? Let's say I sign-up and it turns around that there will be RHEL tooling. Well - money wasted if I standardize on Ubuntu.
>> use grep, ssh, apt-get, tail and man to administer, monitor and extend your server.
- lack of proper course description - the above is not enough. How about setting properly iptables and kernel config (to ensure network security)? how about properly hardening web server? Install from ports won't cut it. How about proper partinioning to ensure no executable bits? etc etc etc
- who are you and how I can be sure that what you teach is best practices and not some oldish shmaboodle fairy tales?
Would the above be addressed positively - I would pay more... and more... and more...
The initial learning curve might be hard for some people though. What is bash? What are commands? How do you cd,mv,cp etc. What is /? What is /etc? etc...
Be sure to let us know how it goes.
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[1]: My collection of links for common UNIX commands: http://cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/anatomy/doku.php?do=index&idx...
What are the highlights?
To give you an idea, here's some headers for the days:
1 Accessing your New Server 2 Basic navigation, cd, pwd etc 4 Installing software, exploring the file structure 5 more, less, nano, tab completion, history and "dot files" 9 cron, contab, /etc/cron.daily anacran and "at" 19 Automation - using logrotate
Like a lot of startups have found, it's hard to know exactly what you've got until it's already underway - and your input will drive the direction this goes.
To answer a couple of points that have come up: (a) Participants on this first course will be using Ubuntu Server LTS, but the course material is based around them having _two_ servers one Debian-flavoured, one RHEL-flavoured. At this level its more about getting them familiar with Linux as a whole, assuming that they may need to support multiple versions. (b) In my day job I act as sysadmin for 20-odd production systems, ranging from PC104 systems running Slackware, to RHEL 6 systems, (c) I've run many technical training courses in the past.
I have yet to find a shortage of friends, family and hobby groups around me who want someone who can take care of their website/hosting/and so on. Its like learning to cook; there are always someone who want free food. By taking responsibility for a website, one is very much more invested to "get it to work", and learn around 85% of what syadmin really is about.
Besides that, as I said, its a very cool idea, and I wish you good luck with your project!
And yes, there will be monitoring and chasing up of anyone who isn't doing their tasks :-)
(the original concept was to report on you to your SO!)
I also like the idea of daily bite-sized tasks assigned via email and the private mailing list for users sounds nice.
In addition to these, will there be any other feedback mechanisms in the course?
The "daily tasks have some general tips and a series of link to online resources that should make them easy to complete.
Sysadmin's understanding isn't about memorizing apt-get or yum install, is mostly about ./configure --help ,)
After you will be able to build from the sources full LAMP stack, understand dependencies and cross-references, realizing the amount of crap^Wcode apache+php uses - this will be something to start with (integrating Informix or Oracle support is a bonus,)
The next step is to understand and internalize what is the difference between mod_php and fastcgi configurations - why they are different, how to enable caching, how it works, what are persistent connections to DB, etc.
The next level - be able to visualize in your mind the flows of data, and follow requests through all the layers - OS, http-server, fast-cgi transport, scripting engine, database-connection, table storage (realization that MyISAM engine or MongoDB are using table-level locking is a sign that you're on the right way).
Then, you must be able to separate the flows, partition the data, at least understand that /var/log and /var/db/mysql on the same disk slice is a sign of stupidity.
Then comes access patterns - how often the data are accessed, when changes occur, how often they are synced, etc (here comes caching and replications, then sharding).
This ability, to understand, trace and see patterns makes one sysadmin.
After that you might say that you kind of sysadmin.) Learning ssh is nothing. Googling is enough.
For a Windows server admin like myself, this course sounds ideal, the things you mention are important no doubt but how important are they for a person just starting out?
I may still check this out though. I still have lots to learn.