from Hacker News

Show HN: Linux sysadmin course, eight years on

by snori74 on 9/5/20, 2:37 AM with 83 comments

• by user_agent on 9/5/20, 9:53 AM

  I'm speechless, @OP. It ceases to amaze me that people who aren't in a position to generate value for others often generate more of thereof than a regular, healthy individual. I'd like this world to be inhabited with more people like you. I know myself how it's like to live with a deliberating illness, so let me just say that I'll be praying for your recovery (and if that's not possible at least less pain and a better "reinstatiation" prospects in the future if a reincarnation is a thing).

  It seems that I'm going to make it regarding my health challenges, so I promise to make a good use of the Linux skills that your course is going to help me to systematize. Thank you. I'd not get into tech without what have happened to me. Being forced to be on a "lock-down" for 2,5 years I got myself step by step into an amazing world of technology which with my skills getting more polished made me feel I might be actually able to transcendent my body's limitation. I can only hope that something similar could still happen to you regardless of the discipline involved (I know that there's probably nothing worse than not being able fully commit to one's life).

  Take care, buddy.

• by Anon4Now on 9/5/20, 1:10 PM

  Hi Steve. I took your original course 8 years ago. I wasn't aiming for a sys admin career - just wanted to be comfortable maintaining a server for my site. It worked well for that.

  I emailed you a few times, and you seemed like a genuinely nice guy. I just wanted to chime in and say thanks and wish you the best of luck for both your health and the legacy of this project.

• by whoknew1122 on 9/5/20, 11:31 AM

  Good stuff. Thanks for all the effort you've put into it.

  One suggestion: Make it more obvious that the courses are on GitHub.

  I make a point to avoid reddit as much as possible, which means I don't know how to interact with reddit's interface. When I tried to view the course via reddit, I had a lot of trouble locating the actual lessons. They were out of order, and I had to shift through other users' threats ('I missed day X!' 'Here's my journal on my progress...').

  Honestly, had I not randomly clicked on the GitHub repo, I would've moved onto something else. I'm glad I didn't, but yeah... pushing people onto reddit limits your audience.

• by codetrotter on 9/5/20, 4:44 AM

  Clickable subreddit link using the old reddit interface that lets you see the content on mobile even if you aren’t logged into reddit:

  https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxupskillchallenge

  The other two links in clickable form as well:

  http://www.linuxupskillchallenge.org/

  http://snori74.blogspot.com/2020/04/health-status.html

• by jasoneckert on 9/5/20, 8:59 PM

  As the author of 14 college Linux administration textbooks since 2001, and someone who has taught IT in the college space for 22 years, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed going through this resource!

  I think it will benefit many who have basic Linux knowledge but need to refine and further apply it, as well as students who are currently taking a course on Linux, or a course that requires Linux knowledge (development, Cybersecurity, devops, etc.).

• by arminiusreturns on 9/5/20, 6:18 AM

  Great work I've seen while doing my regular github foss browsing (by most recently updated), and thank you for putting CC4 on it. I also want to say I like the general format at least on github (not a reddit fan these days).

  Constructive criticism: to me, this is a bit too barebones. There are quite a few extremely similar ones out there with essentially the same content but not as nice a format. You might consider doing the next tier course for those who aren't completely green but are trying to get past that initial hurdle which what many of them are trying to do.

  As for what exactly, I would say an extensive focus on the entire systemd ecosystem would be a great starting point for example. Go ahead and go into nf/iptables, etc.

  One other thing, I think a proper table of contents would be a good simple addition.

• by alekq on 9/5/20, 6:54 AM

  Thank you very much for this! I am sorry that I did not know about it sooner.

  Anyway the question for HN - is it too "late" for a person to consider career change in 33? To clarify, I am not in IT business, my formal education (and job) is in business administration, however with recent and important changes in my private and work life, I am considering to bite the bullet. Initially, I considered back-end development, but actually Linux sysadmin might be more appropriate for me.

• by accidentalrebel on 9/5/20, 3:17 AM

  Seems very interesting. I checked out the site and I want to find out why lessons need to be dished out weekly via Reddit. I'm curious. What is the rationale/history behind this? And why Reddit?

  When I learn a new subject I prefer having everything available so I could go through it at my own pace. I understand people learn differently so I wonder if this kind of approach works well for other people who learn differently from me.

  Wish this project the best.

• by pbhjpbhj on 9/5/20, 3:39 PM

  I'm a regular user but having been around for a while (and done some web dev) this course doesn't seem to go further (except in a few extensions) than my current knowledge/experience. I've written bash scripts, configured Apache/Nginx, setup a mail server with spam filtering, used git to a basic level, all that kinda stuff ... what's the next step for a taste of what being a sysadmin is like?

• by rani08 on 9/5/20, 7:16 AM

  Thank for building and making it available for everyone for free. Sorry about your health. I hope you feel better.

• by atum47 on 9/5/20, 4:10 AM

  well, that's awesome. sorry to hear about your condition though.

• by pakwa on 9/6/20, 3:09 PM

  Is Linux admin suitable for women with disabilities? I have a friend who would like this, but I hesitate to recommend it if she would be discriminated against as a job candidate.

• by lazyant on 9/5/20, 2:44 PM

  Thank you for your work. Can I suggest to add a ToC? (I know this is framed as a daily challenge but it will help to see contents at a glance, even naming the chapters).

• by snori74 on 9/8/20, 4:28 AM

  Thanks for those that got the word out. Looks like we have a "class" of about 1,300 for this month, and its humming along nicely. (There are 5,630 sub'd, but that includes all those from previous classes who've not unsub'd - its an imprecise art!)

• by sbmthakur on 9/6/20, 5:49 AM

  What is Big C in this context?

• by animex on 9/5/20, 10:23 PM

  Any reason why the course recommends AWS/DO vs. running something locally with Docker?

• by istjohn on 9/5/20, 1:32 PM

  Thanks for putting this out there. As an amateur developer who has picked up just enough linux skills to get by over the years, this looks like a great way to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge without getting too deep in the weeds.

• by manjana on 9/5/20, 11:48 AM

  Great work! Was hoping though that you could view the course from the landing page - have you considered moving the course to a simple static website where it could be browsed like www.domain.com/day1/ or something similar?

• by yardie on 9/5/20, 11:20 AM

  This is great. And I wish this hadn’t happened to you. I just started a new position overseeing our Linux based Oracle databases and this will be a great asset. I’ll do my best to contribute where I can.

• by auBavan on 9/6/20, 2:57 PM

  I don't normally comprehend most of what is posted on HN. They are too advanced for me. Probably this one too. But, will try this for you, Sir. This post is not going to let me sleep tonight.

• by chefkoch on 9/6/20, 11:29 AM

  Hello,

  just wanted to you to thank for this fellow myeloma warrior. Happy your asct worked out and with loads of new treatments available hopefully we'll grow old with this :)

• by anoviceuser on 9/5/20, 1:57 PM

  Thanks Steve for sharing this. I am sorry to hear about your condition. I am sure as you survived Big C, you will survive the small C as well. Take care and thanks.

• by qiaoliang89 on 9/5/20, 10:30 AM

  Take care! My dad is going through the same shit.

• by Jimmc414 on 9/6/20, 5:51 PM

  I wanted to point out that Linode has quality Linux hosting for as low as $5 per month. We've used them reliably for years.

• by ivvve on 9/5/20, 5:10 AM

  Very generous of you, thank you! You've helped a lot of people out with this I'm sure. Wishing you the best.

• by silicon_wally on 9/5/20, 9:47 AM

  The links to linuxacademy.com are broken, since it was rebranded to acloudguru.com

• by greenie_beans on 9/5/20, 5:02 AM

  I’ve lurked your subreddit for a while...might finally do it. Thank you!

• by shrthnd on 9/5/20, 3:12 AM

  this is great! thanks for all your hard work and for sharing, snori74!

• by sam_lynx on 9/5/20, 6:33 PM

  Definitely going to check this out. Thank you!

• by westurner on 9/5/20, 5:26 PM

  There are a number of resources that may be useful for your curriculum for this project listed in "Is there a program like codeacademy but for learning sysadmin?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469266 :

  > [ http://www.opsschool.org/ , https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin/blob/master/README... , https://github.com/stack72/ops-books , https://landing.google.com/sre/books/ , https://response.pagerduty.com/ (Incident Response training)]

  To that I'd add that K3D (based on K3S, which is now a CNCF project) runs Kubernetes (k8s) in Docker containers. https://github.com/rancher/k3d

  For zero-downtime (HA: High availability) deployments, "Zero-Downtime Deployments To a Docker Swarm Cluster" describes Rolling Updates and Blue-Green Deployments; with illustrations: https://github.com/vfarcic/vfarcic.github.io/blob/master/doc...

  For git-push style deployment with more of a least privileges approach (which also has more moving parts) you could take a look at: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes#function...

  And also reference ansible molecule and testinfra for writing sysadmin tests and the molecule vagrant driver for testing docker configurations. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/testing-your-ansible-...

  https://molecule.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

  https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ :

  > With Testinfra you can write unit tests in Python to test actual state of your servers configured by management tools like Salt, Ansible, Puppet, Chef and so on.

  > Testinfra aims to be a Serverspec equivalent in python and is written as a plugin to the powerful Pytest test engine.

  I wasn't able to find a syllabus or a list of all of the daily posts? Are you focusing on DevOps and/or DevSecOps skills?

  EDIT: The lessons are Markdown files in a Git repo: https://github.com/snori74/linuxupskillchallenge

  Links to each lesson, the title and/or subjects of the lesson, and the associated reddit posts might be useful in a Table of Contents in the README.md.

• by liveoneggs on 9/5/20, 10:31 PM

  tell those doctors to learn all of the options for tar or gtfo

• by exabrial on 9/6/20, 1:20 PM

  Thank you, incredible.

• by Icedcool on 9/5/20, 3:18 AM

  That’s awesome dude!

• by luzer7 on 9/5/20, 2:36 PM

  Thanks for this.

• by calimac on 9/5/20, 3:15 AM

  thank you!