I can see my house from here!

Where's the car?

I am reading and working with anything Gnu/Linux related that comes my way - in an attempt to gain some understanding and experience. I'm starting to see the picture at some of the detailed levels, but they are not consistent between their parts. Only general rules for each silo of exploration. I figure that I need a better road-map to studying so that I reach the "broad understandings" that one gets from an applied education.

In attempting to determine what to study first I surveyed jobs on Dice using the term "Linux Admin". From those I pulled the requirements and counted how may times a particular skill came up, and how many a particular area was either directly asked for or was implied as important by asking for a skill that applied to that area. What I ended up with surprised me as I got both a priority of subject area and a priority of subject depth in which to pursue.

		Area	Particulars (As of April 6th 2013)
		Everyone	CLI, Apache (install and maintenance, not code)
		OS	Red Hat & CEntOS, Widows, Scientific, Gentoo
		DB	MySQL, PostGRE, Oracle, MS SQL
		Scripting	Bash/sh, Python, Perl, Ruby
		Network	Firewalls, Routers, SNMP, Load Balancing, Mail, FTP
		Tools	Puppet, Nagios, NGing, Varnish, Git/GitHub, Svn
		Big Stuff	VMWare Sphere, AWS, SAN/NAS, LDAP/AD Exchange
		Themes	Configuration Management Monitor & Backup Version Control Security
		Certs	RHEL, Cisco
		Misc	Sed, Awk, Grep, Vim/Vi

It was then easy to align this with the project I was currently involved with. That helped me direct my study while directing my work efforts which made a real win-win for me finally. Don't see a lot of those anymore. Only downside is the legacy system I am on uses Zabbix which is NEVER asked for in the tools area. People who use it love it, and on paper it seems to do more. Guess we shall see.

REFS:

Dice

Closing thought(s):

I think if one knows any two of each area, you would be sitting rather pretty.

What is this place?

Can you believe I made a deck of flash cards to study command line functions?
Can you believe I read articles from 1999 about commands and they were still accurate?
Can you believe that anyone would do StarWars in ASCII??

  I was really impressed with the Ubuntu 12.04 I installed on my laptop. It was a much more grown-up GUI than I was used to. The community was very helpful in strange DELL wireless problems and volume switches and everything was running in a couple of hours. I did this months ago not really even knowing what a Linux distribution was. I easily found some great programs and had everything anyone needed  for daily operations. Plus it ran a lot faster. I used the laptop by switching drives so that I could go to XP, Vista, Ubuntu at will for several months. Then, eventually I stopped putting in the Windows drives and left it at Ubuntu.

 At work we have some deployed RedHat 5 systems, but we test and develop in Centos 5. My gut says they are different but the geeks call it the same - yet fear unplanned updates. Jury is still out.

 I did some training in Fedora running in a VM on Ubuntu.

 I installed Centos 6 on my home laptop to replace Ubuntu (entire rant here withheld).

 Between all these systems, there is nothing that seems the same at first glance. I remember (90's) when Windows decided that it's vendors had to follow a spec for applications so that there was a consistent look and feel to all programs. Sure that started as printer drivers (if you haven't heard of printers they are electronic devices that kill trees - go as your Father) and then progressed into the Tsarist regime we have today; but that consistency was important.I liked hitting the same key in all programs. It really cut the learning curve and made all of us more productive. These days, even Windows isn't following those rules very well so maybe that is now a moot point (another rant that could have been). That familiarity is missing in these non-windows systems. I think it will yet play a role.

 Being NOT on a MAc, and NOT on a Windows machine is very very freeing feeling. I totally am getting my geek on these days. There is a great satisfaction getting something done now. Of course, it is a bit harder. But I really know what I just did. I had to research what my choices meant. I had to decide that what I was doing was best for my goals. I was learning throughout the whole experience.
  I've built a couple of dozen systems from scratch now; On laptops, PC's, VMWare, VMBox and HyperV platforms. They are the same, yet they are different. There is subtlety and finesse and domain knowledge and discovery and mystery. But nothing catastrophic . Nothing unusual. Nothing insurmountable. 

 Where am I? I'm at the point where I have learned that you will get out of a Gnu/Linux system what you put into it. Its pretty linear that way. In Windows you get what you pay for.

REFS:

Ubuntu
Centos
blinkinglights.nl
   or if you are windows without telnet just watch Josh's recording here!
 Cygwin This is the best tool ever! 

Closing thought(s):

 I've learned so much and know so little, and I now know I know so little now that I know now what I need to learn now to know how to now the know how.  Now you gno.No?