I’m trying to get a job in IT that will (hopefully) pay more than a usual 9 to 5. I’m been daily driving Linux exclusively for about 2 1/2 years now and I’m trying to improve my skills to the point that I could be considered a so-called “power user.” My question is this: will this increase my hiring chances significantly or marginally?

  • stoy
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    4 months ago

    What education do you have in the area?

    The IT/Sysadmin sector does have a risk with knowing enough to be dangerous.

    Daily driving Linux is great to get used to the command line, but is different from running servers.

    If you have no experience with running Linux servers, I would be focusing on that part, rather than daily driving at this point.

    Running a server requires a bit of a different mindset to that of just using a desktop.

    You need to be far more restrictive about installing software on the server, be more cautios of reboots, and in general focus on stabillity.

    You also need to familiarize yourself with Debian/Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora based distributions, their package managers, apt and dnf, the general layout of the system, they are mostly similar, but they have their own flavours, especially when it commes to the config files.

    Learn the basics of vim, it will allways be installed on a server, I prefer nano but can use vim if needed.

    A big part of my job when I was a Helpdesk technician combined with a Linux sysadmin was storage, I had to set up VMs in vSphere and Nutanix and give them the correct ammount of storage, sometimes also expand the storage on a server, and work with mountpoints.

    Play around with LVMs, learn the concepts of PVs, VGs and LVs, learn how to expand them, how to move an LV from one PV to another inside a VG, learn how to mount them.

    Learn how to set a manual IP, this can change from version to version of a distribution.

    Learn to get annoyed at YAML files.

    Understand how to secure a system, I’ll admit that I never really had to do this as all servers I worked on was behind strong firewalls and not accessable from the internet, but I did my best with what I had.

    • stembolts@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      Prefers Nano over Vim? Why’d you have to go and commit a felony. Now I can’t take anything you say seriously. Damnit.

      • stoy
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        4 months ago

        It is what I am used to, your approval did not factor into my choice.

        • stembolts@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          And no sense of humor over what was clearly a joke comment. Icing on the cake.

          Now I believe you now, you do use Nano.

          • stoy
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            4 months ago

            Ah, I was involved in a hectic discussion in another thread, I also know that Linux users can be quite outspoken about their choice fs editor, so I didn’t catch the joke.

            Sorry about that! (:

      • stoy
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        4 months ago

        Just make a template, once done you can easily do it while blasting Scooter, get pissed when it breaks due to a change of interface names, switch to Sabaton while you battle it out. After that you go to the local zoo and watch some Lynx just relaxing all day and ask yourself where it all webt wrong.