Introduction

Wow! You made it all the way through this massive Linux course. That is impressive all by itself, but are you ready to take the next steps?

In truth, we have only just begun. I find that no matter how much I learn there is always more. Despite the amount of material in this course, I have only introduced you to many of these subjects. How you proceed from here is up to you, but it can make all the difference in your future.

Curiosity

There is an old – and I think incredibly stupid – saying that “curiosity killed the cat.” I had this used on me as a kid, fortunately not by my parents. I think this dumb saying is used mostly to stifle kids when their questions and inquisitiveness takes them to places that some parents, teachers, and caregivers would rather not take the time to deal with. This is one of the ways in which the boxes were built around us.

My personal saying is that “curiosity solves problems.” Following our curiosity leads us to places that are outside the box, places that allow us to solve our problems in ways that we could not otherwise. Sometimes curiosity can lead me directly to the cause of a problem and other times the connection is indirect.

Learning never stops. Every time I teach a class or write an article – or book – I learn new things. This is all about my innate curiosity.

Although the failure of thousands of specific combinations of individual materials and fabrication technologies during testing did not lead to a viable light bulb, Edison continued to experiment. Just so, the failure to resolve a problem or create code that performs its defined task does not mean that the project or overall goal will fail. It means only that the specific tool or approach did not result in a successful outcome.

I have learned much more through my failures than I have in almost any other manner. I am especially glad for those failures that have been self-inflicted. Not only did I have to correct the problems I caused myself, but I also still had to find and fix the original problem. This always led to a great deal of research which caused me to learn much more than if I had solved the original problem quickly.

This is just my nature, and I think it is the nature of all good SysAdmins to look upon these situations as learning opportunities. As mentioned previously, I have spent many years as a trainer and some of the most fun experiences were when demonstrations, experiments, and lab projects would fail while I was teaching. Those were fantastic learning experiences for me as well as for the students in my class. Sometimes I even incorporated those accidental failures into later classes because they enabled me to teach something important.

Convert

Although I started using Linux in about 1996, I really did not start to learn it in any depth until I converted all of the computers in my home lab from OS/2 to Linux. I liked OS/2 and was comfortable with it but I could see that I would always return to it to do those tasks that I had not yet figured out how to do in Linux. I was never going to be a Linux expert that way.

Everyone learns best in their own way. As a trainer, I saw this every time I taught a class, regardless of the subject. Following our curiosity is the same – we all have that spark that leads us to discover more. Our methods may not be the same, but they will lead us all to greater knowledge and skill.

I started by installing Linux on all of my computers at home. This forced me to learn Linux and not look back. So long as I had a means to go back to my old and well-known way of doing things, it was never necessary for me to truly learn Linux. This is what I did when I decided I wanted to learn Linux, and it has taught me a large part of what I know. I had several computers and created a complete internal network in my home office. Over the years, my network has grown and changed and I have learned more with every alteration. Much of this was driven by my curiosity rather than any specific need.

I have static IP addresses from my ISP and two firewalls to provide outside access and protect my internal network. I have had Intel boxes with Fedora and CentOS on them over the years. I learned a lot about using both in roles as a firewall and router.

I have a server that runs DHCP, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, NTP, DNS, and other services to provide them to my internal network and to make some of those services available to the outside world, such as my web site and incoming email. I have learned a great deal about using Linux in a server role in general. I have learned an incredible amount about implementing and managing each of these services.

All of this translated into usable skills in the job market. And I learned even more in those jobs.

Tools

In this course, we have looked at doing things at the command line, learning the very low-level tools for managing Linux hosts. We also created some of our own automated tools to make our administration tasks easier. I believe that it is necessary for good SysAdmins to understand the underlying tasks that need to be performed before engaging any of the more complex tools available.

There are many higher-level tools available that provide a great degree of automation and ease of use that we have not even covered. Many of these tools are also free, open source software and can be downloaded from the Fedora repositories. Most are also available for other distributions as well. You should spend some time learning about tools like Ansible and Webmin.

Ansible is an advanced tool that can automate many administrative tasks, things that we talked about automating with scripts. Webmin is a web-based administration tool that wraps and uses many of the tools we have studied in this course. It provides a flexible canter for managing Linux hosts and many of the services they provide.

There are many other tools of all kinds out there. These two will give you a starting point for advanced automation.

Resources

I have listed in the Bibliography a large number of resources, web sites, and hard-copy books that you can use to further your Linux education. Many are directly related to this course, but others not so much. They will all help you learn more.

I have two favorite web sites that I can count on for accurate and current information, technical as well as nontechnical. Opensource.com², a Red Hat web site, contains technical and nontechnical articles about Linux, open source software, the open organization, DevOps, being a SysAdmin, and much more. The relatively new Red Hat Enable Sysadmin³ site has articles especially for SysAdmins and can be an excellent resource for all of us who do SysAdmin work. The Enable SysAdmin site has an especially good article on learning to be a SysAdmin.⁴

You may also find my personal web sites informative. The DataBook for Linux⁵ is my technical web site. It has information about problems I have found and fixed, articles covering how to do things that were difficult to find information about, and more. It is loosely structured into a book-like format, but it is strictly a reference and is not at all like this self-study course.

My other web site is related to my published books. It is my “meet the author”⁶ web site, so it contains information about me and my books.

There are many other excellent sources of information out there, both for Red Hat–based distributions and many of the other distributions. With a bit of searching, you can find plenty of information about Linux, almost every distribution ever created, and tens of thousands of specific problems.

Just be careful because there are many web pages with outdated or incorrect information. If you need to try out a fix or solution to a problem, be sure to do so on an expendable VM first.

And that virtual network, the one we created for this course or one like it, should also be one of your resources. Use it for testing everything you want to do on your physical network like we did in the many experiments we performed in this course.

Contribute

As I have mentioned, teaching and writing helps me to learn. So write an article – or two or three – for Opensource.com, Enable SysAdmin, or any of the other distribution-related web sites out there. Most of this type of web sites have information on how you can contribute. Writing about something I have learned or am trying to learn helps me to clarify what I already know about a subject and gives me an opportunity to expand my knowledge.

The staff at Opensource.com in particular are able to assist you through the entire writing and web publishing process. Several of us who have published articles on Opensource.com also have published books, so you never know where that might lead.

Skip this

Most lists of things to do ignore the bits you don’t really need to do. Here is one I can suggest you skip as not being worth the time you might invest.

Chapter summary

To me, curiosity is the driving force behind learning. I can’t just sit in a classroom because someone says I need to learn a particular thing and be successful at it. I need to have some interest in the subject and something about it needs to pique my curiosity. That propensity to work harder on the subjects I liked was very evident during my school years as I did well in the subjects that intrigued me.

By using my home network for indulging my curiosity, I had lots of safe space in which to fail catastrophically and to learn the best ways to recover from that. And there are lots of ways to fail, so I learned a lot. I learned the most when I accidentally broke things, but I also learned a great deal when I would intentionally bork things. In these instances, I knew what I wanted to learn and could target the breakage in ways that would enable me to learn about those specific things.

I was also fortunate because I had a few jobs that required or at least allowed me to take classes on various aspects of Unix and Linux. For me, classroom work is a way to validate and reinforce what I learn on my own. It gave me the opportunity to interact with – for the most part – knowledgeable instructors who could aid and clarify my understanding of the bits and pieces that I could not make sense of on my own.

Those of us who are successful at Unix and Linux System Administration are by our very nature inquisitive and thoughtful. We take every opportunity to expand our knowledge base.

We like to experiment with new knowledge, new hardware, and new software, just out of curiosity and “because it is there.” We relish the opportunities that are opened to us when computer things break. Every problem is a new possibility for learning. We enjoy attending technical conferences as much for the access to other SysAdmins they afford as for the amazing amount of new information we can gather from the scheduled presentations.

Rigid logic and rules do not give us SysAdmins enough flexibility to perform our jobs efficiently. We don’t especially care about how things “should” be done. SysAdmins are not easily limited by the “shoulds” that others try to constrain us with. We use logical and critical thinking that is flexible and that produces excellent results. We create our own ways of doing things with independent, critical thinking and integrated reasoning, which enables us to learn more while we are at it.

We SysAdmins are strong personalities – we need to be in order to do our jobs and especially to do things the “right” way. This is not about how we “should” perform the tasks we need to do, rather it is about using best practices and ensuring that the end result conforms to those practices.

We don’t just think outside the box. We are the ones who destroy the boxes that others try to make us work inside. For us, there is no “should.”

Be the curious SysAdmin. It worked for me.