Brand new sysadmin looking for references.

Hey everyone.

I just recently accepted a job as a junior linux sysadmin for a pretty big business. Thing is, i feel like my knowledge is fairly... limited compared to the other people in our department. So, i'm looking for a few good, recent, books on the job, in order to keep moving forwards.

Now as for the specifics, we're mostly managing centOS/redHat/fedora distros. We also have a few HP/UX machines, on which i would like to learn later on. General documentation is always good, but i'd especially like to look into LDAP / Nagios and on Bash scripting. I already have what i like to call a "decent enough" understanding of those, but i'd like to push that further.

Oh and those books being availible on amazon.ca would sure be a major plus .

Thanks in advance,

Linux Administrator's Handbook Second Edition

Thank you very much, Stratus_ss.

I'll only be placing my order on Monday evening due to time constraints, so any other suggestions until then are most welcome.

Good luck with your sysadmin career!

If I had paid more attention to school & career 30 years ago I'd had gotten in on the "ground floor" of the whole scene.


Here's some GNU humor(at least I hope so...)

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.html

I also like a book called Minimal Perl for Unix and Linux People
I enjoyed reading it quite a bit

Make sure you brush up on SNMP, that is a big part of Nagios/Opennms/etc

I used this book when I came on in my job http://www.amazon.ca/Essential-SNMP...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252843332&sr=8-1

ihrsetrdr said:

Good luck with your sysadmin career!

If I had paid more attention to school & career 30 years ago I'd had gotten in on the "ground floor" of the whole scene.


Here's some GNU humor(at least I hope so...)

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.html

Click to expand...

I have seen that site before, its pretty funny. I'm a storage administrator and get a kick out of this one in particualr --> "ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts disk usage policy in motd. Uses disk quotas. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work. Locks accounts that go over quota."

I hope some of these maybe what your looking for. I remember back when Mandrake was still around I found a Linux System admin Bible the pages were about as thick as a real bible's pages. Its sweet but now I've lost it otherwise I would see if I could find a newer copy of it for it has saved my install many times it was a good 1500page book based mainly off terminal.

Linux Administrators Bible
Linux Command Shell Scripting Bible
Linux Bible 2009

Install vmware server on your home computer and set up a similar environment to what you have at work. If you have Netapp storage you might want to also set up the netapp simulator virtual machine.

I do agree that reading a book will give you tons of knowledge, but once you have done that setting up the test environment will take you further.

dropadrop said:

Install vmware server on your home computer and set up a similar environment to what you have at work. If you have Netapp storage you might want to also set up the netapp simulator virtual machine.

I do agree that reading a book will give you tons of knowledge, but once you have done that setting up the test environment will take you further.

Click to expand...

This +1. It's one thing to read about something, it's another to actually use what you read.

Books are great for qualifications and reference, hands on experience is what you need.

Best thing you can do is get a virtual machine, install Linux on it, grant access to a more experienced tech and get them to break it and send you an email of they symptoms to enable you to fix it.

This is why many people use Gentoo as a learning experience as nothing working right on it untill you have the knowledge required to make it.