[clug] Linux Resources

[Paul Wayper]

On 28/7/19 10:17 am, Lindsay Steele via linux wrote:
>> Just a general question about learning resources.  What Linux learning
> resources do you find useful?
> 
> I think the best way is to set a challenge to achieve to the level that you
> feel suits you.

I agree.  I think just doing courses for the sake of doing courses isn't going
to get you much practical experience for using it day to day.

In 2004 I got a home server and set up MythTV on it for recording TV
programmes.  This then became our home file server, backup server, ssh
gateway, web server, and more.  Each time you've got something working, push
it a bit more.  Fix it when it breaks - and not by reinstalling, by rebuilding
it back to working.  Don't turn SELinux or IPTables off - leave it on and use
the current tools to get that new system working.

The other fundamental lesson is that asking someone else for help is always
the absolute last resort :-)

In the time that you wait for a reply on the CLUG list, you could have done
47,192,895 Google queries and read 6,922,173 StackOverflow pages.  Amongst
those, you will find the one piece of information that helps you get a bit
further.  Read those man pages.  Try things and look for the errors.  Try
alternate ways of approaching the problem.

It will be absolutely frustrating as hell!  It would be lovely for someone
much more knowledgeable to come over and fix it for you.  But a) that wouldn't
teach you much, b) it will take too long to happen if it does, and c) most of
the time it won't happen anyway.  So learning by helping yourself, rather than
asking other people for the answer to your problem, is almost always going to
teach you more.

Other things I'd recommend:

* Learn to use Ansible, Puppet or some other automation tool (even a script)
to install software and configure it.  There is *never* a once-off install -
sooner or later you're going to have to restore your dead computer from
back-ups, or set up another server like that, and that's where you want to
have a script to run again.

* Learn to use Grafana, Prometheus, Performance Copilot, Zabbix or some other
system monitoring software.  While it's nice to have your server at home
ticking along, knowing how the disk space, or temperature, or hard disk error
rates, have gone over time is important for future planning.  And it's much
easier to look at some useful graphs than to ssh into twenty servers and do
'df -h' or `smartctl -A` on each one.

Finally, I'd say that although books are handy if you want something
permanent, they're only marginally searchable.  A man page on a computer (or
on linux.die.net) is much more searchable than the same page printed on paper
and stuck in a book.  You can't copy and paste text from a book.  A book is
almost immediately out of date.  And books take up physical space.  While I've
got three bookshelves behind me almost completely full of books, I read mainly
fiction and for pleasure.  Even my well-thumbed copies of Programming Perl and
The C Programming Language are there mainly for historic reasons - I haven't
used them in years, whereas the man pages still get plenty of use :-)

Have fun,

Paul