Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Start First Day of Red Hat Linux System Administration Course
Boy, I'm glad I took the intro course on Linux last week. While much of it was a refresher for me in terms of file commands and the like, today we really got into things. I would definitely have been lost otherwise. I've used Linux a fair bit over the past few years administratively dealing with things like Web files, email configuration aliases, ftp and a lot of miscellaneous file-management stuff, but doing the full-blown admin stuff was, well, a bit daunting. Here I was using commands that I realize now I typically handed over to a sysadmin to do, 'cept I can't do that any more since this is, after all, a sysadmin course.

For those interested in details, here's roughly what we covered on the first day of RH133:

• basic Linux licensing + hardware compatibility including a brief overview of kudzu
• how devices are added and read by the boot loader in Linux
• lots of material on disk partitioning (covering how to set up master and extended partitions, plus managing them)
• filesystem schemes and system configuration
• how ext3 jounaling filesystem works
• using mount and adding drives/directories
• understanding /etc/fstab
• System V run levels
• controlling services
• ...and plenty more

In the morning we installed RH9 twice on our own system, initially from a single CD-R (just installing basic X Windows components), and then a larger re-install using a network connection (which took a long time with over 20 people working through a slow-ish in-house router. ;-)

The labs for this are considerably harder to do, though again for the most part I seem to be holding my own fairly well against a room filled with MCSE's and the like. So far. All of this has made me seriously re-think the idea of doing the exam at the end of the week, as it is a lot of material to digest and have to regurgitate in less than a week.

Funny thing is, I still haven't got my confirmation email as yet that I can actually come to this class from Red Hat. Their admin end of things is definitely on the slooowww side...