Server Administration :Linux Upskill Challenge

During a recent review at work, a supervisor recommended I work on the ability to manage servers. They did one better by pointing in the direction of the The Linux Upskill Challenge which provided 21 days of sticky content and challenges that are easy to fit into the day.

Because servers are all about files, throughout, the challenge reiterates a few useful nuggets about how the Linux operating system conventionally organizes them such as:

• etc / directory keeps all configuration of services running on a server
• var/log directory holds all log files written by the system

In addition to these general nuggets, these five days stood out during the challenge.

Day 7 : The Server & Its Services

If you have ever wondered what servers really are and especially the difference between a web server and an application server , then check out the article by Robin Wieruch on Web Applications.

The crux of this day’s content is one of the differences. Application servers can serve up, in addition to files, applications such as its own web server, as demonstrated on this day using apache.

Day 0: Creating your Own Server

For this challenge, the AWS free tier worked as the server.To get a server up and running,Day 0 provided easy to follow instructions on setting up with multiple cloud storage providers.

Day 6: Editing With Vim & Day 8 : The infamous “grep” and other text processors

This write-up combines these two days because they brought out the essence of text management as a system admin. The resources provided on these days were interesting as it starts off with writing in text and editing with vim as the text editor. The text manipulation journey crescendos in Day 8 with using among other text manipulation commands, grep which lets you search for a text from any source , be it a file or multiple files or even application output to show you items which are interesting to you and a particularly interesting resource on the history of grep.

Day 11 : Finding things

Given multiple directories in the managed Linux file system , what particularly stands out in this day’s material is the difference between the mlocate package which lets you lookup files stored anywhere in the file system using an index and the find command which walks the file paths directly.

Day 12: Transferring Things

Now that there are files on your remote server, finding a way to download them into physical memory or any other file system became important. To achieve this, the material covered in this day walks through different file transfer protocols available.

This article only highlighted only five days of content.

If you are looking to expand your server administration knowledge, be sure to go through the challenge which starts every first Monday of the month on Reddit.