[Discuss] Aspiring Grumpy Unix Admin

[admin]

jkinney23--- via Discuss wrote on 2022-06-26 10:38:

> Does anyone in this group have suggestions what else I need to land a
> new job as a grumpy Unix guy?
A couple more thoughts came to mind.


Become competent with one of the following:

* Ansible
* Chef
* Puppet
* Salt


I like Ansible, can't speak to the others.  It's easy enough to get 
started with and is backed by RedHat.


Take a spare machine (or a Virtual Machine), get a base OS installed 
(skip the GUI), and use, for example, Ansible playbooks to setup and 
configure a bunch of services on it.

Get some kind of web server / DB running some kind of website 
(NextCloud, WordPress, "Hello World").

Get DNS installed with a bunch of zones.

Maybe setup an nginx reverse proxy and have multiple websites behind it.


Once the playbooks work, tear down the VM and do it again until it's a 
turn-key operation.


Then, instead of having an Ubuntu / Debian / ... VM, run the playbooks 
against a RedHat / CentOS (or whatever the replacement is) / Fedora VM.

Make sure playbooks run there too.



Make Ansible playbook(s) to run on localhost so you can restore your 
machine from a fresh install to exactly the configuration you like, with 
all your data in place.

This is invaluable but a little trickier to test without a spare machine.

And there's always some damned config setting or 
app-I-installed-years-ago-that-I-forgot-about that you'll need to find 
by testing.




Oh, and get familiar with tmux.  Might not count for much on a résumé 
but will be a handy tool you'll come to rely on.