Stewart Williams wrote:
John Summerfield wrote:
If you want to be a really good administrator, probably you should
seek classroom training and employment in that area.
Administration is my main purpose, as far as work goes anyway. I
Do you have regular performance reviews? If so, that would be a good
time to build a case that it would be of mutual benefit for you to
become a RHCE or similar, and btw there are these fine courses....
Face to face training is hard to beat when you can get it, especially
off-site and sans phone.
currently administer two CentOS 4.x (SMTP, HTTP, POP/IMAP) and two
Debian (Samba PDC, DHCP, etc.) servers; so my knowledge is quite good,
but I still class myself as an intermmediate user.
You could try opensolaris or any of the BSDs, but essentially you're
repeating substantially the same experience. I don't see much
advancement there.
I have already installed them before, but not done much with them. I
just feel I'm missing out on something if I don't try them. (e.g. you
read things like "Solaris has and excellent filesystem called ZFS..." or
BrandZ containers allow you to run Linux apps natively...")
I have no problem with looking at them, and some familiarity with them
looks good on the resume too, but don't think you're going to master
them all:-)
You might contemplate buying, if you don't have one now, a system that
supports hardware virtualisation, and if you can manage it, a
quad-core processor (which automatically includes virtualisation). And
stuff a thumping big drive into it.
I have an AMD X2 dual-core, with 4GB memory; but still prefer to dual
boot for speed and graphical stuff.
And if you want to run Windows, Debian, Ubuntu and Solaris all at once?
If you want to be a hacker, choose some software that interests you,
the kernel, some database software such as postgresql, or KDE, and
build the latest source.
I'd like eventually to learn some hacking/programming; This is one of my
personal interest in OS's of this type, as well as tinkering, tweaking,
troubleshooting, etc.
I did once successfully build the latest KDE 3.x branch from CVS on
Slackware once; that was fun!
that's good, even better with a bit of horsepower:-)
If there's software you'd like to use but that isn't packaged for
Fedora/RHEL, do the packaging and offer it to relevant repos (CentOS
for RHEL packages).
This I'd like to do, but I'm no expert with RPM yet, so I need to learn
more there.
If you don't start, you won't get far.
Some people like to run really silly bleeding edge stuff. Tracking
snapshots of something someone isn't and repackaging it regularly as
RPMs (for Mand*, *SUSE*, Fedora an RHEL) might be an interesting
project. You'd start from existing packaging, and choose something less
complicated than all of KDE.
You'd also find why I don't like dual booting, more-or-less, and have a
good reason to keep in touch with other distros.
If you want to get involved in a distro, probably Scientific Linux can
do with help. It's another full distro based on RHEL, with additions
valuable to the scientific communities. If not SL, then CentOS is
always looking for more hands.
I would like to get more involved with the Fedora project, but I don't
feel experienced enough yet.
So enrol on an appropriate list and ask for a mentor. I don't know
whether Fedora has an official mentoring program (Debian does), but
someone would get the idea.
A while ago, Shuttles, a man with more money than he needs, headed off
for a holiday in the Antarctic. For light reading, he took archives of
some Debian mailing lists.
On his return, he offered employment to some he felt distinguished
themselves, and from there came Ubuntu.
Interesting ... I never knew how Ubuntu came about, apart from Mark
Shuttleworth being the creator and owner of Canonical.
I assume you John, are a Fedora and Debian user? - Fedora/CentOS/RHEL
and Debian/Ubuntu seem to interest me the most, maybe I should just
stick with one from each set.
I have too many computers, and run or maintain Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora 5
& 8, WBEL4, Centos4, Scientific Linux 5 and opensuse 10.2. I'm about to
reduce Ubuntu by one and (probably) C5 by one.
Debian has some rough edges, but supports over 18200 packages, I find
that once I've heard of a package, it's mostly an "apt-get install"
away. I think it would describe itself as "highly principled." Others
might see some of Debian's beliefs as religious in nature, but it
contributes enormously to free software.
Ubuntu picks the best bits from Debian and applies polish and testing.
It also has an enormous repository of software, but only a relatively
small subset has support for security woes. Supporting the whole lot
would be enormously expensive and probably not the money-making concern
Shuttles would like.
It's handy to have one or the other around so as to evaluate new
software before deciding whether to add it to one's "production" system.
--
Cheers
John
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