Want to be a sysadmin?

Every couple months, somoene asks r/sysadmin or r/linux, “What do I need to learn to be a sysadmin?” The checklist below lists the broad technologies that every admin needs to be familiar with. At the end there are a few resources to get started.

Skills:

  1. Provisioning
    1. Installing Linux
    2. Backing up Linux
    3. Replicating OS installs
  2. Networking
    1. Basics of a LAN
    2. Simple routing
    3. Troubleshooting
    4. OpenVPN or Wireguard
  3. Services
    1. NTP
    2. DNS
    3. DHCP
    4. TFTP
    5. HTTP/HTTPS
    6. SQL
  4. Firewalls
    1. iptables
  5. Security
    1. Firewalls/iptables
    2. SSH
    3. LDAP
    4. Best practices
  6. File systems
    1. Local storage
    2. Software RAID
    3. NFS
  7. Automation
    1. Learn Ansible or Puppet or Chef or Salt
  8. Virtualization
    1. VirtualBox or QEMU/KVM
    2. Docker/LXC
  9. Scripting
    1. Learn Bash or Python or Perl or Ruby

Resources:

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