How should an experienced Windows SysAdmin learn Linux? [closed]
- by Systemspoet
I have a new hire starting in a few weeks who is an experienced Windows SysAdmin. I think he's fairly senior on the Windows side, with a pretty deep AD understanding and experience with Exchange 2007, 2010, and exchange migrations. He's done a little PowerShell but I suspect more of the "run this command to do this" variety then "write a script to do this" sort.
However, we are a mixed shop and (he knows this) I expect him to become a reasonably competent Linux SysAdmin over time. I'm looking for good starting points to bring him along. I have over ten years of Linux/UNIX experience, so it all sort of seems intuitive to me, but I've been thinking about the toolkit you actually need to be productive in the Linux CLI world. Just to be able to use the machines at all, off the top of my head...
vi
Basic CLI stuff -- move around, rename files, copy files, tar, gzip, changing passwords, finding relevant manpages, keep track of where you are, find things in your history, etc, etc.
More advanced things that I take for granted but are actually pretty hard -- doing things with 'find', extracting relevant text via 'awk' and/or 'cut', knowing when to use 'grep' and when to use 'grep -e' or 'egrep'.
Distribution specific stuff... compiling software, rpm, yum, apt-get, you name it.
This all seems pretty basic to me, but when I think back to 1995 when I was first learning my way, some of those things took me years to master.
So my question is -- where should I send him to pick up those skills? I'm not just thinking of classes, but rather also websites and books? Where do you all suggest as a starting point for picking up Linux skills?
