Where to learn Linux?

[sammy ominsky]

On 15/03/2010, at 09:53, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:

> Hi Dov,
> Not far off at all from the original question. The first thing that I look for in an employee or consultant is is he has this feel for the state that you mention. If the employee has only used Windows or Mac at the GUI level, then the chance of his understanding the system state is very small because the visual pane of Windows and Mac that is designed to make things easy effectively prevents all understanding of the system state.


Honestly, even though I spend many hours a day on the command line of debian servers, I feel I've ruined myself for linux by delving too far into OS X on the command line :)

OS X doesn't prevent understanding of the system state at all, it just doesn't force that understanding.  If the desire to delve is present, the command line offers much deeper system access than the GUI ever could.  It's very different than linux, though.

Someone plugged a USB drive into one of the servers in a data center in the US, and for the life of me, I couldn't think of anything on a debian system that would give me a list of all attached disks. On OS X, I'd just type 'diskutil list' (output at the bottom of this email, if anyone's curious).  In the end, dmesg told me where to find the disk, but maybe it's time for some disk utility on linux that's caught up to the present?  cfdisk is great if you already know what device you want :)

Anyway, back on topic...  My company is considering creating a position for a junior sysadmin, and honestly, I'd much rather have a 20-year old with 6 years of playing with "servers" in his basement than a freshly-minted RHCP or whatever.

--sambo


Anything that does this on linux?

zefat:~ sambo$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Backup                  499.8 GB   disk0s2
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS zefat                   249.7 GB   disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                        ZFS Archive                 999.9 GB   disk2s2
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk3
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:                        ZFS Archive                 999.9 GB   disk3s2
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk4
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:                        ZFS Archive                 999.9 GB   disk4s2
/dev/disk5
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk5
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk5s1
   2:                        ZFS geniza                  999.9 GB   disk5s2
/dev/disk6
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk6
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk6s1
   2:                        ZFS geniza                  999.9 GB   disk6s2
/dev/disk7
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk7
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk7s1
   2:                        ZFS geniza                  999.9 GB   disk7s2
/dev/disk8
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk8
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk8s1
   2:                        ZFS geniza                  999.9 GB   disk8s2
/dev/disk9
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk9
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk9s1
   2:                        ZFS geniza                  999.9 GB   disk9s2