The Linux Upskill Challenge

So, in years past, I lamented that people didn’t know basic sysadmin skills and therefore invented complex solutions to what are rather simple problems of configuration within common Linux software. They’d write entirely new pieces of software to deal with something I saw as trivial, and they did this because they didn’t know a solution existed.<p>These days, I don’t lament this at all. As I see it, people wanted to make new on their own instead of learning what was there. This is just how younger people are. As they get older they naturally want to learn how things used to be, and the cycle will repeat. They will be the ones lamenting, and the younger folks will make it all new.<p>I don’t remember who said it but: those who don’t understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it poorly.

I think the next level above this might be <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sadservers.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sadservers.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m very happy to see this continuing. The original creator passed it onto the current maintainer before he died.<p>He was super nice.

Honestly most of the people that approach me to learn Linux, I have them follow the Gentoo Handbook to compile and configure a Linux workstation from scratch.

I’m on team vim, but it is still interesting to me that the challenge has vim but not emacs. I would think that an introduction to Linux would include both.

The post mentions using crontab for scheduling tasks. Recently, I needed to use systemd user account job scheduling. I found it pretty nice once I got the hang of it.

What&#x27;s the best way to run software on an old Ubuntu system that I don&#x27;t want to upgrade or run apt-get on, and I don&#x27;t want to run stuff inside a Virtual Machine, and snap is broken, and docker as well? Compiling stuff seems too much trouble because of all the dependencies. I was hoping for Nix to save me here, but it only compiles for a specific libc version.

sudo -u fred -i # to become fred

ip a<p>ss -tnaopu<p>grep -C 5<p>grep -E ‘dick|ass’<p>nano -c foo<p>grep -A 5<p>ls -lrth

You can achieve much more learning in 20 days.<p>Important fundamentals are omitted but some oddly specific subjects are cherry-picked and given an unusual amount of attention like running nmap. Running nmap (a portscanner) can get you fired from your job and there&#x27;s precedent of this.<p>The text formatting is inconsistent. Reader mode makes it better, but a simple markdown file would have clearer.<p>Explaining what a service is before explaining what a task is, is weird.<p>APT is mentioned, but APT is specific to Debian-based distros. Debian is not mentioned a single time in the article. Other distros use other package management systems.<p>You should use nftables instead of iptables. iptables is deprecated.<p>This article just reinforces that &quot;learning Linux&quot; is simply learning some few random commands.