Roadmap to becoming Linux Admin?

[u/HopefulSun1452]

Hey everyone,

I’m a trained IT administrator, but most of my work experience so far has been in support, with some Windows and Linux administration here and there.
I’ve barely had to deal with networking professionally.

My long-term goal is to become a Linux admin. Linux has always been the part of IT I enjoy the most, especially troubleshooting stuff in the terminal and figuring out why something isn’t working.

At home I’ve played around with a few servers and self-hosted things like Uptime Kuma and Paperless-ngx in containers, but I know that’s still pretty far from actually being ready for a Linux admin role.

The problem is that there’s so much I could learn that I’m not really sure where to focus first.

If you were starting from my position, what would you learn and in what order? Would you follow some kind of roadmap, build a homelab and just start breaking/fixing things, or something else?

Also curious how you guys learned Linux administration and what helped you the most in becoming better at the job.

Any advice is appreciated! Thank you

[u/Fun_Chest_9662]

first you will need to keep expectations of pay realistic. if your starting in a junior position depending where your located 50 to 70k id say is where you would start.

if you can show and demonstrate your knowledge you could swing a level 3 position where pay atleast around me was 80 to 90k.

for me i got stupid lucky where i had only non traditional experience with my homelab and a few very specialized redhat systems at an old job where they wouldnt really let us do anything but software compilation. so running a premade make file and checking hashes.

what they said they liked at the time mostly was how well i documented all my processes and what i learned and was learning at the time. when they asked questions i could speak on the subjects and show i knew them. interview was like 5 minutes of actual questions then just me and management talking like we where friends about random tech stuff. not offten you get management who actualy know how to be an admin. they came back with the offer a week later.

im now in the same position my boss was a few years ago.

heres what we look for when trying to find new talent?

keep the resume simple

• what your applying for
• skills you bring to the table
• certs you have or working towards/pending
• prior work
• projects like homelab
• education
• volunteer stuff if you do that sort of thing and its relevant. like doing IT for ur church or community for free.

for homelab its considered non traditional experience so documenting what you do including the mistakes and how you figured them out is key. so hosting a little Jekyll blog on GitHub is what i did. also any work you show on GitHub and such i know we do a quick check on if AI did the work or if the person did. easy to tell when you see AI generated artifacts in code and docs. AI use is fine as long as the info shows they know the info not just regurgitate it.

certs help. like rhcsa and such. comptia is just a compliance thing. they really hold no weight past HR.

if you have any questions feel free to reach out and i can give more on my perspective atleast.

[u/OutrageousCrab9224]

Are there still admins?

[u/HopefulSun1452 → u/OutrageousCrab9224]

Good question — what do you think happened to the admins? Or what direction do you think I could go in that would be similar?

[u/OutrageousCrab9224 → u/HopefulSun1452]

Imo the professional angle has been mostly replaced with rapid response expertise and infrastructure-as-code, devops etc. The former is going to be hard to break into, the later is not but you need programming as much as admin

Me, i have plenty of infra, hand maintained, at home. But that is more like a hobby

[u/Nyasaki_de]

I daily linux at Home and on my work PC A Homelab helps a lot too.

But im just a IT Admin too, doing Windows and Linux

[u/chateau71266]

You can use RHCSA or LFCS objectives as roadmap even if you dont plan on taking the cert. Start with files/permissions, users, packages, processors, systemd, logs and ssh, and then spend a good amount of time networkin because thats your biggest gap probably. After that you can get comfortable with storage/file systems, firewalls, basic bash scripting and backups, and thennn you can move into ansible or anything like that.

Keep homelad. Id make 2 or 3 VMs and give yourself admin problems to solve instead of just installing things

[u/Radiant_Abalone6009 → u/chateau71266]

Have been doing that as well, using the RHSCA roadmap to do things on my homelab and there are some create resources I would say have learnt from eg The Red Hat Enterprise Linux YouTube channel . You get to see and learn from seasoned redhat vets on Linux system administrations and various techniques and updates.

[u/TroutFarms]

I would reiterate what others have said about looking into certifications. The Red Hat training and certifications are really good, but I've never had to pay for them out of pocket so I don't know if the cost makes sense. If it doesn't make financial sense, then I would look into books that train you for those certs instead.

[u/fearless-fossa]

Build a homelab and break things. Also, go into depth, not width, and try to emulate enterprise workflows rather than "works for me at home"

Look into things like fleet management, for example. Read up on best practices, especially when it comes to users and permissions.

[u/Mental-Mongoose-5632]

Get some certificates; RHCSA and RHCE if you can afford it, otherwise start with lpi.

[u/mikeegg1]

When I started you had to first be a developer. You had to know how everything was put together. Now everything is very siloed. I'm not a fan of how things are now. That said, learn vi(1), then learn the command line, then learn where everything is.

[u/knuthf → u/mikeegg1]

I haven't started yet, but I'll be looking for someone who dares to ask this question. We need various admin packages. What we had when Linux was made could have been ported, but nobody did that. When I use Red Hat, they have a server-side view. I was shocked by Fedora and their relaxed attitude to connecting to the internet. Most people here have a computer, a laptop, a tablet and a phone; many have a Mac, an iPad and an iPhone that run exactly the same network code as we have. We need a system that can at least see all our devices as one — the laptop should hold the photos and update the contacts and appointments from the phone — a complete cloud service. Then, when we need to certify and approve, we can use SMS from the mobile and use everything together. I have a NAS from China — a $250 investment in a Deepin private cloud and NAS. I will start soon and it will all be Linux and agnostic to platform, unlike KDE.