OK... got 2... what do I do now? !HELP!

[etancross]

Ok guys I have a question….

I decided I was going to teach myself unix/linux (this is actually a long story but to avoid the long story). What I decided to do was build a sever to work on and teach myself well I went ballz to the wallz and built a Suse 10.2 server then said.. “What the heck” then built a Redhat server. It took me about 2 days to get them both set up and working. (I have a buddy that helped give me hints on what to do but I actually did the work). I got them up and got him to dial in last night and he said I did a good job getting them up. So my question is this……

I have 2 linux servers setup, I can dial into them remotely…. So…. “What do I do now”? What should I do first? I've been reading commands, and looking at things on the net but I feel lost sometimes and don’t know what I should do first…

Any help, advice, incite, direction would be greatly appreciated.


*****EDIT*************
Also my buddy (he's a unix admin) said in his oponion he thinks i should do as much as i can (at least 80&#37 all command line and not get lazy with the GUI. So im trying to go that route to learn i guess...

[budman7]

A good place to start would be The Linux Documentation Project
Reading man pages is also a good way to go.
Just do
man COMMAND

For instance if you want to learn more about the man command, just do
man man

[oz]

Check out LinuxCommand.org for lots of good information on commands:

LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line. Write shell scripts.

[Freston]

The best advice I can give you is to participate in a forum such as this. Because there is not a lot two working servers can teach you, other than that they are working fine. But coming here, you'll find a host of very different problems, both easy and advanced. You can read what others say about things you're interested in, and of course help out where you can.

The benefit to you/me/us is that a working computer is not really something you'd investigate. But if you read about a defect in someone else's computer, you may get inspired to check out why it works on your machine, but not on the other one. You learn a lot about your system that way.

Of course, writing your own scripts to make your life easier is also a good thing. Everything you have to do more than once can be automated and/or easefied (<= I propose this as a new word ).
You can set your default runlevel to 3. You can run a more complex distro such as Slackware, Debian or Gentoo... or others. Or run a really obscure distro build for a very specific audience. The other day someone mentioned Blackroute, a Slack based distro build for forensic research. It's not even in DistroWatch.com: .! But it sounds interesting, doesn't it?
And if you want to stay closer to home, you can always read your bootscripts. Come to think of it, you need to at least make *rolls dice* five modifications to your bootscripts. See if you can get your machine to boot faster

[etancross]

So you don't think its too early to start scripting?

[oz]

When a person starts scripting is really a personal preference. Some never start at all and get by just fine with Linux.

[etancross]

Thank you all for giving me straight answers, and not trying to make me feel like an idiot. Ive been a PC guys for years and now i want to move over into unix so i know windows/windows server backwards and forwards but unix is a real slap to the cheek and has been harder for me to get into.

***********************EDIT*********************** *******
Ozar the site you suggest "LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line. Write shell scripts." has helped me more than I can say, I have 4 - 5 huge reference book i use to file through and I had all kinds of things swimming around in my head and that site helped me tie something’s together, and now I can navigate around my servers like crazy! I feel like a kid in a candy store and I want to keep learning more and more, but at the same time I keep telling myself to slow down and process what i’ve learned, practice, use what I know, THEN move forward... but after not understanding and wondering what to do for so long its HARD to slow myself down then start moving forward again!

You guys have ALREADY helped me more than I can say and i'm really looking forward to a LONG LOOOONNNG stay here!

[Gtrax]

Great that you have some working servers. So maybe the next step is to let them do a little serving for a small net - like mail or print serving, or Apache2, and offer some home-grown webspace.

But the truly ultimate just has to be to set up partitions with LVM, and have your servers running simultaneously on one PC using XEN, and know that you can start, stop, make another, remotely expand or contract storage, or mess with several .. at will.

Why my 2c worth? Well, its because I am well impressed that you can figure up a couple of servers so casually in just 2 days when getting into an operating system that is totally new to you. I would spend longer than that just reading the manuals.

[etancross]

Great that you have some working servers. So maybe the next step is to let them do a little serving for a small net - like mail or print serving, or Apache2, and offer some home-grown webspace.

But the truly ultimate just has to be to set up partitions with LVM, and have your servers running simultaneously on one PC using XEN, and know that you can start, stop, make another, remotely expand or contract storage, or mess with several .. at will.

Why my 2c worth? Well, its because I am well impressed that you can figure up a couple of servers so casually in just 2 days when getting into an operating system that is totally new to you. I would spend longer than that just reading the manuals.

Thank you for the kind words Gtrax, i appericate the advice. So manythings i want to do... im still at the crawling stage though, I need to soldly grasp crawling before i start walking! You have my brain buzzing now at the thought of multiple servers on the same box, i dont know what xen is yet but i think ill look into that soon. I actually do hope to do some work with apache/apache2 and scripting in unix sounds SOOO much fun. I was reading up on things you can do with the | (pipe) command last night and the less/more commands.

[Gtrax]

OK etancross
XEN is a "virtual machine monitor" that can allow more than one system to run under it simultaneously. Another similar product are is VMWare, but Xen is free.
The key feature is that it is not actually running the systems as full emulation, but rather, with their co-operation, hence nearly at full speed.
Xen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The end effect is that the processor and machine usage efficiency is much improved. There is only a small performance overhead for any of the machines when doing stuff like being servers. This of course makes it very popular in implementing servers, and I have heard of up to eight servers running simultaneously in one machine (blade construction PC probably). Its a very much better use of the computer hardware investment.

For me, in the way of messing about with it, the appeal is to have the current trusted distribution running, while maybe able to experiment with another, without the need to re-boot. Indeed, one system can be happily handling a long bit torrent download while I grandly screw up while messing with another. Its got to be the best way to experiment.

Nearly all major Linux distributions come with it now. SUSE has got some GUI tools to help set it up.

The Gentoo manuals are great - even if your distro is not Gentoo.
HOWTO Xen and Gentoo - Gentoo Linux Wiki
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