LinuxQuestions.org - What Programs Should a Sys Admin Know?

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What Programs Should a Sys Admin Know?

Code:

Squid 

Nginx

Nagios+Cacti+PNP4Nagios+Munin Monitoring

Openstack

Mesos+Ganglia+Zookeeper+Hadoop

Proxmox/OpenContrail

BGP/OSPF

Channel bonding/Load balancing

LDAP/SAML

Kerberos

SNMP

AWS's Lamda+Cron jobs

Sudo

OpenVPN

OpenSSL/GPG

OSSEC/Samhain/Snort/Tripwire/Suricata

Wavemon/Kismet/Horst

Bro

Nova/Honey Badger

Lynis

Elk-stack/Splunk

Vim

Alpine/Mutt/Qmail

Spam Asassasian, STARTLS, DMARC+SPF, S/MIME

OpenDLP

Ksplice

SystemTap

SElinux/AppArmor

Cgroups

Shell Scripting

Python/Perl/Ruby/Lua

Awk/Sed

Git+GitFlow

Gitlab/Jenkins

Firewalld

Iptables/Nftables/eBPF+carp+pfsync

Astero/Untangle/Pfsense

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Nmap, Netcat, Strace, Dtrace, Ftrace, Perf, Perftop, Tcpdump, Chroot, SSH, Telnet, Vmstat, Iostat, Dstat, Dmesg, Htop, Ps,

Lspci, Nmon, Macchanger, Ethrape, Ettercap, Tcptrack, Whois, Iftop, Gdb, Ngrep, Rsync, Ifconfig and the newer Ip commands, 

dd, Scp, pcap, /proc 

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Foremost/Testdisk (data recovery tools)

PXE

Wake-On-LAN (to push late night software updates)

LAMP+Mod_evasive+Mod_security

PHPmyadmin

LuCI

FreeNAS/OpenSDS

Ceph/ZFS/RAID

BURP

Ansible/Puppet/Chef

GNS3

OpenDNS

VMware/VirtualBox/KVM/QEMU/Libvirt

Open vSwitch+OpenFlow

VNC

Screen/Tmux

Docker/Kubernetes

SystemRescueCD, Clonezilla, Kali, Inquistor

The above is a list of programs that "I think" I should learn if I want to become a Linux systems administrator. But I wanted to know if I missed anything, or if the list is not accurate.. Is it possible to learn all this, and if so what should be the estimated time frame? Should I even try to learn all this, or only what the job requires? Any advice would be welcome, thank you!

I know about a fourth of them -- or less.

But I know where and how to find what I need to know, when I need to know, and I do have a "bag o' tricks" of reliable strategies to take in most cases. (But I also know how to ask a question on LQ!) :)

I can never anticipate what tool I might "run into" next. Happens all the time.

Huh, interesting thats good to know, I still actually want to learn most of these tools besides the redundant ones (as in the same type of tool but just different brand). But that makes me feel way better, thanks for your input man!

Quote:

The above is a list of programs that "I think" I should learn if I want to become a Linux systems administrator.

I encourage the thinking, but don't do it this way. At most get a very basic overview of each in case you need to know more later.
I would suggest getting a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and try to build something with guides as necessary. For example, your own blog or gaming server.
Focus on getting it working, then making it secure and then optimizing it. Figuring out how to troubleshoot is a BIG thing to learn.

Personal experience: I've been using BASH for years and only recently would I say I "know" it to any level. I use vim as my primary editor and I wouldn't say I know it very well. Many of the tools you've listed you could use for years without fully understanding it.

Yeah that sounds about right, I mean right now all I have is a very basic understanding of what these programs are used for, but I'm sure they do ALOT more... Good advice though I need to setup a virtual lab and get well versed with strace, gdb, and the like so that I can get some skills in debugging aswell. Thanks for the advice, good ideas!

AppArmor is OK for Debian Stable, but for CentOS or Red Hat you'll need to know SEL. I suspect that knowing /proc is pretty handy, too. This is a simple (and often amusing) introduction to some useful CLI stuff
http://www.brendangregg.com%2FSlides...xPerfTools.pdf

Good2know thanks David, I didnt put SElinux on my list (now I did) for that sake of saving time cause I heard how complex it can be to setup/debug, as it's so fine grained. And I didnt know that Red Hat mainly used SElinux, but it makes why they do as their both US based.. Thanks again! And yeah /proc definitely is important aswell as pcap too I think..