Fedora

Hey , I have become pretty normal, using unix and what not and working around FEDORA 9

I was wondering does anyone have any IDEAS or have anything I should try to build or scripts to write ,
or possibly know any sites where I could practice some things just so I know I am writing them correctly or going in a good path to one day become a Unix ADMIN instead of creating 1000's users something a little more finger oriented ?

sorry if this is very vague, I just want some easy scripts to write and a good direction to head..
Sorry if this is the WRONG section



Thanks for the help
if I receive any;

Maybe you have some stuff in your company that you or others do manually every day and then and it is very... cumbersome and lot's of writing and also may not be forgotten. This could be a thing you could make a shell script for running by cron or called on prompt, whatever. Think about what could be automated nicely by a shell script in your company.

Also maybe you browse this and get some ideas:
Heiner's SHELLdorado

Maybe you get a good book about shell scripting and work this through so you will be guided by good efficient style and still can get some new ideas.

Try process monitoring. Write a script (you choose language) that monitors your process space (ps -ef etc) and reports to you when "unusual events" occur... You define "unusual" for yourself for learning purposes... For example...

1. A process that appears in less than 1 of 4 sweeps
2. Processes that run more than a few minutes
3. Process whose actual time exceeds its cpu time by more than 100 to 1

things like that...

Become a sed expert... Set up a crontab (again an example) and write a sed script that advances the time of every job in the list by one hour...

Become an awk expert -- even better for a sysadmin

There are lots of basic tools you could teach yourself to use proficiently for admin purposes, and you could do useful things with them like learn to automate system backups, etc.

When you feel really confident, have someone come along who knows what he/she is doing (so there's no physical damage) and DESTROY your system -- screw up NFS, over-flow the process space, what ever, and then you have to (a) figure out what is wrong and (b) fix it...

quine@sonic.net