UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm reading through yet another book on Unix admin'ing and it occurs to me once again that there are simply way too many things that you could be learning about with Unix for a newbie and you don't have infinite amounts of time to learn it all.

For instance, I'm told that learning the intricacies of something like sendmail is probably not worth it because (1) you won't be mucking around with sendmail as a Unix admin newbie and (2) you won't understand the nuances and importances of many issues/concerns if you aren't a seasoned Unix admin in the first place.

So what would you suggest Unix admin newbies stick to reading about and experimenting with given he/she doesn't have all the time in the world to learn everything off the bat? I understand that newbie Unix admins should be very familiar with more-or-less novice tasks like installing OS's, being able to use things like vi and perl with at least some proficiency, and be familiar with as many commands as possible. What I would like to know is what apps should a newbie Unix admin be famililar with, more than just knowing what it does?

What tasks would an entry-level Unix admin be required to do that would necessitate learning or knowing this-or-that app? I understand that there is no 'typical' answer to this question, I'm looking for examples or your experiences in such situations.

Thanks.

First of all! Merry Christmas and/or Happy Hannukah!

Though I am not an admin, In my humble opinion, learn shell scripting! You will take away quite a bit about UNIX if you do. I have learned much from studying the init scripts, reading about the boot process and by simply just tinkering around with the box. There is a lot to learn about UNIX, pick a spot and jump right in! By the way, hand around this board and you will learn quite a bit. Good luck.

The answer to this question depends heavily on what the servers you are admin for do. So take my recommendations as coming from somebody whose primary responsibility the past few years had been supporting mostly production and development database servers . . . .

I think the most important thing to learn beyond the basic OS stuff is storage. Almost everybody uses Veritas, so learn that even if your particular job now doesn't require it. Also, if you have any SAN gear like EMC, StorageTek, Hitachi, or other disk arrays learn about those as well.

I'd recommend learning Veritas Volume Manger and Filesystem thoroughly. If your environment uses exclusively something else, like HP/UX LVM, then maybe do that instead (but knowing Veritas too can't possibly hurt the resume). Know how to set up various RAID configurations in software as well as using your SAN hardware if you have it. Know what the various filesystem settings are and how they impact I/O performance. Know how to move data between systems and how to recover if a box crashes hard enough it needs to be rebuilt. If you have a SAN knowing how your snapshots, BCVs, or whatever other business continuity features it has available works.