QQ: even when I use Linux as a daily driver I don’t use the cli much. I heard that getting a cheap vps, set up some popular services, and then exposing it to the Internet actually teaches a lot about sysadmin. Does this make sense?
One big issue for me is that when I use Linux I only use it for a specific purpose, e.g. hacking kernels, and the cli commands are extremely limited. I have been using a Linux box for a year and haven’t learned much TBH.
Hosting a Minecraft server was pretty big for me. Learned about screen and tmux to keep it running and be able to detach and reattach. Learned vim to deal with configs on the headless server.
Another thing that helped me learn a lot was what I call "anime playlist management", but may be too niche to recommend. Basically after I moved from VLC to mpv I had to create and add to playlists without a gui. I learned a lot about the find command, text redirection, vim, fzf, file permissions... I retrieve the full file path for the videos and dump that into a .m3u file that I then watch in mpv or rearrange later in vim. find helps to get to the exact files quicker even when everything is sorted neatly into separate directories, fzf lets you add multiple files from the find output at once, selectively. find can also filter by mtime, so I have some one-liners that just show e.g. all files 7 days old or newer in the media directory, easy to rerun and select the stuff I just downloaded to put in the playlist.
At some point I preferred vim over geany or whatever other text editor I used to use. It's nice to be able to use the same tools everywhere, including over ssh, so that reinforced a preference for stuff that runs in a terminal. irssi, aerc, stig+transmission-daemon, neovim, mpv (controllable over ssh). Also having a file server gets you more into rsync, sshfs, stuff like that.
I've made several vim macros to speed up the "anime workflow" as well. Like I add new episodes to the very bottom of the file, but the file has sections broken up by empty lines, and I have a macro to take everything just added at the bottom and move it to the bottom of the top section, where the high priority stuff goes. I also have macros to delete the top line of two side-by-side files in vim at once, saving both. I have both a human-readable list and the actual playlist file and then I delete the lines as I watch.
I've been incrementally refining this workflow for several years now. Just find something you enjoy doing and try to polish it, learn more applicable tools you can incorporate, etc.
> Hosting a Minecraft server was pretty big for me.
This seems to have been the gateway to systems administration for a surprisingly large number of contemporary young people - just like IRC, Quake and Counterstrike servers in my teen years, and futzing with config.sys & autoexec.bat for DOS games when I was a kid... And the hacking soon becomes more fun than the game itself !
Absolutely! In my opinion, the only way to learn anything in any meaningful way is to actually do the thing. In the example you described, you'll quickly start jumping into "Wait, how do I configure a firewall?" and discovering ufw et. al.
I think that’s more about what you do than how you do it. And sometimes when to do it.
You could try a data engineer’s life which is full of meetings, ad-hoc tasks and other BS —- everything that screams that this is not a real engineer job.
For a 13 years old? Wow that’s so amazing. How did you get him interested in Linux and OS stuffs in general? Btw you can probably get him access to the actual systems — there are people offering accounts for those operating systems.
I probably have another OS book that covers slightly different ones — instead of IBM mainframe OS it covers CP/M.
> How did you get him interested in Linux and OS stuffs in general?
I’m sure I made some contribution, but a lot of it is just him-e.g. he’s an Arch Linux zealot, I never touched Arch until he started demanding I fix things he’d broken in it. I think he was converted to Arch by Youtube
> Btw you can probably get him access to the actual systems — there are people offering accounts for those operating systems.
I’ve run MVS under Hercules before, he doesn’t need anyone else, he can emulate and I can help him do it. (Except for OS/400, there is no emulator for that sadly, but I have a free IBM i account from pub400.com and he can get one too.) But he hasn’t decided he wants to yet
I bought him a desktop with Windows installed. At some point, he decided he wanted to install Linux. He wanted to try Arch, but got stuck on the install process, so I helped him install Ubuntu. Later on, he managed to solve his problem with Arch installation-so now his desktop triple-boots between Windows, Ubuntu and Arch, although he almost never boots into Windows any more. For his 13th birthday, we bought him a laptop that came with Ubuntu preinstalled. I forget when he became interested in Linux, probably around 11 or so? He’d already heard about it from me, but Youtube was also a big influence on him.
As a preschooler he already knew how to use DOS (technically DOSBox’s command prompt), because he was in love with Commander Keen mods
Thanks! Looks like he started very early! What kind of things did you allow him to do when he was a preschooler? I’d assume maybe 30 mins everyday, mainly about typing games and maybe a bit of BASIC? Did he show patience back then or did you grow his patience somehow?
Curiously, I do buy and read tech books. My hobby is legacy OS kernel research so I bought some second handed books on old Linux (kernel 1.2) and NT (3.1). It is fun to research so I don’t use AI often for side projects.
I enjoy reading really old programming books, the 1997 edition of Learning Perl mentioned in the article being a perfect example. I don't fret over the exercises, but if it's well-written it gives a glimpse into how people thought about technology/code/computers at that point in time, like the tech equivalent of flipping through old newspapers.
I agree. I also read a few books written by Microsoft people back then. I really enjoyed the writing style and the more hardcore programming environment back then. Wish I could live through that era.
Thank you for the recommendation. That’s an interesting topic. I’m pretty full right now so unfortunately even getting into Linux and NT is a bit hard for me. I was reading VFS but bogged down due to lack of time :/
I also want to get into Solaris, too, because it introduces a lot of ideas back then.
One big issue for me is that when I use Linux I only use it for a specific purpose, e.g. hacking kernels, and the cli commands are extremely limited. I have been using a Linux box for a year and haven’t learned much TBH.
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