On Sat, 2 Oct 2010, Rob Cherry wrote:
I fear that my days of Solaris bigotry are very outdated. I can ignore the Linux world no longer. I can also no longer assume that knowing Solaris is enough to fake it for enterprise Linux environments. As such I wanted to ask all the linux admins out there 2 questions -- What admin task did you do in the last week that you consider a linux specific thing? i.e. editing the password file doesnt count, dealing with ReiserFS does.... - Linux War stories, What was the worst linux disaster you have had that I should read up on to make sure I could fix it if hit with it in future. Dont have to go into much detail as these can get long, but a general pointer to give me some reading homework would be ideal. Anything else I should know that you think I should spend some time reading up on?
the one linux specific thing I have run into more than anything else is learning how to recover a system which has had the boot process corrupted. It doesn't matter if the distro you use uses grub or lilo, they both can get corrupted and you need to figure out how to fix it to get the system to boot (since you can't always just reinstall)
as a second thing, look at the ways to recover corrupted partition tables, filesystems, and software raid configurations.
I've managed Solaris, AIX as well as Linux (several distros), and there are far more similarities than differences. When you do get into the differences, they frequently end up being as different between different linux distros as between Linux and Solaris.
you should get familiar with both RedHat (RHEL or Fedora) and Debian (including Ubuntu) distro families. SuSE is close to RedHat, but not very close.
There is _far_ more variety in hardware on Linux, and the configuration of the hardware (including troubleshooting, kernel configuration, device naming), etc) is going to take you places you never had to worry about with the relativly limited Sun hardware.
you should definantly learn to compile your own kernels, even if your company policy is to use distro kernels on your production machines. It will help you understand what's going on under the covers and how things are organized.
David Lang
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