Job role: junior system administrator
As a newly hired system administrator you spend your first month: taking over servers, account and backup work, daily checks and your first on-call shift.
Level 201 · 16 lessons · 15 practice labs
Lessons
First week
- Inheriting servers: the first-day checklist
- Documenting what you find: the server card
- Cleaning out old accounts and keys
- Short task: write up two server cards and flag three risks
Routine work
- A daily check script and the morning report
- Account and permission requests
- Verifying the backups really ran
- The weekly update routine
- Short task: automate a week of routine
Problems
- A disk alert in the night
- A service is down: first response and escalation
- A scheduled job that quietly stopped working
- Short task: write incident records for three problems
End of the first month
- Preparing a change request
- Your first on-call night
- Capstone: the first-month review: improve the estate you inherited and present it
Practice labs
- Run the first-day check on an inherited server: On the web server check release, services, listening ports, accounts and disk state and fill in the checklist.
- Write two server cards and flag three risks: Write cards for the file and backup servers with role, services, data location and dependencies, flagging three risks by priority.
- Clean out old accounts and keys: On three servers find accounts with no recent login and SSH keys of unknown owners, then lock and remove them against an approval list.
- Write the daily check script: Write and schedule a script that checks disk, services and backup state and produces a morning report.
- Verify the backups really ran: On the backup server check the dates and sizes of recent archives, find the missing day and test by restoring a random file.
- Run and automate the weekly update routine: Test updates on the file server first, then apply to the others, with a script reporting pre and post checks and reboot needs.
- Respond to a disk alert in the night: Find the full partition, free space safely and record what you did for the morning team.
- Give first response on a downed service and escalate if needed: Try to restore the web service and escalate the database problem you cannot solve with evidence and what you tried.
- Find a scheduled job that quietly stopped and write it up: Notice a report job that has not run for weeks, find why, fix it, make up the missed runs and add a check that prevents recurrence.
- Fulfil an account and permission request: Add a user to a group per an approved request, verify access to the project directory and record the action.
- Prepare a change request: Write a request for a web server config change with purpose, steps, test, rollback and impact sections.
- Handle your first on-call night: Prioritise three alerts in the night, solve two, escalate one to the right person and write the on-call log for the morning handover.
- Draw up the risk list of the inherited estate: List risks found on three servers — outdated packages, open ports, data without backup — with impact and likelihood.
- Fix the three most important risks: Fix the top three items of the risk list and prove the state before and after for each.
- Prepare and present the first-month review: Write a report summarising with measurements the improvements you made in the Selvikent Belediyesi environment, remaining risks and a three-month plan.
About this course
As a newly hired system administrator you spend your first month: taking over servers, account and backup work, daily checks and your first on-call shift.
What you will learn
- First week
- Routine work
- Problems
- End of the first month
Prerequisites
Finishing the level 101 courses of the same path, or knowing those topics, is enough.
Lab environment
Lessons run in your own Kali Linux terminal in the browser, connected to a private lab network. Nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this course right for my level?
- The course is at level 201; it assumes you know the topics of the lower-level courses.
- Is there anything to install?
- No. Every lesson runs in your own lab environment that opens in the browser.
- How do lessons work?
- Each lesson has 8 to 10 steps and a short quiz. Early steps show the command to type, later steps give less help; if two attempts fail, the solution opens.
- Can I try it for free?
- Yes. The first three lessons of every course are free.