Job role: Linux system administrator
You are responsible for a mid-sized company's Linux infrastructure: new services, capacity, backups, updates, access and incidents, living a real workload through a quarter's worth of tasks.
Level 301 · 16 lessons · 15 practice labs
Lessons
A new service
- A new service request from a team: drawing out requirements
- Building a server to the standard
- Deploying the service and adding monitoring and backups
- Short task: hand the service over to the team with a runbook
Health
- The monthly capacity review
- The monthly patch cycle
- The quarterly access review
- A restore test
- Short task: an end-of-quarter infrastructure health report for management
Incidents
- A night outage: diagnosis and communication
- Suspicious activity: handing over to the security team with evidence
- Post-incident review and follow-up work
- Short task: an incident timeline and action list
Project
- A migration project from an old server to a new one
- Turning manual work into automation
- Capstone: complete a quarter's work list by priority and present it
Practice labs
- Draw up the requirements for a new service: For an internal wiki service list port, data directory, user, backup and monitoring requirements before installing.
- Bring a service live with its own user, TLS and backup: Install the service under its own system user, publish it behind a reverse proxy with TLS and add its data directory to the backups.
- Hand a service over with monitoring and documentation: Add a health check and alert to the service, test a restore and hand it over with a written runbook.
- Show the servers' health summary on one page: Using data in the monitoring system gather load, memory, disk and service state of three servers on one dashboard.
- Catch an approaching capacity problem early: From disk growth trends find the partition due to fill within four weeks and write an expansion or clean-up plan.
- Audit patch and backup state and close the gaps: Check pending security updates and backup age on every server, fix the laggards and wire the check into a weekly report.
- Take ownership of an incident and write the first update: On a file server access problem determine the impact and prepare the first status update for users within ten minutes.
- Remove the root cause of a recurring fault: Find from monitoring data and logs the real cause of a service that is restarted every week to cope, and fix it for good.
- Run the post-incident review and carry out the actions: Write the review for a backup server outage, set three actions, carry out two and run a test verifying their effect.
- Draw up a migration project plan: For moving the file server to a new volume write the steps, risks, rollback point and outage window.
- Carry out the migration with a short outage: Move the data with a pre-sync, do the final sync and cutover, and verify by comparing permissions and file counts.
- Close the project: retire the old system and update docs: Decommission the old volume safely, update monitoring and backup definitions, refresh the server card and write the closing report.
- Turn a manual task into a script: Turn a weekly manual account audit into a script that takes parameters and writes a log.
- Write a standard build script for new servers: Prepare a re-runnable script that sets up accounts, SSH settings, time sync, the monitoring agent and the backup client.
- Offer the team a safe self-service tool: Using sudo rules set up a limited, audited tool letting developers only restart their own services and read their logs.
About this course
You are responsible for a mid-sized company's Linux infrastructure: new services, capacity, backups, updates, access and incidents, living a real workload through a quarter's worth of tasks.
What you will learn
- A new service
- Health
- Incidents
- Project
Prerequisites
You should be comfortable with the level 101 and 201 topics of the same path.
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 301; 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.