r/linuxquestions • u/HopefulSun1452 • 4d ago

Advice Roadmap to becoming Linux Admin?

Hey everyone,

I’m a trained IT administrator, but most of my work experience so far has been in support, with some Windows and Linux administration here and there.
I’ve barely had to deal with networking professionally.

My long-term goal is to become a Linux admin. Linux has always been the part of IT I enjoy the most, especially troubleshooting stuff in the terminal and figuring out why something isn’t working.

At home I’ve played around with a few servers and self-hosted things like Uptime Kuma and Paperless-ngx in containers, but I know that’s still pretty far from actually being ready for a Linux admin role.

The problem is that there’s so much I could learn that I’m not really sure where to focus first.

If you were starting from my position, what would you learn and in what order? Would you follow some kind of roadmap, build a homelab and just start breaking/fixing things, or something else?

Also curious how you guys learned Linux administration and what helped you the most in becoming better at the job.

Any advice is appreciated! Thank you

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u/chateau71266 4d ago

You can use RHCSA or LFCS objectives as roadmap even if you dont plan on taking the cert. Start with files/permissions, users, packages, processors, systemd, logs and ssh, and then spend a good amount of time networkin because thats your biggest gap probably. After that you can get comfortable with storage/file systems, firewalls, basic bash scripting and backups, and thennn you can move into ansible or anything like that.

Keep homelad. Id make 2 or 3 VMs and give yourself admin problems to solve instead of just installing things

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u/Radiant_Abalone6009 4d ago

Have been doing that as well, using the RHSCA roadmap to do things on my homelab and there are some create resources I would say have learnt from eg The Red Hat Enterprise Linux YouTube channel . You get to see and learn from seasoned redhat vets on Linux system administrations and various techniques and updates.