Starting Your Linux Journey

Starting Your Linux Journey, Episode Summary

In this episode, David van Heerden discusses the journey of learning and working with Linux servers. He shares his personal experience of starting with Ubuntu and gradually gaining confidence in navigating the Linux environment. The host emphasizes the initial intimidation of Linux and the mental barrier that prevents many from exploring it further. He suggests finding motivation and projects, such as using Home Assistant, to overcome this barrier and gain practical experience. The host also highlights the importance of Linux skills in the workplace and encourages listeners to dive into Linux and expand their capabilities.

Read the Automate IT Transcript

David van Heerden:

All right, welcome to the Automox Automate IT podcast. I was supposed to record this at night, but here I am in the morning with my coffee. I hope you're drinking some coffee too. Let's go.

All right, so the theme of this month for us is servers and we're specifically talking about Linux in this. Even though most of my personal background is in the Windows server environment, I dealt with a lot of point of sale systems back in my day. The Linux side of things has been an interesting personal journey of mine where it-

depending on who the audience is listening to this, right? Linux might've been something that got you into IT and system administration, or Linux is kind of like the scary thing that you occasionally came across within the help desk environment, but it's usually something left to the system engineers or the sysadmins on the backend that you escalated your tickets to. And...

That was kind of my path through all of this is that I started out on the help desk and troubleshooting side. But my first dip into Linux was actually in college where I'd gotten a really cheap HP laptop secondhand and I wanted it to look cool next to all of my classmates who had MacBooks. I couldn't afford a MacBook at the time. And so I was like, you know what? Like, I'm not going to look lame with.

you know, a Windows machine. So I pretty sure I Googled "coolest Linux" and landed on Ubuntu as like the most user-friendly user interface and installed Ubuntu onto the boot drive, wiped my Windows install out. And then out of sheer determination of having a cool looking desktop with all the widgets and everything else.

I was sort of forced to learn quite a bit about the Ubuntu distro and all of the repositories and pulling cool stuff down off of GitHub. And from that, wanting to look cool and working my way up through the help desk, there was a networking administrator who kind of took me under his wing.

And he started to teach me about SSH into our remote boxes and navigating the file system, not through that cool looking UI, but instead understanding the file system itself, which I think is that mental barrier and sort of the point of what I wanted to talk about today of when you go from getting used to navigating a computer through remote control, you know, and or through sitting next to someone and

taking the laptop off of their lap and onto yours and messing with a computer environment through the user interface. Linux feels so much scarier when you have to interact with it through the file system or through a command terminal. The media that we've seen, it's always like the knowledgeable hacker that pulls up the black box on the screen and starts tapping furiously at the keyboard, right?

to a lot of us nerds, right? That's the looking cool part is that, oh man, like look what you're doing on that screen in the black void of infinite power in technology. So, you know, that mental barrier of intimidation, I think looking at that terminal was often what prevented me from diving too deep into it. But once that mentor sort of showed me that

Hey, it's not that complex at all. It's, you know, it's just something that you haven't lived in. And the more time you live in it, the more comfortable it gets for you. Um, is, is such a simple and plain perspective to have, but I think it is an important one. So if you've been listening to my podcast series before, you know, we started at the basics, we're talking about process of procedure really much more on the business side of things of IT, and obviously this one dives into more technical.

but I still want to speak to that audience that is trying to just figure this whole IT tech landscape out still. And so, you know, how to step into this Linux environment, how to approach servers and what they are inside of your workplace. You know, there's almost an overwhelming amount of information and there are some fantastic resources out there on YouTube, of course, I think as we all know.

of coursework on like how to understand Linux and how to dive into it. But I think what a lot of us miss and struggle with is what is the motivator? What is the goal? What is the project, the problem that you're trying to solve that then requires the Linux and that's kind of that motivation that you need to, to live in it, right? To convince yourself to sit inside of this and do it. And, uh, you know, for me, it was trying to look cool and, and have a different looking desktop environment.

Um, but for, for many of you all, you might not necessarily have that kind of application in mind. Um, and you may not even have the bandwidth or the ability to play with it at work. So it's something that you kind of have to figure out at home. Um, and one application that I found at home that I use myself, um, is. Projects like Home Assistant Um, you know, you may have an Apple environment or an Android environment where you have your, your Amazon Alexa or your, your.

your Google or your Siri, where you load it in and you can control your lights, maybe your TV, your thermostat, some of those basic devices within your home. But there's a platform called Home Assistant or an application called Home Assistant that allows you to connect all of those different ecosystems into one single controller in your home.

So if you have the Apple only compatible device or the device that only works with the Amazon Alexa and you have, you know, all these different mixed blend compatible ecosystems, your ZigBees or your Z Waves or your Bluetooth only devices, even just your, your alarm system might be one of them as well. That was in my case, where, yeah, I think it was like my Qolyss or Q-Sys home system.

was not compatible with certain devices that I had in my home and I wanted to automate it. I wanted to open my front door with the keypad and then have my lights welcome me in. And if someone was already home, don't touch the lights, right, they may be asleep and I don't want the lights to light up. So there's all these kinds of little tweaks that you can do. To kind of spread some ideas on what you could do with a home assistance server is that I...

I was hosting a D&D campaign. I wasn't the dungeon master, but it was being held at my house. Um, and I wanted to get nuts and have LED lights installed as well as Bluetooth speakers sitting around, uh, that could be triggered via tablet, uh, for any particular events within the campaign. So there's a troll walking in, uh, the DM could just tap a button on a, uh, iPad that I had or, or a small Alexa tablet. And.

or Amazon Fire tablet. And when tapping on that dashboard on that button, it would play the troll sound and then the lights would flicker as if it was shaking the room, right? And adding those kinds of effects into the lighting of the room. And all of that is on the same tool, the same service within Home Assistant.

And plenty of guides, right? Whatever it is that you want to do in your home, whatever device you want to connect in, there's all the documentation, there's all the videos there. And I think it's a kind of a, a simple project. That's an easy win. That's low risk, right? You're not, you're not messing up anything at work. You're not playing with a website or a web server, you know, where, where others might notice it's just something that you could do at home. That might be fun for the kids or, or something to show off to your, to your roommates or to your spouse. Um,

and start to sharpen those technical skills in the Linux environment. And I think that's where, you know, I have to call out Home Assistant where in my setup, I went the route of installing Debian Linux on an old Dell computer that I had ripped from my previous job. I think any of us that had the in-office job or tech job, we have a few of those spare machines around.

But that's sort of the beauty of Linux is that it's such a lightweight operating system. You can install it on anything. And from there, you can start to follow these guides and install the core services and then configure them and set them up on your network to then talk to certain devices. And as you now have this goal in mind of, I want to automate the lights when I come home, you'll start to use some, you know,

basic scripting language fundamentals. If you've, if you're, you know, like me more on the windows side of things, you would understand your PowerShell syntax and PowerShell scripting. It's very much adaptable into the Linux shell environment where, all right, yeah, different syntax, different quirks here and there, but that's what the copy pasting and modifying code is for, right? Or even those ChatGPT

assistance on, all right, write this for me in Shell, and you can adapt it to your needs. But again, that important part is getting over that hurdle of intimidation of working within that Linux environment, because it is different, it is uncomfortable. But I want to try to inspire and encourage you to find those kind of fun projects that you can run at home, because you'll be surprised what it can actually lead to.

Suddenly, once I had done this little project at home, I set up some virtualization to run some additional services where I was emulating the sprinkler control system that I would normally have to have paid for to be installed on the side of my house. I could just emulate it on side of my little Linux Dell machine sitting in my house, and then I could control my sprinkler system from it, just hot-wiring some stuff onto a circuit board, right? So just like these...

These little, these little changes that, uh, you'll, you'll notice where, okay, I've figured this out. I I've done the basics and I could do some cool stuff with my lights. Now I want to sort of try and automate this. Maybe I can do that. And then that steps up into now you're controlling some more analog type systems with a Linux server. And then you start to realize, Oh, in this work situation, in this work environment, I have an ops team that's trying to.

set off air cannon or as a part of a celebration event, or I have an ops team that's trying to run a Splinker system. Or you have any application within your business environment, you realize, I've done something somewhat similar or close to enough and I can now implement it in this workspace for cheap. I can do it on spare hardware that's sitting in the closet.

Um, and you can sort of hack something together, which for those more experienced folks, you're probably building up an anxiety of, oh my gosh, that amateur hack together thing that's now pushed out into production, right? Um, but with that said, right, it comes into, uh, all right. You're more comfortable. You understand this a little bit and you can start to follow that, that bug of excitement into this world of Linux, um, and how to implement it and use it in the real world.

And that's where, of course, we get into applying those IT and security frameworks and processes, it's, all right, how do we deploy this in a way that's scalable? How do we deploy it in a way that's stable? And transitioning into that environment is something where, you know, there's, there's tools for that, right? The, the shameless plug for Automox and being that way to manage your Linux environment at scale. You can have, you know, everything that you deploy visible and controllable and scriptable in there.

But as you work on these projects at home, you'll come across those very important things like your virtual private network to connect to it, how to set those up and build those connections properly, and then your automated cron jobs to keep your dependencies up to date and continually refresh and kill and restart those services in sequence. And those are really those building blocks of how to prepare a Linux server for the real world.

An example of where I was able to take my home project and bring it into a work context is like web servers. For the Home Assistant thing where I wanted that little interface to allow my Dungeon Master to trigger some lights that required a user interface, which required a dashboard, which had a little bit of that HTML stuff in it, right? And CSS, which...

needed to run on a service that could present that page to whoever visited the URL. Right. So all of those components is effectively everything needed to run a website. So I was able to take that experience at home and then dive right into, you know, Amazon AWS LightSail instances where you set up a light, cheap, static website. And from there, I could start to apply some templates and follow some guides on.

SSHing into my web server, setting up the proxy and then loading up the web page onto it, and then going in at a later time, setting up GitHub actions and updating my website through just VS Code and committing to GitHub and never touching that web server again because I got my cron job set up to keep it up to date and I have it resetting and refreshing all the time to clear out the cache. And so it's these kinds of...

little building blocks and steps that can really get you to the point of, yes, I can do that. And I'm more comfortable in this Linux world, uh, even to the point of fully configuring and automating it for a customer or a client and that, yeah, now it's a side hustle for you. Maybe your work, you know, doesn't feel comfortable with you being the Linux admin, uh, and maybe that Linux admin could take you under their wing now that you've shown an interest and they can start to coach you, but

you already have enough knowledge just by playing in this environment, which I think is kind of the best thing about Linux is that it's quite native to having fun in it. Like it's mess around and find out, right? To keep the language clean on here. You can F around and find out on Linux pretty safely at home. And through that experience, build up that confidence to let you dive in because our world

effectively runs on Linux, right? We know that Windows is dominant inside of the workspace and in those server environments, but in truth, so much of the skills that you're going to need moving forwards is going to be inside of that Linux environment, understanding how to navigate that space, understanding the command terminal and how to take action using shell scripts and all of the infrastructure required to deliver a simple...

service on Linux is that same infrastructure that's used all across the globe. So dive in, get started. It sounds a little intimidating and scary, but set yourself a goal. Make that goal something small and simple. It could be just setting up Home Assistant on a spare laptop and then just following the guides as they click through. It does start you off in the UI.

Those guides do have you pull up the terminal a little bit and get some work done to spin some stuff up. But you get a quick short easy win that's fun to show off to those that come to visit your house or even you set it up at work with a little LED strip so that when you walk into the door and log into your computer or something there's a little sequence that comes in right any sort of fun project you can think of. Yeah, I encourage you to find whatever it is I can motivate you to start.

to dive into Linux and get more comfortable in it because it is those building blocks towards a more powerful and capable skillset that you can utilize. So please reach out, ask any questions. I'd love to show off my work. I don't have my setup in this room, which otherwise I would totally be showing off with the lights. So maybe I'll post something around on social media so y'all can take a look, but thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.