Interesting & productive things to learn to do on my Linux box?

[nsafreak]

Well folks so far I can attribute a fair amount of learning to doing it on my own on my Linux box and a lot of it has been stuff that I can probably use in the future. Currently it's running Fedora Core 3 although I have put Mandrake 10, Debian woody (stable & unstable), Debian sarge (unstable), and a few other distributions on the hard drive at one point in time. I'm trying to find new things to learn that might help me down the road in the job world. Here's what I've learned so far (some of it simple stuff but some not so simple):

1) How to setup a DNS server (BIND 9)
2) How to setup SAMBA to act as a PDC for a Windows domain
3) How to setup a MySQL server and maintain it
4) How to setup and maintain a FTP server (ProFTPD)
5) How to setup and maintain a HTTP server (Apache 2)
6) Using shorewall to act as a NAT and do firewalling duties
7) Setting up remote management via webmin (pretty easy admittedly)
8) Running a mp3 jukebox (have used jinzora & netjuke)

If anybody has anything else that I might want to learn then feel free to let me know. Keep in mind that for anything CPU intensive I'm running this on a PII 233.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

iptables?

 

[nsafreak]

IPTables, yeah that wouldn't be a bad idea. I've actually started learning a bit about them already.

 

[nweaver]

I would set up Gentoo (you learn a lot setting that up) and not use Genkernel. Stage 2 install.

learn perl/bash and analyze log entries, setup iptables to log packets that it drops and figure out how to parse those for true attacks

setup LDAP and LDAP authentication to the ldap server

monitoring apps, such as NTOP/Nagios/nessus from source or CVS (learn how to resolve dependancies from source)

DHCP

PXE boot w/thin client support (I want to do this one when I have some time)

 

[kamper]

Learn how a package manager works, both the packaging system and the manager that is...
Since you're on fedora you can do both apt and yum at the same time to get a broader picture.

 

[nsafreak]

I would set up Gentoo (you learn a lot setting that up) and not use Genkernel. Stage 2 install. - I'll look into it. I was looking over Gentoo's site is there a way to do an install via SSH/telnet?

learn perl/bash and analyze log entries, setup iptables to log packets that it drops and figure out how to parse those for true attacks - I know bash pretty well as is. Can write my own scripts and I'm currently learning perl.

setup LDAP and LDAP authentication to the ldap server - Hmmm I'll look into this

monitoring apps, such as NTOP/Nagios/nessus from source or CVS (learn how to resolve dependancies from source) - Well I've already built multiple packages from source but learning a monitoring app wouldn't be a bad idea.

DHCP - Been there, done that bought the t-shirt. Before I bought a regular router I had a PC doing router duties including DHCP. I had it set so that certain clients would always get the same IP (static DHCP) among other things. I don't think I have much more to learn on that service

PXE boot w/thin client support (I want to do this one when I have some time) Well this would require additional hardware purchases granted thin clients are cheap so if I happen to run across a deal on eBay I'll look into it

If anybody has more suggestions feel free to post.

 

[groovin]

i dont know what your linux background is, but how about simply learning the OS really well and learning good, solid admin practices? stuff like compiling/patching kernels, updating apps with fixes, rotating syslogs (or central sysloggin), tricks with /proc, making a md RAID array, backing up/recovery, etc, etc. but as i said, you might already have a solid foundation in this.

also, you might want to play around with SELinux as well since it's been getting alot of attention in the security world lately. Finally, I know you said you have a PII 233, but one day when you have a beefier system to play with, try some hypervisors like Xen, virtualization is aiming to be an important technology soon (well, even more so than it is now). Actually, Xen runs really smooth... you *might* be able to get a simple xen setup on your machine.