Not worried about the certification but training material for RedHat 5.5 or 6

I recently took a new position at a new company. We are going to be deploying several 100 machines with Red Hat 5.5 and moving to Red Hat 6. I will be receiving a fully depreciated machine

with either 5.5 or 6 on it. Is there a particular book out there that is recommended? My boss has given me the green light to get "ramped" up.

What's really exciting is I have an enterprise account, so I can call Red Hat directly if I have any questions and their experts should be able to assist.

I am really just looking for one resource to start off with. I won't need to be an expert, but as the supervisor I will need to be able to train the techs on our deployment and data migration process. There is one in place, sort of, but I would like to obtain additional knowledge so I can have the Linux knowledge to offer not only a high overview, but to attack processes from a technical level as well.

Thanks for any advice.

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brownwrap

N2IT wrote: »

I recently took a new position at a new company. We are going to be deploying several 100 machines with Red Hat 5.5 and moving to Red Hat 6. I will be receiving a fully depreciated machine with either 5.5 or 6 on it. Is there a particular book out there that is recommended? My boss has given me the green light to get "ramped" up.

What's really exciting is I have an enterprise account, so I can call Red Hat directly if I have any questions and their experts should be able to assist.

I am really just looking for one resource to start off with. I won't need to be an expert, but as the supervisor I will need to be able to train the techs on our deployment and data migration process. There is one in place, sort of, but I would like to obtain additional knowledge so I can have the Linux knowledge to offer not only a high overview, but to attack processes from a technical level as well.

Thanks for any advice.

But if I were deploying a 100 machines, I get a kickstart server set up. If you are familiar with Solaris, it would be similar to jumpstart. Checkout cobbler, it is a RedHat supported project. You could start up by sitting up one machine, and then concetrating on cloning another.

UnixGuy

The best resource is RedHat's official training material..there's also Michael Jang book, and CompTIA Linux+ books.

The web is full of tutorials/example, you can always Google any topic for examples/explanation.

/pub/beer/

Kickstart rocks. Your environment might lend itself to network installations, but I just find it easier with my USB Kickstart setup. I have a 2 partition USB drive that boots and starts the linux install referencing the kickstart file. The hardest part was figuring out the drive lettering at the various steps.

I have the kickstart setup to install what I need, partition according to our security policies, assign the proper IP, etc. My post script restarts networking, does a yum update, and runs various scripts. Depending on how many updates there are I can deploy a new xeon base web server in 7-8 minutes.

N2IT

/pub/beer/ wrote: »

Kickstart rocks. Your environment might lend itself to network installations, but I just find it easier with my USB Kickstart setup. I have a 2 partition USB drive that boots and starts the linux install referencing the kickstart file. The hardest part was figuring out the drive lettering at the various steps.

I have the kickstart setup to install what I need, partition according to our security policies, assign the proper IP, etc. My post script restarts networking, does a yum update, and runs various scripts. Depending on how many updates there are I can deploy a new xeon base web server in 7-8 minutes.

Hey guys thanks for the heads up, unfortantly I believe they are going to set up a network install. It looks like command line to get it started will be ran out of Samba.

The tech is pretty nice and has a lot of patience so I should be able to pick this up pretty quickly

I did grab a linux + book from Amazon. I'll go through this as well.

The problem is I am on this project and I am trying to nail down the deliverables and activities and doesn't give me much time for any of the operational processes at the moment.

brownwrap

N2IT wrote: »

Hey guys thanks for the heads up, unfortantly I believe they are going to set up a network install. It looks like command line to get it started will be ran out of Samba.

The tech is pretty nice and has a lot of patience so I should be able to pick this up pretty quickly

I did grab a linux + book from Amazon. I'll go through this as well.

The problem is I am on this project and I am trying to nail down the deliverables and activities and doesn't give me much time for any of the operational processes at the moment.

Kickstart is a network install.

/pub/beer/

brownwrap wrote: »

Kickstart is a network install.

Kickstart is just the automated install config file, you tell it where to grab from. You can grab from a network location or physical media. There are types of network installs that work more like a network boot. The number of machines that you are provisioning and your network setup will determine if that setup is worth it or not.

brownwrap

/pub/beer/ wrote: »

Kickstart is just the automated install config file, you tell it where to grab from. You can grab from a network location or physical media. There are types of network installs that work more like a network boot. The number of machines that you are provisioning and your network setup will determine if that setup is worth it or not.

I forget how many machines we had altogether, approximately 80. When We ran a kickstart, it loaded the OS, configured the machine, and patched it. It was a patched vanilla machine when finished. All of the home directories were NFS mounted, as well as /usr/local. If it was a webserver, that unique stuff was kept on a NetApps NAS.

So if a machine crashed, we could re-kickstart it and have it up again in an hour. Backups were done nightly, so that could be restored pretty quickly as well, since backups were online.