The second day of an On-Site Training Session is the day that students recognize how challenging the process will be to learn Linux Administration. The first day is always filled with expectation and it is tough when that expectation and desire looks reality in the eye. This is an issue in training that you have to approach from a position of facing the training as a challenge that must be taken one step at a time. Linux Administration is a process that involves thousands of details that are not intuitive because you are working with a command line not a GUI, you are working with commands that are strange but powerful and you are trying to figure out a file system that is like nothing you have seen before. As an instructor the goal of the second day, is not only presenting the challenge to students but helping them take a foothold in the learning process to bring a light at the end of the tunnel. This can be accomplished with the topics on the second day which focus on managing users, quotas, managing system logs and using tools to manage your drives.
Managing users and understanding logs are two of the easier topics in Linux administration so students gain some confidence once they have been exposed to these topics. They enjoy the feeling of accomplishment and control they gain by mastering the fdisk command and building LVM partitions. For most students this is the fist time they have partitioned, formatted, and mounted a partition. This opens up new methods avenues of understanding for how the whole Linux file system works and how many options really exist. This is the source of hope as they recognize that becoming a Linux Administrator is possible.
This day is a day of interest as most students do not know how to build hard drives using fdisk, LVM or RAID so spending a step-by-step process for most of the day breaks new ground for most students. We purposely build and dismantle LVM correctly 6 or 7 times and have them mount the partitions on the file system. The virtual machines that we use have one drive with the file system on it and one drive that is completely blank. This allows us to have students do all of the building on one drive without as much chance they will make a mistake and break something on virtual machine. We build everything from the command line and also spend some time looking at the graphical tools for managing the LVM, pointing out bugs with the graphical tool.
When presenting difficult material like partitioning drives be careful in the speed at which you cover the topic. Students will not always let you know that they need a slower pace so it is important that you recognize warning signals. Those signals are often when one student is helping another…or if you sense frustration in the questions asked…if you see that recheck to verify the pace you are using in progressing through the material.
Reality Check….Linux Server Administration is a challenge that must be taken on one step at a time.
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