With the pandemic, there have been loads of courses that have been made temporarily free. It can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff; video courses are better than grinding through dense documentation, but not as effective as practise. Enter the Linux Upskill Challenge. The challenge is a good mix of clear instructions and community support that gives a good grounding in Linux Sysadmin.

As a linux user, there was a temptation to simply use my own machine. This however runs contrary to the spirit of the challenge. Instead, creating and maintaining a virtual private server gives a far more authentic experience of Linux System Administration. Although it’s the first day, I have found the experience of setting up an ec2 instance on AWS invaluable.

I’m keeping a repo of my notes here The repo also includes a simple script to manage ec2 instances straight from the command-line rather than use the the web interface.