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The Linux Upskills Challenge

LinuxUpskillChallengeTitle.png

Course Overview

We begin our journey into Systems and Programming with the Linux Upskill Challenge

This challenge is a great way to take our first steps into Linux. It is a month long commitment that you can follow at your own pace, but if you dedicate 2-3 each day it will take you roughly 21 days to complete the challenge.
For our purposes we will be using the Challenge as a way to learn Linux for the first time and as a way to begin building on our Linux Command Line Skills.

Goals of this Course Overview

  • Set

    up your own Linux Server either on the cloud or locally on your own machine

  • Learn to Navigate the Linux File System & learn about the Linux File Hierarchy Structure ( LFHS )
  • Cover the basics of the powerful vim text editor
  • Set up your own web server with Apache and set up some traffic rules with ufw
  • Understand how to filter information with commands like grep, cat, more, less, cute, tail, etc.
  • Learn about various file transfer protocols from SMB to SFTP and more
  • Grasp the basics of permissions involving users and groups
  • Ubuntu Universe vs Multiverse
  • Learn about Archiving & Compressing and build from source
  • Inodes, symlinks and other shortcuts
  • Get a brief introduction to shell scripting
Course Notes

The Linux Upskill Challenge has a lot of great concise and sufficiently detailed explanations for most of the topics they cover. Which makes it pretty hard to make any notes that wouldn't just be a copy & paste.
As a middle ground the following notes are commands and information I found particularly useful.

A quick note for people who are windows users.
Some of you may be using WSL to access your cloud instance. You might experience clock-drift on your device making you unable to access to the AWS CLI. If this happens try running the following command. 

sudo hwclock -s

This should serve as a temporary fix to your clock-drift but I would recommend looking online for a more permanent solution.

The ls command and its switches
    - ( Readings-l

)

: lists directory contents
    - ( -a ) : lists hidden files
    - ( -t ) : lists by date created
    - ( -r ) : lists in reverse order
Some notes on Sudo & Root Best practices 
    - Don't leave root open
    - Be careful of using sudo to open GUI applications, if you have to, use sudo -h 
    - /etc/shadow : A very important space that stores information about the user passwords on a Linux system
    - Hackers can't auto-crack if root is locked down
Commands used to find files
    - locate | find | grep | which
Ownership and Permissions in Linux
    - ls -ltr is a good way of showing who owns what files and what permissions they have
    - chmod
         - u = user | g = group | o = others | a = all
         - ( + ) = add permission | ( - ) = remove permission | ( = ) = set permission
         - r = read | w = write | x = execute
         - u = user | g = group | o = others | a = all
         - 1 = execute | 2 = write | 4 = read
examples:
         - chmod u+w hello.txt | Gives user write permissions to the hello.txt file
         - chmod 777 hello.txt | Gives read write and execute permissions to everyone
You can get practice with vim by running vimtutor
Turn a file into a bash script with #!/bin/bash

Required ReadingReadings


Section Projects

Project-1
Project-2

 

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