snori74

Risky.biz - "cybersecurity" but done with great energy.

Just about at the one year anniversary of my monthly not-for-profit https://LinuxUpskillChallenge.org Have plans underway to partner up with someone who's also committed to seeing it continue and to grow.

Will be looking at options to provide the content in other places than Reddit, (which is a turn off, or unavailable for some).

Keen to make it known and used by the pre-college crowd. It's easy and informal, but I feel would give these folk a big boost in confidence when the come across *nix in their studies.

Gratitude and humility.

Concentrate on the multiple wonderful things you've experienced in this life.

Recognise that every single one of your ancestors had their life, then it ended just as yours will. Recognize that you are part of a community of all of those millions of lives.

You say this, and yet Simon Bridges was relentlessly hassled about his accent...

Quite a nice article about this here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-g...

Hard to know how you could state this so confidently, snacked on a kakapo recently?

I was excited for a moment, because I was a listener of his "Daily show" way-back-when distinctly remember when Apple got on board for example. At the time he was legitimately a pioneer of the technology, terminology and the medium.

Unfortunately/fortunately? I'd pretty much not tracked him for 15+ years, so had forgotten what a sleazy Bagshot crazy he's become. Sad.

"First, the importance of gratitude" - so true

Thanks, I did dig through my emails and got in touch with a few of The Originals. You guys were willing to buy a "pig in a poke" - I gave out no outline or Table of Content (still don't!), and you paid Real Money to get content into you email each day for a month. These youngsters are getting it all for free! Thanks again. - Steve

Ha, ha, my original goal was to make a tidy pile of $$, but also a desire to teach and share. The feedback I get is certainly bouying me up as I go forward toward that big unknown. Thanks for your thoughts.

Thanks for those that got the word out. Looks like we have a "class" of about 1,300 for this month, and its humming along nicely. (There are 5,630 sub'd, but that includes all those from previous classes who've not unsub'd - its an imprecise art!)

Yes! This is techy and certainly not everyone "cup of tea" - most people would run a mile. But everyone is learning to remotely control a powerful server on the Internet ...which I think is cool and empowering.

We're covering the basic Linux skills to do that, and have a vague "junior sysadmin role in big company" in mind.... But nothing stops you using these same skills to create your own website, security scanning service, or get into robotics.

While discrimination unfortunately exists in some places, just avoid those and go forward. As for disablement, you just do what you can at the speed you can. (You're reading this fine, and have no idea what a hassle it was for me to write!)

Absolutly recommend "Murderball", quite an amazing film.

https://github.com/snori74/linuxupskillchallenge ?

The "How This Works" post covers this

Wow, thanks Jason!

Thanks, but most of that would be way over the top for my "newbies".

However, You must be the third or fourth person today to suggest that I add a TOC - so that is something I think I'll need to look at!

Yup. No way of knowing exactly, but I'd guess that quite a lot of the "students" are in the same boat...

Thanks, and I appreciate your comment. Things do get a little messy, but overall I've been happy with Reddit as a platform - once I figured out to pin a big FAQ ("How This Works") posting. Noone seems to read the sidebar :-(

Thanks, fixed in Github now, all ready for Monday!

Well in a sense, I do "know better". There is a real benefit to setting up a VPS "fully exposed to the Internet (another thing that some struggle with); A real benefit to taking a day to investigate each day's lesson; A real benefit to getting into the habit of ssh-ing daily.

But hey, having run this for a long while, I'm well aware people are coming from all sorts of backgrounds, having all sorts of crazy things going on in their lives etc - so however they do it is fine by me.

So, those that simply read it through - OK. Those that run it in a VM on their laptop - OK.

Peace,

Thanks for your kind words.

Yes, I've commented in a number of places that this is essentially Part I of a two part intro to the absolute minimum I'd like a newbie sysadmin to know.

It's likely that I'll put a tentative ToC for Part II into somewhere like /r/linux of /r/sysadmin for comment and discussion.

Thanks, that old interface really was much nicer...

Well it is what it is. One of the "odd" things is not really knowing how long you've got. Doctors hate to put a date on it, and clearly everyone's trying to push things out - but it makes planning difficult :-)

For this course I now have a small team of helpers authorised to look after the subreddit, the GitHub and the domain name. So hopefully it'll keep going strong after I bow out.

I've also changed the licensing to CC by SA 4.0, so if you think this is a good base you're welcome to develop it as you see fit, including commercially.

Although I say repeatedly that each 'lesson' has about two hours work in it I worry that were lessons available, students will just skim though the whole lot "in one go".

I also believe that 'forcing' students to ssh in daily for a month gets a bit of muscle-memory working, and proves that they have the required stickability. (The initial paid version reported such things back to their employer!)

In fact, all lessons are available via Github, but I try to avoid pointing this out :-)

I really wanted a good discussion forum, and I'm not a great fan of much of the classic forum software. While Reddit gets a good bit of stick for some of it's subreddits, if you pick those you visit well the content can be very good - and the upvoting etc works pretty well imho.

[Edit: added comment on stickability]

Once dealt with a 2d digitising pad that worked off the audio click of a spark in a similar way. Wild.