What kind of Linux projects can I do to build skills?

Hi everyone,

While I’ve been learning Linux, someone told me that if I want to become a system engineer I should do some Linux projects to showcase my skills. The problem is, I’m not sure what counts as a “Linux project.”

What kind of projects can I actually do that would be useful for learning and also good to show on a resume? Any guidance or examples would be really helpful.

Thanks!

I'm not sure either. It depends as the skills you might need depend on your career or self-improvement goals.

If you want sysadmin skills, then you should look at things that exercise your knowledge of how to install and maintain the OS and applications, measure performance and troubleshoot hardware/software. Included would be things like the installation and maintenance of server apps such as webapp servers, file-share servers, and so forth.

For Linux in particular, it is a good thing to know what the major distros are and their package managers.

If you want programming skills, then focus on the programming language(s) of your choice and how they are used to build apps that will run in the target OS.

Then there are devops skills, which tend to span between applications development and their installation/maintenance on a production system.

I suppose that one thing that almost everyone could use some sort of practice in would be installing and using a SQL database such as MySQL or even SQLite.

If you're serious about developing the skills needed to work in an enterprise environment and you have the budget, setting up a homelab might be useful. You can use cheap micro-pc's and/or Raspberry Pi systems, since the main differences are in the horsepower of the machines rather than in their software abilities.

Tim Holloway wrote:I'm not sure either. It depends as the skills you might need depend on your career or self-improvement goals.

thank you for the quick response Tim!!But I am interested in Site relirabilty Engineer or System Engineer domain but I am not sure which skills i should follow and what projects should i do?i was told to do linux project without any context so that is why i am confused

It's no wonder you are confused. Those are the kinds of titles companies make up out of their desire to sound important and have no authoritative universal definition.

Personally, I believe that reliability is everyone's responsibility, not just something for one person. In a large enterprise you might have a person or division to audit complex system interactions to make sure that they integrate reliability, but as a general rule reliability should not be just one person's job while everyone else just gets by.

System Engineer is an even worse title. It could mean Hardware Systems, Software Systems, or even DevOps. And in some countries, the title "Engineer" is strictly controlled by law and only allowed to certified members of construction-related trades. Though where I live, the title of  "Software Engineer" has sometimes been printed on my business cards. I do the same basic things regardless of what they print on my cards.

Yeah those job titles are definitely vague! Maybe it's more helpful if you look at the specifics of what they ask for in postings.

This is not a project, but if you aren't already using it for your everyday PC work at home as your main desktop (or at least a secondary), it can't hurt to start. For me it was enough to learn most of what I needed (but that's because I like to tinker, and I'm more a developer than sysadmin type). My general advice is to start using it at home for stuff.

For project ideas maybe:

- Setup a small homelab server using Proxmox (if you use a decent enough machine, this would also let you create remotely hosted Linux VMs for more projects and testing)
- Install Arch Linux the old way from the Arch Wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
- Setup a Pihole DNS server for your home network
- Setup a basic web server that auto starts Tomcat running some simple web app

Some things like bash scripting, vi, networking, disk partitioning, LUKS.. you might need to focus on those specifically. The project ideas I can think of would only touch on these, rather than going very deep.

I don't know if your time is better spent elsewhere if you're only focusing on career goals. For example learning AWS or Azure cloud stuff.

Is pure Linux sysadmin work still a major thing these days, or is it more of a complementary thing for other job roles? (I don't know!)

Tim Holloway wrote:It's no wonder you are confused. Those are the kinds of titles companies make up out of their desire to sound important and have no authoritative universal definition.

thank you for the reply tim!yeah with the feedbacks ive got i think it focuses on the overall health, performance, and stability of the technical infrastructure and i remember that person saying something he implemented about caching mechanisms
.

BH: Well done only quoting that part of the previous post you need to quote

Bhushitha Hashan wrote:
thank you for the reply tim!yeah with the feedbacks ive got i think it focuses on the overall health, performance, and stability of the technical infrastructure and i remember that person saying something he implemented about caching mechanisms
.

I am not a big fan of certiifications, but one of the few exceptions I've made was the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). While I have never attempted it myself, the descriptions I read sounded like you'd have to do about what I used to do when taking a cold machine and turning it into a live production server and in about the same amount of time. Though I'm not sure what the current state of IBM Red Hat certs might be. And I have since moved on to automated provisioning (Kickstart/preseed, Ansible, Puppet). But it's a good start in testing your skills and establishing credentials.

Caching can be done in many ways. I use Squid to cache OS installation packages to spare the load of keeping all my systems up to date. But depending on needs, you can cache web pages to be served, database traffic, pretty much anything that's high traffic and oft-repeated. And, of course, you can cache either in software or via a dedicated hardware cache server.