CentOS - Mar 2008 - Slightly OT: How to learn UNIX

Hi,

	I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, or 
HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?  Books?  Courses? 
Self-teaching in a home lab?

Thanks,

Ugo

2008/3/6, Ugo Bellavance <ugob at lubik.ca>:
> Hi,
Hi Ugo
>         I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris,
or
>  HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?  Books?  Courses?
>  Self-teaching in a home lab?
>
>  Thanks,
>
>  Ugo
I recommend you installing OpenSolaris in a virtual or physical
machine and build a labor environment.

Buy study guides for Solaris certified System, Network and Security
Administrator (for Solaris 10 boxes). OpenSolaris is released under an
OSI approved license and pretty innovative.

cheers
Simon

-- 
XMPP: sjolle at swissjabber.org

On Mar 6, 2008, at 7:02 AM, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> 	I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris,  
> or HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?  Books?  Courses?  
> Self-teaching in a home lab?
in addition to the other suggestions, i recommend a copy of Evi  
Nemeth's "Unix System Administration Handbook"
(http://www.admin.com/
Pages/USAH.html).  one of the distinguishing features of this book is  
that for each topic it provides configuration examples for several  
different UNIX variants, highlighting the differences and similarities.

the current edition is the Third; you may also be interested in the  
Second edition, which covers some more proprietary UNIX variants.

-steve

--
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an  
improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v

I'm a big proponent of self teaching. In the IT field, it's usually hard
to get an employer to pay for training, so if one isn't willing to self
teach, it's hard to advance.

Use user reviews on Amazon to get feedback on what books are good for learning a
specific operating system.

There's no substitute for hands on experience. With Solaris, you can always
download ISO images and build your own test server on inexpensive x86 hardware.
I don't know how you'd do that with AIX or HP, though. I've wanted
to learn AIX myself, but am certainly not going to shell out several thousand
bucks to buy a used AIX server.

PG

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Ugo Bellavance <ugob at lubik.ca>
> Hi,
> 
> 	I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, or 
> HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?  Books?  Courses? 
> Self-teaching in a home lab?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ugo

> Hi,
>
> 	I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, or
> HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?  Books?  Courses?
> Self-teaching in a home lab?
Hello,

  here's an interesting resource, though more on the "surviving
guide" side ;-)
http://www.bhami.com/rosetta.html

Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> Hi,
>
>     I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, 
> or HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?  Books?  Courses? 
> Self-teaching in a home lab?
note that those three are /completely/ different from each other, 
especialyl when it comes to administration things.   AFAIK, AIX and HPUX 
only run on IBM pSeries power servers and HP PA-RISC/Itanium servers 
respectively, while Solaris can be run on either Sun UltraSparc or x86 
stuff.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 5:02 AM, Ugo Bellavance <ugob at lubik.ca>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
>         I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris,
or
>  HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?  Books?  Courses?
>  Self-teaching in a home lab?
>
I found that the best way for me was to stick to one OS, go through
Evi Nemeth's Unix and Linux Administration Handbooks and learn what
each chapter goes over. Break that one OS multiple times. Then pick up
another one. These days for someone at home you can go with Linux,
xBSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD,etc ), and Solaris on x86 hardware.

However, for other people this does not work well and it is better to
dive into all 3 'flavours' at once.. otherwise they find that they are
always saying "well OS#1 is better than OS#2 because its commands are
like this or that."

HP-UX and AIX can only be really learned on specific hardware.. I
found this limits the amount of self-teaching one can do on these OS's
as you end up only with production boxes at some site :). If you have
a 'beefy' system at home.. I would suggest installing some sort of
virtualization software and then installing a BSD derivative (for
learning MacOS etc), a Solaris virtual system and various Linux
distributions.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"