🚀 Mastering Linux Fundamentals & Advanced DevOps Challenges

My Journey into Linux, Nginx, and DevOps Automation

As part of my DevOps learning journey, I recently dived deep into Linux fundamentals and explored advanced system administration topics. From installing Nginx and hosting a website to managing users, groups, and storage volumes, it has been an incredible experience! Here’s what I learned and the challenges I tackled during this phase.

🔥 Week 1: Learning Linux Fundamentals & Hosting with Nginx

I started my journey by learning essential Linux commands and concepts. The most exciting part was installing Nginx and successfully hosting a website for the first time! The hands-on experience helped me understand how web servers work and how to configure them efficiently.

Key Learnings:

• Understanding Linux command-line basics

• Installing and configuring Nginx

• Hosting a static website on an AWS instance

• Managing file permissions and ownership

It was an amazing experience to deploy a live website and see my work in action! 💡

🔹 Week 2: Linux System Administration & Automation (90 Days of DevOps Challenge)

SSH & Secure Copy (SCP)

• Learned how to SSH from one server to another

• Explored SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) to securely transfer files between local and remote servers

• Completed an assignment on SCP for hands-on practice

User & Group Management

• Created users and groups

• Added users to different groups

• Set up file permissions for security

File Permissions & Ownership

• Explored chmod, chown, and chgrp to modify file permissions and ownership

• Ensured secure access for different users in a multi-user environment

Powerful Linux Commands for Log Analysis

• Grep, Sed, Find, Awk: Used these commands to analyze and extract information from logs

• Networking commands: Learned commands like nslookup, ping, ps, htop, traceroute, dig, and wget for network troubleshooting and monitoring

🔹 Deep Dive into Linux Volume Management (LVM)

A big shoutout to @shubhamlondhe bhaiya for sharing a detailed session on Linux Volume Management (LVM)! 🙌

Key Topics Covered:

• Creating Logical Volumes and Volume Groups

• Setting up Physical Volumes

• Using AWS EBS (Elastic Block Store) to create and mount volumes

• Dynamically increasing storage capacity with LVM

I also received an assignment on LVM, which I will be completing by the evening and sharing my progress. This hands-on learning has been incredibly valuable! 💯

🛠️ Week 2 Challenge: DevOps Linux Server Monitoring & Automation

This week's project was all about managing a Linux-based production server effectively. Here’s what I worked on:

📌 Tasks & Assignments

✅ 1️⃣ User & Group Management

• Created devops_user and added it to the devops_team group

• Set a password and granted sudo access

• Restricted SSH access for certain users in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

✅ 2️⃣ File & Directory Permissions

• Created a workspace /devops_workspace with a file project_notes.txt

• Set permissions:

  • Owner: Read & Write

  • Group: Read-only

  • Others: No access

• Verified using ls -l

✅ 3️⃣ Log File Analysis Using AWK, Grep & Sed

• Downloaded a sample log file

• Used grep to extract error logs

• Used awk to extract timestamps and log levels

• Used sed to mask IP addresses for security

• Found the most frequent log entry using:

    sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10
  

✅ 4️⃣ Volume Management & Disk Usage

• Created /mnt/devops_data and mounted a new volume

• Verified storage using df -h and mount | grep devops_data

✅ 5️⃣ Process Management & Monitoring

• Started a background process (ping google.com > ping_test.log &)

• Used ps, top, and htop to monitor processes

• Terminated unnecessary processes for better performance

🌟 Final Thoughts & Shoutout

This journey has been an eye-opener into Linux system administration and automation. Special thanks to Shubham Londhe bhaiya for always being an inspiration and guiding me through complex DevOps concepts. 🙏🔥

I am looking forward to the next set of challenges! 🚀 If you're also on a DevOps learning path, let's connect and grow together! 👩‍💻👨‍💻

💬 What’s your favorite Linux command that you use daily? Drop a comment below!

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