Linux steep learning curve
Hey guys. I've been a microsoft goon for a long time. I've been doing system admin/troubleshooting stuff for about 10 years, and getting paid pretty well for it. I kind of pride myself on being a fairly clueful person, I've pulled of tricks that should not have worked, supported tons of production machines and kept uptime on critical boxes high, etc. I'm entirely self taught and have managed to learn SQL, Exchange, server, and a ton of apps.
My problem is, at my current client, they are uh, shall we say, cheap. They need a cache/proxy service to help 'speed up' web traffic. I know squid does a good job, and so I threw together some parts and did a network install of redhat 9. Easy enough.
My problem is, redhat installed squid, but it doesnt seem to be running. I tried to install webmin with an RPM and I double click on it, it hops from 1/3 to 1/2 done and then the window goes away. So I downloaded a new build, managed to do the make and whatevers and install the new build of squid. It still doesnt seem to be running.
The interface in redhat (I think Im using xwindows and gnome, not really sure) is not intuitive at all. The advantage of microsoft products is that you can depend on things being fairly similar, or at least make certain assumptions about how to manage services, settings, etc. I read that the squid process has to have rights to the cache directory, ok great, how do I do that? what is the squid process? Is there some shell I can load on redhat to give me links to things like this? Am I dead in the water? Do I need to go buy some "how to admin linux" books to do this? I've honestly never had to read a book on any piece of computer technology before? Checkpoint firewall? No problem, dorking around with the gui and phone-boys site was enough. Exchange 2000/Active directory migrations? No problem, read 2 paragraphs in a white paper and messed around on the home machines for a few days and had it down.
I was hoping for something similar with linux, but after having this machine running for a week, I can't even be sure squid is installed correctly, or running. If it isn't running, I have no idea why not. I have modified the config file and it makes pretty striaght forward sense.
What gives? Any "Windows 2000 Server" shell I can put on red hat to have it make sense?