Home/Learn/Linux System Administrator/30-day plan
30-day lab plan · 🐧 Linux System Administrator

Become job-ready as alinux system administrator in 30 days.

One focused task a day, four weeks, ending with a portfolio and a mock interview. Built for students and engineers in India who learn by doing — about 2 hours a day on weekdays, a little more on weekends.

What you needInterview questions →Role path →
Your kit

Set up before day 1

Two Linux VMs (Ubuntu + Rocky), a Windows client, and our 40 Linux commands guide, cron explainer and systemd generator. Everything here is free or has a free tier; a laptop with 16 GB RAM is enough for most labs (32 GB for nested clusters).

  • Daily ruleFinish the task, write 5 lines of notes, commit to Git. Notes become your interview stories.
  • Weekend ruleDay 7 of each week is a review: redo the hardest task from memory.
  • Stuck rule30 minutes max, then ask in a community or our engineer network.
Week 1

Core skills

  1. Day 1Install Ubuntu Server and Rocky; SSH keys only; sudo setup
  2. Day 2Filesystem, permissions, chmod/chown drills (use our chmod calculator)
  3. Day 3Processes, systemd services, journald; break and fix sshd
  4. Day 4Package management (apt/dnf), repos, held packages
  5. Day 5Networking: ip, ss, nmcli, static IP, DNS, firewall (ufw/firewalld)
  6. Day 6Bash scripting: backup script with logging (our script generator as reference)
  7. Day 7Review: write a cheat-sheet from our 40-commands guide
Week 2

Services

  1. Day 8NGINX reverse proxy + Let’s Encrypt (our NGINX generator)
  2. Day 9PostgreSQL/MySQL install, backup, restore
  3. Day 10LVM: extend a filesystem online; ZFS basics
  4. Day 11NFS/Samba shares with permissions
  5. Day 12Cron and systemd timers for maintenance (our generators)
  6. Day 13Monitoring: Zabbix agent / node_exporter + Grafana
  7. Day 14Review: document each service with restart/rollback steps
Week 3

Security & automation

  1. Day 15CIS hardening script; Lynis before/after
  2. Day 16fail2ban, auditd, AIDE; test alerts
  3. Day 17Ansible: inventory, playbook for users/packages/sshd across both VMs
  4. Day 18Patching playbook with reboot handling
  5. Day 19Centralised logs: rsyslog → Loki or ELK
  6. Day 20Docker: run 3 containers via Compose (our generator)
  7. Day 21Review: write the server build standard
Week 4

Troubleshooting & portfolio

  1. Day 22Fault injection day: full disk, bad fstab, broken DNS — fix each
  2. Day 23Performance: stress CPU/IO; diagnose with USE method
  3. Day 24Kernel/boot: recover a VM with a broken GRUB entry
  4. Day 25Write 5 runbooks for the faults above
  5. Day 26Prepare a 2-minute explanation of your lab for interviews
  6. Day 27Mock interview with our question bank
  7. Day 28Publish the Ansible repo; update resume
After day 30

What you will have

  • A portfolio repoDiagrams, configs, scripts and runbooks a hiring manager can read in five minutes.
  • Interview storiesReal faults you fixed — the answers to “tell me about a time…”.
  • A certification targetSee the role path for which exam to book next.
  • A place in our networkFinish the plan, share the repo, and apply — we mentor and place engineers who complete it.

Finished the plan? Show us.

Share your repo and notes; completed plans get a technical conversation with our architects and first paid tasks through the engineer network.

Apply to the networkPractice interview questions