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Linux commands for advanced hardware and system info

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Re: Linux commands for advanced hardware and system info

#43

I have to say the title is a bit clickbaity. Since when were uname,dmesg,fdisk,gdisk,parted,blkid,lsblk,mount,df and /proc "advanced" commands ? A newbie will likely need to use all of them within the first week of them ever using Linux.

I have interviewed "senior devops" candidates that didn't know what procfs was. edit: We didn't consider them for the role.

Actually, a lot of the people new to DevOps who come from the Dev side don't know the Linux internals. All they know is TF/CF, k8s, Docker and either AWS or GCP. If you asked them to set up a raid array they'd look at you like you just grew a second head. If you asked them how to tell what modules the kernel was running, they wouldn't be able to find out without a lot of googling.

The fact that DevOps does encompass a lot of fundamental Linux system knowledge is glossed over by a lot of people. Then again, some of them don't know any other way to package and deploy software except in containers.

Re: Linux commands for advanced hardware and system info

#45
post #30

I have to say the title is a bit clickbaity. Since when were uname,dmesg,fdisk,gdisk,parted,blkid,lsblk,mount,df and /proc "advanced" commands ? A newbie will likely need to use all of them within the first week of them ever using Linux.

I've been using Linux since 1995. I had never heard of `inxi`. 21k lines of Perl, not Bash....

> 21k lines of Perl

GLORIOUS

$10 says this was made by someone who worked at an ISP.

Re: Linux commands for advanced hardware and system info

#46
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. I've been using GNU/Linux on the desktop (and server) for 20 years, I don't think I ever used blkid or lsblk. fdisk, on the other hand, was a thing in the DOS/Windows world, too, back in the day, and dealing with partitioning is something you are going to do regardless of the OS you are using.

> I concur. I've been using GNU/Linux on the desktop (and server) for 20 years, I don't think I ever used blkid or lsblk. How do you write disk images (like, if you're installing a new machine and you need to write the installer to a USB drive)? I always use lsblk to find the right device name, then dd to write it.

> (like, if you're installing a new machine and you need to write the installer to a USB drive

I just make sure I point at the right device letter.

For all it worth in the last 10 years I never need to bother with it, because in the worst case I write the installer in Windows environment and when I install it on the machine (be it a hardware or a virtual machine) it doesn't matter.

Re: Linux commands for advanced hardware and system info

#49

I have to say the title is a bit clickbaity. Since when were uname,dmesg,fdisk,gdisk,parted,blkid,lsblk,mount,df and /proc "advanced" commands ? A newbie will likely need to use all of them within the first week of them ever using Linux.

Since everyone is mentioning experience, I have administered from 1 to a dozen linux servers since 1994.

df, mount, dmesg are basic ones for someone who uses a command prompt.

fdisk and friends are for the ones who added a disk after installation

The rest is for those who had a problem and found a solution on askununtu.com or serverfault. Or are actually advanced.

I think there is a big difference between the users who work on the command line and those with a GUI. I do not even know what GUIs are used, except that I heard the names gnome and kde. Troubleshooting those would be a real challenge for me as they are very complex software.

Same for the sound. I recently had to attach a small loundspeaker to a rpi. Oh god, what an experience to make it make a sound. All this with nearly 30 years of Linux.

So experience is very relative, you may know how to write an inode table from scratch and google basic stuff you do not use.

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