Bit of a back story:
I'm a contractor hired by company X who works for company Y to do general sysadmin stuff.
About a year and a half ago, I interviewed for a database job in front of a panel of of ten older gentlemen. I ended up not getting the job.
Fast forward to last week, my contract manager messages me and says something along the lines of, "Are you interested in a unix/linux position? It's yours if you want it."
It seemed very fishy at first, so I asked my contract manager why he would want me working on an operating system that i have, quite literally, zero experience with. He said that when I had my interview a year and a half ago, one of the older gentlemen was very impressed with me and my abilities and skills. It turns out that the gentleman was one of the head IT managers for company X. I negotiated getting a substantial bump in pay and organized a meeting with the gentleman who had been keeping his eye on me for awhile and wanted me to work in this position.
A few days later, I met with the IT manager and my future Team Lead. It was very non-chalant and the IT manager apologized and explained why I hadn't received a job offer for the database position awhile back. He chose someone who had been working at the company for 7+ years and wanted to make sure whoever got the position was someone who had a lot of longevity at the current workplace (I had only been working for around 6 months at the time of the interview)
The Team Lead explained the position and what people in my role typically do on a day-to-day basis. I came to the conclusion that the stuff I would be working on are 1-and-done problems. As in, this is an issue you'll see once in your life time and then never, ever again.
Currently, I'm a Windows SysAdmin with ~2+ years of experience in an enterprise environment.
What I would like to know is, how the hell can I get some really good experience with Linux in a relatively short amount of time? From what I've been told, most of the work is done on Red Hat. I was told that there would not be a lot of pressure with me getting a whole lot of work done when I start- rather, just getting familiar with Linux in general. I would like to be able to help out much sooner rather than later, though.
TL;DR: Please help. Need to learn Linux in a relatively short amount of time.
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