What would I need to know if I ever get a dedicated server?

I'm not at the point yet where I need to get my own server, but I'd like to someday when I have the money. What skills will I need for managing it? What web sites or books should I be reading now?

In particular I'm worried about setting it up and security; I hear too many stories about new server admins screwing things up. I have a little UNIX experience, but no real opportunity to practice as I don't have ssh access to my web host.

 

Moved to Domains, Hosting, & Servers (we recently added servers to this last night).

 

Learn these commands:

man
li
mv
cp
chmod
mkdir
su

Those are the basics. You should know how to configure and restart Apache, NGINX, or Lighttpd, whichever you're going to be using. You should also know basic MySQL command line functions. You can learn other things as you go. I would recommend taking an intermediary step to a Managed VPS server if you are not there already. Learn everything you can on the VPS server. I say Managed because you'll get more support if you break something.

You can also learn by getting a Linux boot disk or putting Linux on another partition or in a virtual environment. This allows you to work with it on your local computer and learn.

If you're dedicated server happens to be a Windows Machine than you need to learn Remote Desktop and IIS inside and out. You'll also probably want to learn XML because all the configuration files for IIS are in XML these days. Though I find the format a lot easier to work with than .htaccess.

 

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Need to work on this.

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I'm not sure about this one; I type using a voice recognition program that won't run on Linux. I have heard of others using one computer to telnet in to the computer running Linux, or a virtual machine (??), but don't know how to set that up.

This sounds like the way to go. Thanks!