System Administrators

This path assumes you're already comfortable with basic server administration and focuses on the layer above that: the operational discipline of running production systems safely — credential hygiene, safe rollback, structured monitoring, and root-cause thinking, grounded with a hands-on IIS lab in the middle to keep the material concrete rather than purely conceptual.

The ordering here is deliberate: fundamentals (permissions, IIS, credentials) first, then operational practice (monitoring, rollback), reinforced with hands-on practice, then the higher-level investigation skills (root cause, layer isolation) that tie it all together.

1. 1 Linux File Permissions: chmod/chown Demystified  Guide · beginner
   How Linux file permissions actually work — the owner/group/other model, reading and writing permission strings, and the chmod/chown commands to change them safely.
2. 2 IIS Application Pools: What They Are and Why They Crash  Guide · beginner
   What an IIS application pool actually is, why it stops or crashes, and how to tell the difference between an app pool problem and an application code problem.
3. 3 Reading Windows Event Viewer Without Getting Lost  Guide · beginner
   A practical, non-overwhelming approach to Windows Event Viewer — which logs actually matter, how to filter out the noise, and how to find the one entry that explains a crash.
4. 4 Secrets Management: Don't Commit That Password  Guide · beginner
   Practical credential hygiene for real projects — why secrets don't belong in source control, how .gitignore and environment variables actually protect you (and where they don't), and what to do if a secret is committed by mistake.
5. 5 Monitoring 101: Metrics, Logs, and Traces  Guide · beginner
   The three pillars of observability explained plainly — what metrics, logs, and traces each tell you, and which one to reach for first depending on the question you're actually asking.
6. 6 Rolling Back a Bad Deployment Safely  Playbook · intermediate
   A concrete, step-by-step playbook for rolling back a bad production deployment: confirming the problem, choosing revert vs. redeploy, executing safely, and verifying the rollback actually worked.
7. 7 A Safe Local IIS Lab: Build a Site From Scratch  Lab · beginner
   A from-scratch, entirely local IIS lab — install IIS, create your own site, and find its log files — safe to do on a personal machine with no production risk.
8. 8 Root Cause Analysis: A Simple Framework  Guide · intermediate
   A practical, repeatable framework for finding a real root cause instead of stopping at the first plausible explanation — the Five Whys, contributing-vs-root-cause, and writing a blame-free postmortem.
9. 9 Isolating "Is It the Network or the App?"  Troubleshooting Walkthrough · intermediate
   A step-by-step method for isolating whether a slow or failing request is a network problem, a proxy/load-balancer problem, or an application problem — before you start reading application logs.

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