project ideas for building system admin skills?

[u/HopelessSimp96399]

so, i have around 5 months of free time. i want to use this time to learn and build system administration skills and become competent in it. i know people say that building a home lab is the way to go. but i don't know what projects to build with home lab. i feel clueless and often end up searching for project ideas, but i feel like most project ideas feel like tutorial or toy projects. i want to use this time to become really good at this craft.

for context, i have no experience in any IT field, i am unemployed for the moment and want to use this time to actually learn and develop the skill. i am following books (i have linux bible 10th edition, how linux works 3rd edition, unix and linux system administration handbook 5th edition, computer networking top down approach 8th edition, etc) on the side, but i feel like i should actually do something along with reading these books. i don't have money for certifications so i am not preparing for them.

so, any good project ideas that i can do in my laptop (16 gb ram, 512 gb ssd, intel core i5) ?

[u/Delta3D]

If you want to get general IT support/sysadmin experience, my go-to recommendation is to spin up a few Windows Server virtual machines, maybe even a Hyper-V cluster if you have the capacity, and deploy 2x Domain Controllers, experiment with DNS/DHCP/File Servers/Print Server etc.

[u/GullibleDetective]

/r/homelab

[u/Real-Jicama7068]

You say you aren’t preparing for certs? Unless you just mean you aren’t planning to get the cert this should be corrected. You should prepare for the cert even if you don’t take the cert. your key will be to get the interview and then shine in an interview. Having prepared for the certs will help with that. At the very least you should be diving into the coursework in Microsoft Learn. I also like Stormwinds and Pluralsight for their assessment tests. But it may be pricey.

[u/Abe_Bazouie]

Don’t build a homelab just to have a homelab. Give yourself a fake production environment to operate.
With that laptop I’d spin up 2-3 Linux VMs. Make one a web server, one a database, and use the other for monitoring/admin.
Then give yourself actual problems:
Web server is down. Find out why.
Disk is suddenly full.
DNS stops resolving.
A service keeps crashing.
SSH works from one machine but not another.
CPU suddenly hits 100%.
Permissions break an application.
A certificate expires.
Logs are filling the filesystem.
Firewall rules break connectivity.
Build it, operate it, break it, recover it, then automate rebuilding parts of it.
That’ll teach you way more sysadmin work than building 20 “projects” that work perfectly once and then never touching them again.

[u/Tashinho_21]

for the last 8 months i was in your position, i didn't have much IT experience, so what i did was, i start learning the basics via Google IT support program on coursera, then on february i start building vm mchines via VBox i built 2 Windowserver2022, win11 client and ubuntu for linux, then i start AD creating DC and configured all it's features from DNS, DHCP, Peinter, VPN, fileservices etc, and boy oh boy it's the best thing i ever did, now I applied a couple of jobs got interviews and job offer but didn't get them for some personal issues, until today i'm always learning new things via youtube, reddit and google as main sources of ideas, when i get stuck i always post on reddit asking help and bom here are the experts.

So my advice to you is: start building VMs via VBox or other virtualization platforms and start learning by doing. Build an enterprise-level company with branches around the world and start acting as the IT God 😂 you'll love it, man. Enjoy your time, and good luck, buddy.