I wanted to find out what working on a real Linux server actually feels like — not a local VM, not a simulator. So in May 2026, I spun up an Ubuntu 22.04 server on AWS EC2, connected via SSH, and spent the entire month doing real work on it. Here's what I built. chmod , chown )ps , top , kill , systemctl )ss , curl , UFW, DNS)apt scp , rsync )grep , awk , and sed By the end of the month, I had built and automated 5 production-style Bash scripts. A monitoring script that checks: Scheduled every 15 minutes using cron. ./server_health.sh
Date: 2026-05-12 10:00:00
Hostname: ip-172-xx-xx-xx
--- CPU Usage ---
✅ CPU is OK (2.3%)
--- Memory Usage ---
✅ RAM is OK (45%)
--- Services Status ---
✅ ssh: RUNNING ✅ nginx: RUNNING ✅ docker: RUNNING --- Network --- A script that scans partitions and generates alerts when disk usage exceeds a threshold. Features: Runs every hour through cron. A maintenance script that: Built using find , gzip , and mtime filters for log retention management. Runs every Sunday. A provisioning script for creating users with a consistent setup. Features: sudo ./user_creation.sh --file users.csv Creates compressed backups using tar.gz archives. Features: Scheduled daily at 2 AM. All scripts were automated using cron jobs. */15 * * * * /home/ubuntu/scripts/server_health.sh >> /home/ubuntu/logs/health_cron.log 2>&1 0 * * * * /home/ubuntu/scripts/disk_alerter.sh >> /home/ubuntu/logs/disk_cron.log 2>&1 0 2 * * * /home/ubuntu/scripts/backup.sh >> /home/ubuntu/logs/backup_cron.log 2>&1 0 23 * * 0 /home/ubuntu/scripts/log_cleaner.sh >> /home/ubuntu/logs/cleaner_cron.log 2>&1 Once configured, the server handled routine maintenance automatically. At the beginning, basic terminal commands felt unfamiliar. After working daily on a remote server, navigating Linux from the command line became much more natural. There's no shortcut — you just have to do it daily. One of the biggest mindset shifts was noticing repetitive work and immediately thinking: "Can this be automated?" That shift alone made scripting feel much more practical — and honestly, more fun. Working on an actual EC2 instance exposed me to problems that are difficult to fully understand in local environments: Solving those problems on a live server taught me far more than just reading commands from documentation. Next, I'm moving into AWS Core Infrastructure — VPC, IAM, RDS, and Terraform. That work starts in June 2026. Follow along if you're on a similar path. All scripts and documentation are open source: 👉 github.com/tanayjdev/linux-bash-scripts BCA Student • Aspiring Cloud & DevOps Engineer