I learned nothing about servers from college. I graduated with an Associate’s Degree in IT Web Development, and learned nothing about servers. Everything I learned, I got from google.
I tell people I run 2 servers out of my house, and they stand back in awe. To me it’s not all that great a feat… It’s just 2 repurposed Dell desktop PC’s that have been reformatted and a linux distribution put on them (currently running Debian).
I have some friends that are really interested in running servers not because they need a server, but because they just want to learn how to do it. I can tell you from experience: if you don’t need a server, then learning how to run one is going to be a very strongly-inclined uphill struggle.
I honestly didn’t want to deal with a server, because I knew I’d have to provide the electricity to run it, as well as knowing that the power could go out at any minute. Also, did I really want all my internet bandwidth eaten up by a server?
The thing that finally sent me over the edge was realizing that hosted solutions limited what I could post on a website. I wanted the freedom to post whatever I wanted on my own personal site, so I repurposed a Dell PC into an ubuntu desktop, and googled how to install and run a web server.
That lead to installing and running a minecraft server, teampseak voip server, Subsonic, and all sorts of different games including ace of spades, open arena, nethack, quake 3, goldeneye source, zandronum… the list goes on.
Every time I needed a server, I could always use mine. What drove me was knowing that in the end, I’d have something that I had control over, and something I could call mine.
You can’t expect to learn anything about running a server until you actually have a need for one.
I learned about server administration on the server after a crash made me lose everything, or after the power would fail and I’d have to reboot and manually start all my services… I had to learn how to remote to it so I could access it anywhere.
Basically, my process went like this: what do I need? How easy is that to set up? I can set that up in Windows, but how hard would that be to set up in linux?
Those 3 questions were all I needed to get anything running.
So, if you’re looking to get into learning about how to run a server, and linux, and the like, I urge you to read about my experiences, and to remember that in the end you’ll need a finished product that you actually plan on totally utilizing. If you don’t, everything you learn will be a total waste of time.