I am tasked with the administration of a small office network as well as several workstations running mostly Debian and Ubuntu. There are two servers: one database & print-server, and one backup & file server.

Being relatively new to this side of things, knowing enough to help myself to some degree on Linux, I would like to know what software tools and tasks/habits I can use/acquire to learn this field and be effective while doings so.

I don't need to know what is the best, just what a newbie sys-admin can use as a starter-pack to learn and use as a base to grow into proper system administration.

[edit] What I need is those few basic tools to start with, and the kind of things I need to do regularly, e.g.: which logs to check, when & what to monitor, the kind of 'right' place to start and to which I can ad as I need.