[Cialug] Getting started as a sysadmin

[Aaron Porter]

A little late to this discussion but as a sysadmin & hiring manager that's
been interviewing linux admins pretty much non-stop for the last 10 years,
I'll toss in some comments:

It doesn't matter what scripting/programming language you learn, but learn
one. It's better to be good at one than vaguely familiar with a bunch.
Fight the distraction and focus. With a solid foundation in one language
you will start to notice you can muddle your way through more with a little
help from a peer/book/google/etc. It's mostly about the logical thought
process and less about the syntax/vocab of any particular language.

Learn how to parse text; again it doesn't particularly matter how (perl,
awk, python, whatever). Being able to sort, count & collate is a huge help
as a sysadmin.

Don't focus on specific products/vendors, figure out the what and the why
of it. Unix is a philosophy as much as anything else. If you start to
understand what the underlying process is, figuring out what an application
is doing becomes a lot easier.

Learn to love version control. Git, SVN, Mercurial, Perforce, whatever.
Again, it doesn't matter which you pick or even why. Figuring out why
having revision history is a good thing and deciding how to merge it into
your workflow is the win.

As you solve across interesting problems, don't stop once you figure out
how to fix them; dig deeper and figure out the why of both the problem and
the solution.