[Cialug] Getting started as a sysadmin

[John Lengeling]

Being a long time UNIX/Linux Sysadmin myself (starting with BSD 2.9/4.3 and
System III on up)...

A lot of good advice from Aaron!

1. Adopt Continuous Improvement everyday

2. You need to have a detail oriented personality - If you are not detail
oriented you won't excel as a Sysadmin IMHO.

3. Adopt Continuous Learning... If you run in to a black box, open it up
and learn all about it and if you run into more black boxes, repeat...until
there are no more

4. You really need to understand programming & structure - More than just
throw away scripts.   This is especially true with the movement to Cloud
and the automation needed where things are done via APIs and where you
script automation

5. There are always multiple solutions to a problem - Good admins know how
to pick the best solution and which ones are crap.

6. Develop Problem Analysis/Debugging Techniques - I don't necessarily mean
how to debug scripts, but techniques to debug problems... networking
problems, system problems, read log files and understand which each line is
telling you, how to debug/trace network protocols, trace running processes,
how to turn on application log files,  how to simplify systems to rule out
large parts of system and narrow the focus, etc.   I run into too many
admins who don't know how to debug a problem...

7. I love working on stuff where someone says "I can't be done".   It's
like a puzzle to me.   Most of the times it "can't be done" because the
person doesn't understand the system.  Don't give up an accept the status
quo, take it as a challenge.

8. If you are going to be an owner of something (A server, application,
network switch, etc) - OWN IT! by becoming an expert at it.   It occurs
when you follow advice above, reading/understanding manuals (yes RTFM all
500 pages), playing with it, experimenting, trial/error, configure it, etc.
  I run into too many people who are quote unquote "experts" who only know
the simplest configuration or limited knowledge about the thing.

j


On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Aaron Porter <atporter at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
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