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How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator?
xylix asks: "I figure there must be a number of UNIX admins among the Slashdot readership and I am wondering how you got into that field to start with. The reason I am asking is that I really want to be a UNIX admin but don't know how to get from here to there. What kind of education did you have(CS or other)? How did you start out (as a junior admin or moving laterally from another position)? What certifications are useful?"
"I am an English teacher now but am a techie at heart and spend all my time coding and using various Linux / BSD distros. I figure I am capable of handling a junior position, but most ads I see for *nix admins are looking for several years of work experience (on specific platforms), CS or EE degrees (I have a BA in philosophy) and perhaps years of experience in a specific industry (financial, wireless, transportation...).
I have been told by a couple people that at 33 I am far too old to start ANY kind of tech career (with no previous work experience). Anyone out there with experience to counter that? I know the job market is tough right now, but I am thinking long term."
Where else can I goof off and play with computers all day and still get paid?
Simple...I was told to "upgrade the NT servers," so I installed FreeBSD :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Seriously, that has got to be the oddest combo!
Linux is not the Only thing I administrate but to answer your question: The shoe just fit. I'm handy, am addicted to Operating systems (anyone remember DEC's RTS?) and in a business that needs an operating system capable of coherent networking.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
Believe me, you do not want to be a sysadmin of any kind whatsoever. You think you do, but you don't.
I grew a beard, started wearing only t-shirts and jeans, and developed a surly attitude. The group accepted me, and I've never worked a full day in my life since then.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I started in Novell then hopped to NT then hopped to UNIX. To get into it all you got to start from the bottom helpdesk or intern :(
-Bjorn
It was about 3 years ago and the admin where I was working got in a verbal fight with my boss and ended up quitting. At the time I was a web developer and had basic unix knowledge so when the boss asked, "Who knows Unix?!?" and I responded with "I can list files in a directory and add users, does that count?" I was given the job, a stack of O'Reilly books and put all my efforts into learning as much as I could as fast as possible.
This is rubbish. My wife is 33 and just started a new career as a developer. She had previously been doing international trade development, hated it, was bored silly by the politics, got out, took a two-year course at a local community college with a good reputation and is merrily writing business applications. Her previous career stood to her in that, unlike a lot of fresh developers, she understands business and accounting. I know of another developer who at age 48 retrained and has been doing that for a few years. Good luck to you!
If you have it, you are an admin. If you don't have it, you're not.
Computer Science/Engineering degree, with interning or Cooping is the easiest way. If you already have the degree, it might be trickier (no one really wants to hire a Unix admin without experience). You'd probably have to start out as someone like a coder and slip into the position if one would open up...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I am wondering how you got into that field to start with. The reason I am asking is that I really want to be a UNIX admin
Just find a surgeon and get your fingers removed. Now. Trust me, it will be less painful in the long run.
Have a BS in CS. Stumbled upon Linux in College, got addicted. Was gradually given more and more responsibility at my job. And now low and behold I am an admin.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
I really want to be a UNIX admin
:-)
Ahh - This is your first mistake. Anyone going into the poky comms room meeting the grumpy sysadmin realises that all sysadmins would rather be anywhere else doing anything than what they are doing at that point. Serial murder for example.
Miserable Bastards
A friend from irc had his admin walk out leaving him without the root passwords. I broke into several systems for him and got them back.... he offered me the job after and I've been working for them ever since.
My experience was pissing around on linux/BSD systems at home for about a year...setting up apache/proftpd/bind etc. Most of what I now know was learnt as I worked.
In the UK you might aswell forget it unless you have experience, maybe some of the SUN qualifications would help but for most sysadmins here msce is all you need...unfortunately.
i was a botanist till two years ago. and i am a sysadmin now...
i think you just need to be interested....
"it's not much, really" said the horse.
I know a guy who owned a car spares store near where I lived.. One day he decided (through bitching from his daugher, who was getting all techie at school), to move into the IT industry.
So, he signed up for an MCSE course, got the books, setup the boxes at home, and sure enough a year later YATE was born (Yet Another Textbook Engineer)..
I'd say this guy was in his late 40's and is probably earning about £250 per day contracting.. Not exactly Unix, but a similar path.. I wonder if the recession here in London will do to the YATE's..
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
You are not to old. Don't let anyone tell you that! I worked with a guy who decided to become an admin at 43 and he's doing more than great working at a huge network.
As for degees, CS or other CS like degrees are good (sans MIS ofcourse), though proving your worth can take you much farther in some cases. I got my first admin job out of high school by talking over the other admins head, though I didn't mean to.
Sounds cliche but that's what I did. I'm only 25 and I'm making more than your average MCSE right now (considering that MANY mcses are unemployed right now).
Started in Help Desk at college.
Did miscellaneous consulting jobs for friends, etc...
Got a job as a Jr. Admin.
Got another job as a Sr. Admin.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Every Unix Admin interview I've seen involves LOTS of verbal troubleshooting. Things like What does nsswitch.conf do?. If a machine is seeing lots ethernet transmit errors, what might be wrong?. How should you NOT run sendmail spools over NFS? Skill is crucial, all else naught.
Getting the interview is a different story. Perhap certification would help there, but I doubt it.
I started at age 26 after majoring in Art and getting into the industry through web design. My advice; find a small shop (5-10 people) that supports a few Linux/UNIX systems, and doesn't mind you learning on the job. That's the best learning environment you'll ever have. Usenet and a million other web-based resources are out there if you run into a brick wall on a problem.
Good luck, and you're never too old!
Upon entering college I got assigned work study with the IT dept. I was working with the two UNIX admins doing lowly stuff like changing aliases and updating dns records. This helped a ton because i got a chance to work on stuff that was terribly important while feeling my way out on the systems (there IS a difference between solaris and linux). Two years later and two unix admins later I was the full time admin and started getting the pay to prove it.
So I guess my answer would be to try and get a junior admin job if you can even if you don't plan on working with the comapny forever the experience you get doing the lowly stuff will let you get familiar with the systems as well as learning from hopefully experienced people and learning from their mistakes as well as your own.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
You are not too old to become a tech person at 33. As a matter of fact, you are more likely to be taken seriously then someone who is 20.
Becoming a Jr Unix admin requires that you know the basics of Unix/Linux: creating user accounts, installations, problem determination, permissions, disk space, adding hardware, backup strategies, and simple shell scripting to name a few. Solid end user knowledge of a real *nix like Solaris, AIX, HPUX, or True64 is a huge plus.
Getting your foot in the door is often more important than what you know. You usually have to have someone on the inside who knows you before you have a chance of getting hired. Unix administration isn't a job that you can get by walking in off the street. Since you are a programmer, you do have a much better chance.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
I started out as a bookkeeper who showed some proficiencies with computers. The Acctg dept got a new Unix system and I was asked to administer it (and become the DBA/Analyst for the new database software). After struggling mightily in the beginning and bugging consultants and anybody else who would help me, I discovered Linux and found I could learn everything I needed by playing around with Linux on an old 486. Since then I have never looked back. My education background is History/German. How I got into accounting is a different story......
Whoring myself and kissing a lot of ass (state government).
Certifications? I just made the names up. "Received - Best fucking linux guy with the name Roy, 1997" "Awarded A- certification, fall 1999"
Many admins come from operations type enviroments. They are for instance happy to run a backup but not to check out memory problems with an application. If you're a coder who knows how to take backups, you have the base knowledge. Lie about your experience - you did admin all the school's systems, didn't you?
start by working @ the help desk a large company (this way to get know the internal support structure). Get to know the UNIX Support, and work your way over to the UNIX Admin group.
-nt-
--Hikari
"Long distance information/ Disconnect me if you can/ On Detonation Boulevard..."
For good practice you might want to get a PC and install FreeBSD or one of the Linuxes to familiarize yourself with the resources, shell programming, etc.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
While most Unix administrators fell into their positions. Eg. Right place right time. I think you need to look at getting some training. Forget the CS degree.
I had a friend who broke in at 32. He went off and got certified on Sun, and their E10K's. It helped him get his foot in the door. He was lucky though. Also concentrate on learning a scripting language or two like Perl. You need to have skills that will make you stand out from the rest of the crowd.
I became a Unix admin because it became such a pain to keep track of licenses! Not a worry with Unix
I first got my Solaris box at home in 9th grade and stared learning everything about it (since it wasn't windows, it actually had documentation on how everything worked). When I was in 11th grade, I got a job offer to be an intern admin at a software company.
I think the most important thing to becoming a Unix Admin is RTFMing and reading the RFCs. Learning as many programming/scripting languages as you can helps too
Certifications are useless! Unless its a Cisco or something... Education is worthless too! The one thing that has helped the most is experience. Get an entry level job and offer to help out on more complex things as much as possible.... Anyone with a BS and 100 certs will not be able to do the same job as someone thats got one year of practical experience.....
I don't have any applicable education, just high school. But I taught myself networking, I knew my OSes, and I lucked into a low level job at a regional airline. Three years later, I'm the IT manager. Not bad, considering my previous work history was 13 years of bartending!
Perhaps a lateral move inside your education organization from teaching to system administration would be a good idea. I know that in Illinois techies who are also certified teachers are in great demand. I know several classroom teachers who became school district "technical coordinators" at great benefit to their wallets and stress levels. I suspect that you all ready spend some of your time answering less technically savvy teachers' questions. You might as well get paid for it.
Micah
I did data entry. Then became the office "computer guy". Then was officially tech support. Then they bought a linux server.
I admin it because I had all this experience playing on unix in college and then on panix and on bway.net, but only as a user.
The only other unix was this old iMac that I put linuxppc on.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
I am sure that others will have more specific helpful advice, but the fundamental principle is simple. It's the same way you learn to program -- or play the piano, or dance the watusi -- passionate curiousity and reckless experimentation. Education and experience are both very valuable, but both of these are offshoots of a self-driven desire for knowledge.
So, install Linux on a partition (I imagine you probably have already). Network your apartment/house/dorm room. Set up a web server and host your friends' sites. Set up a firewall. Follow the security updates for the software you have installed. Put a free database on it and write some useless but entertaining CGI on it. Translate the code into Java, Perl, and PHP just for kicks. Get excited, and the rest will follow.
Basically I've loved computers and technology since I was old enough to crawl. Before I used a real computer, I was fascinated by any number of nasty beepy plastic gadgety things.
I worked out how to plug in my first computer (to the TV :-) and started programming on it from a reference manual (in basic, I admit, but I was 5 - I'm allowed).
Since then I've just been hooked. When I heard I could get a free OS I did so (SuSE at first off a cover disc) and since then I've been even *more* hooked.
As for getting a job, I have no formal education in computing yet (I'm 19), and I suppose I just knew the right people. It would be possible for me to get a job by 'sending in my CV', but they have been through word of mouth.
So, basically, develop a fondness for computers for computers sake, and it should be plain sailing. Despite the fact that you're a dinosaur :P
Learning at some schools is like drinking from a Firehose
During this time, I also helped a friend of mine (who was an English major at the time) learn to use the Unix workstations and the Internet. He parlayed this into a position within the help desk organization and then eventually into the administrator group also. So it's possible to do if you have one person who can give you the first break.
If you're not in a university environment, probably your best bet is to try to get involved in the Linux community somehow, get your name attached to some projects that you can use as partial credentials on your resume. Also, if you're not already running a network of at least a couple of Linux machines at home, you probably should. There are several skills you'll need to develop which can't be practiced on a single machine (NIS, NFS, DNS, sendmail or other mailer, etc). Good luck!
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
With graduation a few semesters away, I have been wondering the same thing. All job postings that I have found have been looking for numerous years of experience (no one wants to give root to a rookie!) What should a college student (CSE in my case) be doing to prepare himself/herself and be desirable for future interviews?
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Home experience means nothing in the eyes of an employer.
I can see three routes for you:
1) go to school for CS and then do 2 or 3 or find a school with a co-op program.
2) donate your time - Non-profit groups are always in need of help - implent a solution and support it. - Real, measurable experience.
3) the long way: get a job doing tech support at a small isp (make sure they use *nix in the back end. Work hard and do a good job putting up with the users and show huge intrest in the *nix stuff - and work your way into the admin position, thus building real experience before heading out.
Good luck.
$sig=$1 if($brain =~
Well, I started as a system programmer working for a UK university, if you are prepared to accept the lower pay in return for decent working conditions then it is a really good place to start.
The University encouraged me to learn and extend my abilities, while letting me be an effective sys-admin on a large number of unix workstations and several servers. Staight out of uni with a Computer Engineering degree but no "real world" experience of unix admin (other than playing with linux in the lab and at home).
If you have the basic unix skills and are prepared to learn then I would academia is the place to start. Once you have some proven time as a sys-admin you can then start moving into "industry" if you want to get paid more.
In my experience Universities generally find it difficult to fill sys-admin places because everyone wants to go for the big bucks, but you will find much more flexibility and a nicer working environment than most buisnesses.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
Its all about passion.
If you haven't done so already drop out of highschool. If your beyond that point - drop out of whatever your doing (or atleast lower it to part time). Be willing to work for cheap at a small company. Become an essential resource.
And never, even under harsh duress, take on LESS than you can possibly handle.
He blew RMS!
Yum
Don't ever go out in the sunlight, bathing is optional, answer all questions with a clear and concise grunt, and use one word e-mail replies (my personal favorite is "NO").
You'll know you're good when you are like a phantom and you're co-workers can't describe what you look like and are too afraid to try finding you.
I starting in the accounting dept, becasue thats where my previous skillset was. Our accounting server was always having some kind of problem, so I would FIX it.. Eventually the other sysadmins in the company began coming to me for help. Bingo I am a sysadmin.. no college, little experence, and a WHOLE bunch of optimisim.
My best advice is to "WORM" your way in through some of your other skills....
WrongWay@mafia.org
- Yea its the REAL mafia geez!
1) Install Linux.
:-P
2) Learn it inside-out.
3) Get a CS (Computer Science) degree.
4) Enroll in co-op, that might start you in the sysadm dept.
5) Look for odd-jobs that have a lot to do with networking. (afterall, every UNIX that's worth admin' is networked)
Hope that helps
I have a BS in electrical engineering, and was doing circuit design years ago when we started using Unix ('89 or '90). I had used it elsewhere and liked it so I learned as much as I could. One thing led to another, and I was spending more time admining and coding than anything else.
Then an opening appeared in the official admin group here, I applied, was accepted, the rest is history.
Jim Buchanan
My introduction to unix (which was at first linux) begun because I'd been flunking out of college while playing MUD and MUSHes, and it turned out one day that I wanted to try out my own. So I asked the game owner what I needed to do.. and he pointed me at Slackware's site.
From that point on my main machine was a linux box and I pretty much taught myself everything I knew from the ground up. Fast forward a year when I really am running my own MUSH, when a guy I played the game with gets hired at an ISP.
This was in 98 I think.. maybe 97, just when the internet was starting to speed up and the industry was really gearing itself up. This was the point where anyone who could operate a bash shell was getting hired, and I did.
That was the foot in the door I needed, and while it's definetly tougher now, I have enough of a resume that I can get a job at any number of differing places.
I guess the piece of advice to be taken from this is, find a friend working where you want to work. Have them put your name in. Long as you're not a drooling idiot, chances are good they'll take you in. God knows when I first got hired I wouldn't have been able to do it on my own merits, even considering how well I'd done self teaching.
..I find I have to set up/configure so many systems during my job I find I've picked up the skills on the way.
Anyway in my case I started out as an embedded systems developer after getting my BSc, and often had to administer the systems I was developing on. My great leap forward in admin skills came when Personal Computer World put RH4.1 on the front CD of their magazine and I installed it on one of my home PCs.
As far as being a System Administrator [formal title] is concerned, my impression is that it's a pretty thankless unappreciated task. The advice of others saying "Don't do it" should be regarded seriously! Only if you have an opportunity to become a BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) does the job have its perks.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I highly recommend trying to find a junior position at an .edu somewhere. Colleges tend to be a training ground for tech careers around here in NC. I got my first admin job at an .edu even though I was marginally qualified and gained VERY valuable experience. Another nice thing about colleges is that they tend to have a wide variety of machines/platforms.
Good luck!
Let me start with some info first:
I'm 18, in the Detroit Area.
I have a basic - moderate knowledge of linux
I'm currently attending a community college
How do I get from stocking shelves at a local
grocery store to making a decent living in a IT job? I mean, I have no real background that I can put on a resume... "played around with Red Hat Linux 7.2 until I could move around the files, and write textfiles"
Another question: I've been hearing a lot about the job market in IT going down... will there be a job open for me when I get there, or should I start looking for a back-up career?
http://wsulug.org
- skip the meeting where the new sysadmin is to be chosen,
- Show up to that meeting and pay attention,
- Adopt a grumpy demeanor, or
- Draw the short straw
Its fun, its easy, its BOFH.I had a very Unix-centric education at NCSU, which has helped me out a lot, but most of what I know comes from a decent fundamental understanding of operating systems and C/C++. If you want to be a unix admin, forget about certs, find a job as an NT admin where you can get some hands-on with Unix. Read A LOT - Think Unix, Unix power tools, Unix System Administration Handboot, and Essential System Administration, for starters. Perl will also help you understand a lot of the philosopy behind Unix. Hack around with Linux/BSD. Pay close attention to people that know Unix. Keep a command cheat-sheet. Ask questions, don't be afraid to be borderline annoying.
One day, a lot of the Unix philosopy will just "click" with you, out of the blue, it's strange that way. Don't think of it as a destination, like you would think of a Certification... It's a journey. It's a gearhead thing, either it's for you or it's not.
"C" is for cookie, that's good enough for me.
Well I personally hated Systems Administration, but I did work at Motorola as a SysAdmin. I was an intern, but a good bulk of their people who did not have CS degrees were certified in various things. So you can get yourself certified.
A bulk of our department was Contractors. So you can either start your own consulting business or join a contracting firm. That will get you in the door to a lot of corporations and a lot of experience. If you are well connected I'd suggest starting your own business.
http://davedash.com/
Want to be a sysadmin, say you'll do it for peanuts with on-call thrown in and even if you didn't know your 'any' key from the scroll lock, they'll hire you!
I've been both an admin and a developer ever since. I have worked with better programmers, and better admins. I find that I can bring a unique perspectives to both realms. I can bring an Admin's sense of process and procedure and documentation and paranoia to the development process, and I'm good at programming solutions, not just hacking scripts, for administration problems.
Unless you like wearing a pager 24/7, being a sysadmin might not be right for you.
I got into Unix system administration by pure luck. I was in the Air Force and told my future boss I was into computers hobby. He asked if I would like be the administrator for the shop's computer systems.
So, with 3 years of experience and lots of training, I left the Air Force in July to make big bucks in the IT industry. That unemployment check is really paying BIG Bucks.
I've just read a report in Computing (UK IT industry mag) that claims that one of our building societies (think bank) claims to be leading the way against IT ageism by taking on IT trainees in their 40's.
I realise it isn't administrator level stuff but it's a step in the right direction surely as once you are inside a company in an IT role, however minor, you in theory should only be limited by your skill and ability...
Oh yes, and I was rather close to first post too but I'd wager that has slipped through my fingers! Damn me for trying to verify my sources before posting.
Heck, I'm an English major, but I got my start by just getting access to a box at work and trying stuff. Admittedly, I worked at a service bureau (where I printed out stuff from Quark and Pagemaker to film imagesetters and color plotters), and thus got chummy with a sysadmin who gave me an account on our Suns, but the point holds: log in, do a ps and then look up each process with 'man' until you get bored. [That admin was an art history major, who pined for a career in art restoration. Go figure.]
I was stuck in non-admin jobs until I just got together a system and started using it. I tried NetBSD on an old Mac to get the feel for installating, and I tried some Linux distro on a dusty old PC. Eventually I found a support job where I had a server I could legitimately log in to, and I started reading stuff and trying it out.
The books "Unix System Administration Handbook" (be sure to get the 3rd edition) and "Essential System Administration" -- both fairly expensive, but like any good tools, well worth their cost in the long run -- make for good reading even before you start laying hands on a keyboard. (I know: nothing can substitute for real experience.) Mailing lists, like those hosted at sunhelp.org, also make good reading: you can learn a lot from other peoples' mistakes.
It may make you look like a wannabe, but try to get a bit of book-learnin' under your belt, if only to avoid wrecking the first system you get access to.
(Re-reading the above, I have to point out that I had a series of fairly grim support-type roles in places that happened to have Unix around until I found a place willing to hire me as an actual administrator. You have to be willing to start out in a very junior position -- i.e., tape monkey -- in order to get your foot in the door. A corollary is that many places care about your actualy ability and not what certification and training you have in your portfolio. And never mind those people telling you that you'd rather not do it: they're just jealous of your charming innocence and niavete.)
I started off playing around on Linux/BSD/Solaris shells.. from there I built my own machines and put linux and bsd on them.. I played around, broke stuff, learned how to fix it, upgraded, wrote scripts.. etc. I taught myself basically everything.. either by playing around till it worked or reading FAQ's or asking people for help. My friend was working for a local ISP at the time, and they needed someone to do (ugh) technical support, and he offered me the position. He left about 6 months later, and I took over his job of doing the sysadmin work. I moved on to another local ISP, where I did sysadmin work and also work on the network. I'm currently taking classes to get my CCNA. I don't know if i'll go the sysadmin route or the networking route.. but more and likely, if I stay around this area, I'll be doing both because they seem to think you're their bitch and have you do everything.
but I would say that your age may be a problem, given your lack of experience.
I would recommend trying for a place at a small (i.e. less than 20 people) startup tyep place, where it's easy to convince others of your worth and you can gain valuable experience - you may not get the position you want at first but do a bit of everything.
I think if you apply for a position at a major company you'll find yourself in a room with younger better qualified people!
Good luck!
I'm not a UNIX admin but both I sign their paychecks. What I would do is get the techincal expertise that is required developed (setting up a network in your house may help here). I would then look for a business (organization)that I understand that needs Sys Admins. Look for a way in and don't stop learning. One of the things that the folks in /. and the IT field in general lack is a good understanding of how businesses and organizations work. I think that you will have a leg up on a lot of the "young" talent since you have been around the block. What I am trying to say is that at 33 you are still very young and can change just about anything in your life as long as you're willing to pay the price (night school etc.) Good Luck
when I started a C programming class at San Diego State University. I was introduced to Unix at that time, and fell in love with it's power and simplicity.
I was content to be a user, but when I started working in the computer industry in 1995, I was introduced to Linux by a co-worker and fellow Unix lover (Thanks Martin!). I got bitten by the sysadmin bug then. We had a part-time consultant sysadmin then, and I emailed him with problems I was having with my Linux box, and he helped out immensely. Even when I brought down the email system with a badly configured sendmail.cf, he was patient and walked me through it.
As I started taking over day-to-day administration of the Solaris and SunOS servers at work, I found it invaluable to use the knowledge of the Unix propeller-heads at work. All were engineers, but they knew enough about Unix to give me a hand when needed. I also made friends with some old-time Unix-heads that proved to be a wonderful resource.
Don't underestimate the power of a mentor. Find someone with a long beard to talk with regularly. Also, read, read, read. Surf the net. Install software "just because". You will screw up, and have to recover. Nothing compares to removing "libc.so",
I now have 6 years of sysadmin experience under my belt. Even when sysadminning wasn't my official job title, I still found a way to do some. I've got the sysadmin bug, and bad. I love the challenge of it. I love knowing that every time I upgrade some software, or tune a system, that the people who make the product that pays my salary are able to do their work that much more easily and quickly.
As far as certification, it might look good on a resume for a PHB, but in real life don't mean much. Like an MCSE. You know the books, but real life can be much different. In short, if you have the time and $$$ to burn, go ahead. But your time can be equally well spent hacking on a system.
Do it, do it, do it. I love this job.
Jeremy
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
I started out in college changing tapes and watching printers in operations, when a UNIX Admin position opened up. It just so happened that the UNIX group worked in the room next to operations, so I knew some of the Admins.
/. is taking forever to mail me my password..)
I applied for the position knowing only "ftp" "ls" and "pine", but somehow they thought I'd make a good admin. After 2.5 years of Solaris experience, I'd learned much more than the 4 years of my CS degree.
And to those who have said "You don't know what you're saying.. all sysadmins hate their jobs!".. for someone like myself who enjoys a wide range of computer activities (a "jack of all trades"), rather than just coding all day or rebooting machines endlessly, being a sys admin can provide a nice balance.
-Claar (Hi, CNS!)
(AC since
In my case, I spent 7 years as a software developer. However in each job I usually wound up in some sort of highly technical position and was generally relied upon to do any sysadmin-style work for my group including setting up any esoteric hardware.
My last company before becoming a sysadmin was quite small and I wound up creating the entire network infrastructure based on recycling an old development machine as a debian GNU/Linux squid proxy with transparent proxying and junk-busting, firewall, dhcp server, dns server, etc. machine. I also had to learn some cisco IOS in order to do the job. It initially saved the company thousands of pounds and the same again in yearly license fees.
That was the last nail in the coffin for my software development career. I got very lucky around that time because a friend was looking for a Linux/NT sysadmin and he had a very easy time headhunting me. I was 31 when I officially changed career.
1) Repeat 10 times a day: "this change should not affect end users.
2) Type 20 times a day: "rm -fR ~user"
3) 10 reps: "what did *you* do to screw this up?"
4) Stop showering. Now.
5) Smash your pager, claim it was "killed in the line of duty".
6) Pick any given operating system, and develop an intense hatred for it. You will work with this os for the rest of your life.
7) rinse, repeat.
I walked into the CS department at school and went up to the admin and told him "I heard you have a student job opening - how can I apply?" When he asked what qualified me for the job is said "I've been doing tech support for 3 years, and I know how to use man" ... I got my first unix admin job.
When I look to hire people now the first thing I look for is for them to be able to learn, no admin knows everything, but the good ones know how and where to look it up.
Unix sysadmins are trained, not taught. It's like trying to become a carpenter, a fireman, or an actor. You can't wake up one day and be a Unix admin, you have to start with the basics and gain experience by trying new things. There are 1001 people out there who mistake a read through of "Unix for Dummies" as a genuine understanding of the operating system.
That said, there is nothing that says that with enough time, talent, and patience you can't be a unix admin. I started off hacking my own linux boxes out of spare parts. I helped out a few friends at their jobs with odd projects, and the experience I gained helped me land a few part time gigs until I could get my foot in the door of a real job with bennies, being a sysadmin. Its been 3 years, and man did I pay my dues.
A few other tips, learn TCL. If you find yourself doing the same sequence of commands over and over, just write a script to do it. Over time that has saved me man-years of work.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
A friend sat down with me and helped me install slackware from a bunch of 5.25" floppyes
The most used commands during my first year were "man" and "vi", and still today it's those I most frequently use.
My advice to those who realy want to become Unix/Network/Security admins: read, read a lot, and study how the system realy works, so when things go wrong, you know where and what the problem is.
Oh, and *never*, *ever* reboot a system just to se if the problem goeas away... Instead use the opportunity to learn some new stuff.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
That's it. I was in a boring-as-hell lower-level CS class, and usually skipped it. One day, I went, though I sat in the back and read some novel or something. Late in the class, a couple guys from the university Consulting Lab (UMCP's faculty/staff computer help desk) got up to recruit. I joined the team a few weeks later, and got hurled into the marvelous world of admin when our VAXstation 2000 (X-windows, 40MB hard drive) crapped out and I had to rebuild it from a 10mb tar file on a remote server (an early NeXT cube, no less :) )
:)
The rest, as they say, is history.
How would you get into it now? Don't really know. Certainly, it'd help to "play" with the stuff at home, but unless you've got 4-10 machines at home, networked, in regular use, you simply won't have the need to do a good job administering the server (and won't hit upon any of the major challenges).
Is 33 too old to start a tech career? From the standpoint of unconcious hiring discrimination, maybe you'll have a problem there. Plus, there's always the "why are you swtiching careers?" question. From the standpoint of being too old to learn -- bullshit. If you're smart, and can learn new tricks, you'll have a fighting chance.
Best advice -- learn to type fast, and find all the online documentation centers (man pages, web, etc.). If you type and can research the problem fast enough, nobody will ever know you don't know the answer ('cause you'll have just gotten the answer). After that, learn perl. Any time you find yourself doing the same thing more than once, spend the 20 minutes (or three hours) to write a script to do it instead. Then the next time it'll take 30 seconds to do, and you'll look smart.
Where do you teach english? If it's at a high school, you might be able to help part-time with in-house stuff, though I wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of that got given to students. If you're at a college, try the same tack with the help desk or whatever there... Then, maybe, look for jobs with contractors doing help desk in a UNIX or UNIX-Server shop (if you live in the Washington, DC area, there are LOTS of these jobs). You won't be doing admin, per se, but you'll be seeing the "lighter" side of it, especially the customer-side of things, and if you show enough aptitude and interest, you should be able to ease into a SysAdmin side. Another bonus for gov't contractor stuff -- they're used to "second careers" as military enlisted types retire and start working as geeks.
Good luck!
Well... I started out with UNIX in college back when Microsoft was trying to convince people that UNIX was a legacy system because the MAC and PC labs were always full, and the labs full of suns were empty other than CS students. Then I graduated and went a did a bunch of mostly non-computer stuff. WHen I tired of that, I put myself through intense Linux training by myself because all of the really good jobs were looking for experience on platforms that people just don't have sitting around at home or can't purchase at Fry's. Back in the days of Solaris 2.4, there was no good intel Solaris. So, the only way that you could get Solaris sysadmin experience was working at a big shop (or being a CS Grad student sysadmin/slave) I forced myself to eat, breathe, and sleep linux. I started to think about things from the unix perspective. I started collecting all of the perl scripts I could find and reverse-engineering others' code. After a number of months, I was pretty darned good with unix and unix admin, since I'd installed a bunch of distros, configured them, broken them, fixed them, tweaked them, etc. (and this was back in the day when installing linux distros was *not* something to be undertaken lightly) With this linux experience, I was able to find jobs working with larger hardware that I'd been exposed to but hadn't admin'ed rather easily. ANyway, that was in the days before everyone and their dog in college switched to CS major and when unix sysadmins were next to impossible to find. Things are a bit different now, but the same methodology applies to learning unix admin. THe real trick is to find a mentor. No amount of self-exploration of a linux box can compare to having a mentor at a large site that can demonstrate how to manage thousands of unix boxes.
i worked as a tech/sysop (some college, no degree), and studied on my own time. i made myself available to the admins for projects, scripting and every sh*tty little job that came up. so, when they moved on to greener pastures, they recommended me. still going to school, but getting a check and more experience.
I started in high school. There were two distinct networks running, the DECnet one and a student-run network of Sun4 systems that the professionals didn't understand enough to run on their own. Schools are typically in need of fairly technical people and are most willing to give people without any experience a chance. The pay crap, but it puts that work experence on your resume. A company took one look at my experience and hired me up. I happen to be a CS person, but academics seemed to matter less than experience, though I keep both strong. If you are willing to do Unix admin, and have the work experience and references to back you up, in my experience you can get those jobs. Make sure you get your hands on as a diverse set of Unix variants as you can. Companies love to see a long list of Unix variants in professionaly work history. And old hardware as well as new. Old hardware both gives the impression of a longer history, and lets them know you have delt with systems that aren't as mature as todays.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The field has way to many martyrs, (those who feel it's their duty to put in 60 hours a week only to get screwed by managment when it comes time to reciprocate in some way), and those who don't have a degree and are stuck.
Neither group is paticularly fun to work with.
If you want to admin a box set up a webserver and play with that.
Try to become a programmer and fail.
I've always been interested in computers (as have most of the /. readership). I had to leave school for financial reasons, and needed to find a job and FAST. All the UNIX I knew I'd picked up on the job (I worked as a web developer for a time) as well as in my introductory EECS courses. I knew basic commands and plenty of programming (Perl), so I took the 'Linux plunge' in my own time to teach myself some things. Many hard knocks, late nights, huge fuck-ups, and O'Reilly books later, I am a full-time UNIX Systems Administrator, with crazy-mad Linux (Debian, baby!), Solaris (v.2.5 and up), IBM AIX (I don't want to talk about it), and HP-UX )God save us) skills. My web development background dovetailed nicely with my knowledge of Apache and Netscape (yes, they still make 'em) web servers.
That's kind of the abbreviated version. My resume page outlines the journey a lot better.
Luck!
El riesgo vive siempre!
For me, it's sort of a bred-in response. I grew up around computers (learned BASIC at 6, C at 13, C++ at 15, and a whole slew of others later.) I studied math in college. But I adminned a couple research labs as a student job. My initial exposure came through Linux, like most people these days. It was cheap, available and it ran on my PC.
After that, I dropped out of grad school, and found a job. My years of experience doing it for research labs gave me a great foothold, and I was able to prove I knew my stuff.
Technical degrees and experience help - but if you need to break in, look to education and small shops.
For a drastic career change, you need to network amongst friends and friends of friends. My degree was in anthropology and I was mowing lawns for a living when I got my chance for a career change. A friend of a friend needed autocad work done and I had happened to know some autocad just out of playing around with computers. It was just temporary work, but I parleyed it into better and better positions going the contracter route for a couple of years.
I dunno why everyone is saying 'get a CS degree' - I've done CS, and I wouldn't know where to start administrating a Unix server - its given me the basics to start a good career in software engineering, but if you ask me, you'd be better off doing 'targetted' qualifications, if you're really sure what you want to do...
1995: After various post-collegt Mcjobs, got a temp job paying GBP5 per hour converting Lotus 123 files into Excel, on Windows 3.1. These 123 files had macros, so I taught myself VBA from the manual and help files. In 96 we got web access - which made an enormous difference as I could search for software, help from othe users, etc. Got into Perl about this time (10 line sof Perl == five pages of VBA, and it's soooo much more elegant and powerful...)
1997-8: Brief spell at Logica, then joined Bain as the sole developer in teh London office. I twisted the specs and fought to do as much web-realted stuff as possible, which I could sneakily do in Perl on Apache rather than IIS/ASP, and no-one was any the wiser :) Also got into net admin stuff, learnt as much as poss about TCP/IP, DNS, routing...
About this time, installed Debian GNU/Linux on my shiny new PC. practice, practice. Save up for many O'Reilly books: read them, practice, test, experiment.
2000: On the basis of the Bain web dev and home experience, worked for a couple of dotcom startups: by the time the last one went bust in August I'd got tons of 10-hours-a-day Linux experience (get the hours in!), networking (DMZ design), lots of security experience hardening production servers, w/stations, IDS, pentesting etc. Still supposed to be spending 50% of my time developing websites...
Which brings us up to the present: I've got tons of experience and knowledge, but no MCSE / CCNA (UK employers don't seem to pay for formal training in my experience...) I really really really want a job in network security, or system/network admin, or even good old Perl web development... but the job market here (London, UK) is dead, I'm on the dole, and with my savings going fast I soon won't even be able to afford Net access.
In summary: practice, practice, practice; keep a career goal in mind when changing jobs - how will this position help me get where I want to be? Look out for any chance to get experience in your chosen field. Practice at home if you can. System admin involves knowing about a lot of different areas: networking in particular is a huge field. Look out for tasty free information on the web: there's an absolute ton of indispensible stuff out there. Don't /ONLY/ read O'Reilly's: I reckon about a 5:1 ratio of ORAs to 'other' publishers' books...
Good luck!
I graduated from college with only a minor in CS, but I had lots of personal experience in Linux. I found a Sun shop that needed help, and they wanted someone who knew at least a little something, but was willing to work their way up. I got in, and now I am one of the three admins..
Long story short, find a place that will let you in as a junior and let them know you want to learn. Any and all experience that you have is worthwhile.
After I was hurt in a parachute accident in the US. Army, I moved to Tampa and started with a contractor answering phones at a support center for a large retail chain.
After a few months of training on my own, listening to processes the analysts were going thru etc. I was promoted to Tech Support Analyst Level 1. I read man pages, looked thru the available documentation on the systems etc. And kept learning. I then progressed to a Level 2 Analyst, and after a few months I was hired onto the company that I was contracted out to.. IBM!
After a few months as a Level 2 Analyst, I applied for a position in Technical Services. Here again I studied the OS we were using, SCO Open Server 5.04. Studied Korn shell programming, Learned PERL, Learned Perl OO methodology, learned hardware specific stuff like SCSI, IO, IRQ's etc.
During all of this time my passion was Linux, so I was also studying it as well. In March 2001 I received my RedHat RHCE, and applied for a position as a Software Engineer providing Linux Solutions for Xseries IBM servers.
By the way, I am a High School Drop-out.
Just goes to show you what hard work can do.
The amount of time I spent working with that project, and later on the network team at my uni meant I actually ended up failing my degree, but I'd got so much experience that I landed a job as a Senior Techy at another college. Stayed there 6 months before joining SuSE's UK office. When I'd been there about four or five months I was made the Network Manager (read Sys Admin). Stayed in that role for nearly a year before moving on to my current job (title: UNIX System Administrator) with a major insurance company.
There were two key aspects to my becoming an SA:
Hope that helps some.
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Hiya,
/var/spool filled up or the SCO refused to talk to the HP 9000. When Marlon left it was decided that Jay had been most seen in the vicinity of Marlon so he started getting the calls, got his name in HP's and UUNET's support databases, etc. When Jay left, well, I had been Jay's roommate for a year... The rest is history.
True Story: At my small accounting software company Marlon hated hardware the least so he ended up being the one that called when the
For management style think 'Lord of the Flies', not Harvard MBA.
-Greg
FYI: Admin jobs are grunt work. They're generally boring, and you're generally tethered to a pager. They're the grunt jobs of the IT world. I was an admin for a little while before I realized that the good jobs are in development. We have long deadlines (ie: no pagers), we're paid signifcantly more, and we're at the top of the food chain in most any organization. So, if you want to get into tech, start with being an admin, but don't stay there. Admin jobs are good for fresh-faced kids right out of college, but you'll get sick of being a button-pusher very quickly.
I hate to be the guy who shoves a hot poker in the eye of this... but we really don't need more sysadmins.
What the tech industry needs is better coders and more robust administration programs where simple tasks, even server cloning can all be automated. Setting up a website or email or dns for a customer should be painless, fast and simple.
The ultimate goal of every sysadmin and programmer should be to render themselves obsolete.
Hammer of Truth
I got to be System Admin. because I was the one closest to the machine. They sat the machine in my cube, handed me the manual, and said I get to baby sit. Good thing I turned out to be good at it.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Grow a beard.
Grow your hair into a long pony tail.
Avoid the sun at all costs.
Bash windows.
Develop a god complex.
Ding you have just leveled up to Unix Admin.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
1990-1993 Ran a BBS while in high school
:)
:)
1993-1995 Went to college at Vanderbilt University. Admined Mac machines and did videotaping for the graduate business school.
1995 Worked at a (then) small ISP back home in Texas doing tech support and modem maintainence. Installed linux on my desktop.
1996 Went back to Vanderbilt; got a job on campus as a systems administrator with the student-run computer center.
1996 Quit Vanderbilt, moved to New Mexico to attend UNM. Got a job on campus admining SGIs for the physics department.
1997 Left the Physics department for the Computer Science department, which had more UNIX boxen.
1998 Dropped out of UNM to go to the Bay Area and work for @Home as a sysadmin.
1999 Fired from @Home. Moved to Utah and got a job with iMALL as a sysadmin. iMALL bought by @Home (they're following me!!! AGGH!!!).
2000 Quit iMALL to start Blue Aspen Software.
2000 Blue Aspen fails, moved to LA to work for Ticketmaster CitySearch.
2001 Quit TMCS to work for my fathers company for a few months, to help him out.
2001 Moved to Boston to work for small startup, Compete.com.
2001 Bailed from Compete.com to move to Virginia and work for one of the largest companies on the Net, who shall remain unnaimed.
There you have it.
No, you're not too old. You need to find someone (an employer) who doesn't care what age you are. I started my third career at 44 (in the software industry) after doing research for 10 years, and then teaching 11 years. It can be done. The hardest parts will be
1) overcoming the "English teacher" label,
2) and the current economy (it sucks).
One last piece of advice. Find a venue where you can show your skills in public. You teach in a school that has a network? Volunteer your time to be the admin of that network. That will look better on a resume than your "hobby".
I started a CS degree at age 33. Now, several years after finishing I code on an RMS system product for a small company. A good basis for tech work is the ability to think semi-coherently and concentrate for a long period of time. A degree in Philosophy seems like pretty good training.
As for Admin stuff, we mostly use MS products, but I sneak linux in whenever possible. And it's usually possible because I can get it running quickly and on the cheap. Linux runs the file servers via Samba and the firewall.
I did it the wrong way.
Me: "I can build the corporate web site. We've got some older PC's laying around here. I have Slackware 1.2, it has a web server. That should do it"
Boss: "I want it to run on NT."
Me: "Why? There are problems all over the place with Windows in general crashing just by receiving a bad packet. Nobody will know the difference."
Boss: "I will know, I want to run NT."
Me: "No. I don't want to spend all my time rebooting the thing, and people won't be able to SEE our website when that happens."
Boss: "It WILL run on NT."
Me: "Fine. Just get me the ad slicks and I'll make them into web pages."
A week later....
Me: "We site is all done. Goto www.xxx.xxx to see it."
Boss: "Great! And it runs on NT right?"
Me: "Nope."
Boss: "GODDAMMIT RICK!"
At that's how it all started....
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Too old? Nonsense. I've worked with several people in advanced middle age who chucked their old careers for IT. In each case, what ever they lacked in technical knowledge they made up with people and business smarts.
How did I get here? I was enlisted in the Marine Corps as a rifleman and decided that I wasn't quite done being a Marine, but I sure didn't want to be a bullet stopper no more.
I reenlisted on the condition that I become a computer programmer. After taking the quickie 3 month COBOL course (the last taught in the USMC!) they found they didn't NEED COBOL programmers and made me a small computer specialist. Which is (or was then) a catch all position dealing with lan, PCs, sysadmin, datacom. I just kept doing that when I EASed.
Display some adaptability.
Wait until the economy gets better.
:)
There are too many UNIX Admins out of work, of which, I am one. Let us get back to work first.
In times of crisis, UNIX Admins only think of themselves.
An entry level helpdesk job is the place to start. Certifications are nice, but don't get one to get one. Learn the material. Good UNIX people can spot the textbook Certs a mile away. Most of the time you wont find a person with UNIX certs and an MCSE.
They are usually HPC (High Paid Consultants) or a textbook weenie.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
I moved up the ladder. Out of University with a Pschology degree, I got a job with a local ISP in Ottawa. Being with a small company just as the Web became a "Big Thing" sure makes you learn fast. When you do a bit of everything to the company (accounting Perl scripts, sysadmin, web authoring) you tend to run to keep up. You learn even faster when the hard-drive on your main server dies in the middle of the night...
After the company disappeared, I moved my O'Reilly books cross-town to a government department, and worked with a few more people doing web admin with a bit of system admin thrown in. After two years there, I graduated to the local Unix Support group. Today I help support 150+ Unices, with a few NT boxes thrown in for flavor. A work with a talented group of people, whom I try to learn as much as I can from.
How did I do it? I did a bunch of self learning. It may be a cliche, but cracking open an O'Reilly book, and walking your way through a problem really worked for me. Plus, in the beginning I had the good fortune to have a Senior Admin with alot of patience for all my questions.
The first language I learned was Perl. I have found it to be an invaluable tool for me. I have since found PHP a help with Web apps, and MySQL for db work. However, your Milage may vary. Select your tool with the job in mind.
In general, find what you enjoy to do, and the appropriate job will find you.
The hiring manager told me flat out that there were at least a few other candidates that were much more experienced in Unix than I. He told me he was going to recommend me anyway, though, because he liked my enthusiasm and really felt that he would enjoy working with me.
Before graduation, I had been the sysadmin of my own home Linux box for a few years, and had even spent a year as president of the Miami Unix Collective, a student organization of Unix geeks. But I had no enterprise-level sysadmin experience, period, and certainly no certifications from Big Blue or anything like that.
The thing is, I had a passion for learning. All the Unix I knew, I had crammed into my head in between studying Plato, formal logic, mathematical physics, and organic chemistry. I think the manager was impressed with that, and I know he was impressed with how much I picked up after I started here.
I've been a Unix sysadmin here for five years, and pretty much everybody knows to come to me if they're stumped with something Unix-y. And pretty much everybody comes out of my cube with at least a good direction, if not the answer to their problem.
I script and automate routine stuff that doesn't really need my attention, and I augment systems with GNU and other tools more useful than the ones that come with the systems, so that I can work more efficiently. Folks frequently have to ask me to slow down if they want to be able to repeat what I'm showing them. I think it's because I've really come to think in pipes and regular expressions and such.
That's really the most helpful thing of all-- being able to think Unix.
Forget worrying about the degree. Just show them your stuff, and they'll hire you. If a particular employer won't hire you based on your capabilities, but is insisting on some silly technical degree, then you probably don't want to get stuck with them, anyway.
Best of luck.
clayton hynfield
OK, Youre reading slashdot. So you probably know linux a little bit. I began my professinal career as an operator for an IBM mainframe under VM/VSE a couple of years ago.
:-) an the whole story is not even five years ago.
:-)
When there was a discussion about how to set up an intranet, i simply installed linux on an old box and showed my boss the results.
With just an average knowledg of linux, no other knowledge of unix and a strong will to learn everything i became member of the unix-team some weeks later.
and this is the point:
show youre willing to learn. show youre able to learn quickly.
btw: im turning 34 next tuesday (presents welcome
so please dont moderate me to high, or my colleagues will read this story.
Could be worse. Could be raining.
The rest was natural.
I asked my closed-source vendor about ubiqitous computing.
He answered "Oh no! You-not-be-quit-us!"
I accidently because the webmaster for the university I am attending at the ripe old age of 33, with degrees in physics and astronomy, no real computer science training, and no formal graphics training. I do have 7+ years of experience with web sites, 10 years of Unix experience, have a good eye, and no how to say 'No'.
The Physics Dept. shoulda given me that raise.... I'm making more that twice what I was as a grad student...
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
Now HERE's someone from whom to avoid taking too much advice. Brainbench certification? "Referees"? What a putz. I wouldn't hire this "junior admin" if my life depended on it.
And calling the poster a dinosaur, that's certain to ingratiate this clown with people who make a difference. What a jackass.
Every admin I've talked to fell into the postion, just like myself. I just happened to be the person at my first admin job (wasn't an admin initially) who knew the most about computers. Had nothing to do with my degree (it was in Physics, never received since I spent too much time being an admin).
However, stay with devlopment...it pays better and you actually get to have a life outside the office.
You should consider becoming a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE). Once you know Windows well, Unix is basically an outdated version.
I started by working in an internet cafe (Speakeasy RIP), and doing simple tech support. It was the beginning of the internet boom. Almost all the people I know either started in tech support or went to school. Certifications are crap if you don't already know how to do it.
:).
Don't do it. Go to college. The days of skilled admins are numbered. The idea of a general purpose OS that needs lots of special knowledge to configure for a specific job is nearing it's end as the dominant paradigm. Admins are expensive and it's hard to find ones that are competent and not lazy
Thanks to the Apgars for the opportunity they provided. I wouln't be where I am today without the Speakeasy.
Greetings,
I may be younger than you, but here's how I did it...
I got my first degree BSc (Bachelor of Science for non Brits) in Applied Physics. I spent three years unemployed doing a lot of computer based voluntary work.
I went back to college, got my MSc (Master of Science) in Software Technology and went to work as a software engineer for the R&D side of a small company. The other part of the company was an ISP. We needed to get some new servers running so myself and one of the other Software engineers were allowed to install SunOs on them. We secured them as best we could, and from there I slowly moved into administration. Before long I was transferred to the ISP side of the company as the web servers moved over (don't ask why R&D ran the web servers). Then I was trained in Cisco Routers, got more involved in network administartion, and ended up moving to the US...
Now I'm in my second job over here both of them have been pure systems administration.
How can you get into Systems Administration? Well, my advice would be to get experience with other flavours of Unix. At least try Solaris X86 (a free download from Sun) and one of the BSD variants. Linux only isn't going to be so useful if they are looking for a Unix SA. HP-UX and AIX experience could also be useful, but harder to get unless you want to buy a workstation from e-bay.
Read at the very least one of Essential System Administration or The Unix Systems Administration Handbook.
Network... Join Usenix and SAGE. Go to local meetings. Advertise on the SAGE website that you are looking for junior positions. Talk to local technical recruiters. Keep an eye on local job postings.
Apply for non-junior positions, try and talk to the hiring manager first, but it's possible that they may not get what they're looking for, and be willing to accept a good junior candidate instead.
Don't worry about your lack of experience, you have most of what you need. As a teacher you should have good communication skills. You should be able to manage your time. You should be used to putting in long hours when needed. You should have problem solving skills. The knowledge of particular versions of Unix is secondary. I'm working on AIX now, it's radically different from other versions I've dealt with. It's still Unix, the other skills are more important.
I wouldn't try and get a help desk job and move over... I've never seen that done successfully.
I hope that this helps.
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
Nobody in their right mind would become a unix admin by choice. This is something that you get forced into at which point you get experience and then become valuable as a unix admin because it's the only thing you're really good at.
I majored in Industrial Engineering (hated it). I worked menial jobs (fast food, retail, data entry) to pay my way through school. Meanwhile, I played with Coherent (anyone remember that? It was a U**X workalike, similar to Xenix, for 80286 PCs), and eventually bought a NeXTstation because it was just the coolest thing I'd ever seen! That's how I learned PC hardware and U**X.
After I graduated I knew I didn't want a job in IE -- I eventually found a job maintaining a network of PCs running Interactive Unix (later we migrated over to UnixWare, then Solaris and Windows NT because that was the direction our industry went).
It's a job in which you're generally unappreciated and overlooked. But a challenge every day.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Here's my advice:
Enroll in a few courses at your local community college with a cs/cis program.
Weasle your way in to a technician position (beware, you may have to start as a lab aide!)
If you're lucky, you can move up from a "student" position to a "real" position, and get tuition reimbursement.
Get your BS while working there, and at the end of the process you've got several years experience, a degree, and minimal college expenses.
I tried this technique, but couldn't get a "real" position because faculty didn't want "some kid" running their networks. Being 33 would help you out in this case.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I figure computers ain't actually all that hard. Unix administration takes about the same brainpower as auto maintaince, just a somewhat differient set of talents.
I would suggest the following.
1. Get a 486 something and setup a NAT router/server for your home network.
2. Add pop3,imap,apache and any other interesting daemons, basically make your own little ISP on that 486.
3. Bullshit your way into your first job, when you don't know something, read the FAQs..
Half the time I swear, being a computer expert is just a zen and knowing how to use google really well..
Getting involved with an IRC group is another way. Learning sysadmin skills well stealing software is a highly popular method.
because it became such a pain to keep track of licenses!
I suppose you were a NT/win95 admin before, and are now a linux admin.
The licensing for a lot of packages under unix (i.e. a real, certified compiler under sun, not gcc) is terrible.
Did you ever try to figure out how much it cost for a oracle deployment in a multi tier environment with ~ 100 users?
That is one reason free software is used, you don't have to report it to the beancounter.
Isn't it odd how Liberal Arts majors seem to become Unix admins.
Adam
Bachelors of Music
Unix System Admin
Well, I kind of fell into it(as I've done with most stuff in life)...
I happened to get a job as an assistant to the sysadmin for the CS department, and about 4 months later, he left. I learned a lot from him in the time I worked with him, and then pretty much took over the sysadmin stuff.
Now, onto the other part of being a sysadmin--I'm sure someone else will have posted this already, but hey:
see alt.sysadmin.recover faq Of particular interest:
2.1) I want to be a sysadmin. What should I do?
Seek professional help.
also good are:
2.2) So, I've just "volunteered" to be a sysadmin. What do I do?
See 5.3 (Actually 5.4 --they're error, not mine:)
5.4) Should I slit my wrists across or downwards?
Downward. For more information on interesting methods, see the alt.suicide.holiday faq.
Gotta love the good-old asr faq.... and pull out some copies of BOFH, as well.
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
I've been a hopeless computer geek since I was 11 or so. Dropped out at 16 to get a full time job. 18 now, making 70k/yr. Could be worse :-D
I was asked to take care of an old HP-UX since I was the best on windows 3.1 at the time. Now I am administrating 25 Solaris and Linuxservers. So to be in the right place at the right time is a good way. I have learned everything along the way.
I'm actually a full time programmer, but I administrate a Linux box here too. There's no one else in my office who knows enough about Unix to administrate it. We need it for development since our web server farm is Solaris based and is administrated by an overworked IT staff about a 1000 miles from here.
If you seriously want to build up some experience as a sysadmin, I'd recommend college. It's not the classroom experience but the environment that's the advantage. The deadlines are much more reasonable than the real world and there's a lot more opportunity to get exposure to non-MS systems. I think I learned more from my peers than my instructors, although the CS theory has been coming in handy more and more recently.
-Jennifer
Good to see another English major in this line of work.
I first started at this company as "Microcomputer Support," that is, Windows and some Mac OS. This shop has been all Windows and VMS since time immemorial, but one of their critical apps was switching from VMS to Unix so they had to do it too. I happened to hear at some event that they were going to have to start working with Unix, and since I had already logged a few years with Linux and BSD, I started to push through channels and ask if I could be involved - that's all I asked. Next thing I know, the Director of Technologies is calling me, asking for an interview, and in a few months, after taking a battery of tests and as soon as they were able to replace me, I moved to my new office as sysadmin. This must have been divine intervention; everything else here goes through lots of channels and gets tested with umpteen Gartner and PWC statements, blah blah blah, but for some reason (I'm sure it was a clerical error) they awarded me the job. Of course, they are paying me about half what an outside consultant would charge, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Having said that, you might be surprised at how boring and thankless this job can be sometimes. I know a lot of people who really have programmer tendencies, who get stuck with sysadminning and burn out on the whole industry.
In my present office, we have trained folks from all sorts of backgrounds (notably an English major and an astrophysicist) into quality admins; We have found it takes three things to become an admin:
- the ability to learn
- the willingness to learn
- convincing an admin shop to give you the chance
Not to say there aren't other factors, but these are the biggies.I spent a while learning linux, pulling hair out, and eventually was running it on the desktop and on my a server on my cable modem. Very unprofessional, of course.
:D
I then, by the grace of God, got a nice job as tech support for a privately owned phone company (!) with an internet division. Yep, just me, the sysadmin, and an AS/400 programmer back here in the room.
Well, the sysadmin quit.
That's how I got my job
In truth, they decided to extend the position upon finding a rehire, and those extensions are beyond my current capabilities, so my gig is only temporary, but it's still nice.
(I DO know my stuff, mind you, but I'm horribly under-experienced. Doesn't mean it won't look good on a resume.)
...but speaking from my own experience, yeah, I'd say that a junior admin position is the way to go, as long as you're also practicing with your own projects on the side. You'll have an opportunity to learn from those with greater experience than yourself, and even if your *job* didn't qualify you for the next position you apply for, it can still help you get hired if you have the skills from elsewhere.
Mac
UBERGEEK the Comic. Umlauts be danged.
http://ubergeekthecomic.com
It's neato!
4 year undergrad degree in internation relations/economics, three years of law school.
Oh yeah, I also taught myself z80 and 8088 assembler in high school, and had this summer job debugging other people's cobol, and hooked up a bunch of satellite networks....
A bullsh*tter in Counter Strike?
Seriously, tho, I recommend finding a spare box and literally installing whatever distro you can get your hands on.
Try Linux, BSD, and whatever else you can pick up off a ftp site or cdrom or "gimmes".
Heck I came late to the party unix wise, because I d/l'ed slackware and waited a year or so before installing even tho I had the boot disks and such working. I simply did not want to mess up a working machine...just because you can, does not mean you should (especially when starting out).
When I got a second box, the old one was running slack a few hours later.
Personally I think installing *nix's is harder than running, but way easier than securing.
And if you run into trouble you'll need 2 things:
1) access to a guru and documentation
2) Win98se. Because windows is still the best hardware detection utility that a unix user could ever hope for.
GISboy.
Unix: Because pain works...Make it WORK for YOU!
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
I know certification can be a joke but take a certification course and get it. That way you can show potential employers that have the know how just not applied expeirence. So maybe they would consider you for a junior position.
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
Yep, it's true, there were 2 of them, They got job offers from dot-coms and left the same week.
I was the only person left who knew the root password.
It's been over a year now, and I still haven't decided whether this has been 'a good thing(tm)' or not.
I am educated in Chemical Engineering. I worked for an engineering company out of college and I decided that I liked playing with the computers more than the engineering aspect of my job. So I changed jobs and I got an entry level position doing unix admin for a siesmic data processing company. That was about 7 years ago now.
:)
:)
I believe that with you showing the initative in installing Linux/*BSD will go a long was in getting an entry level position. I know it did for me. Of course, that was in the days of the 1.0 kernel and redhat 3.X
With regards to the job ads looking for people with experience, they are probably from recruiting companies. Ignore those. Look for those from posted directly by the company. Better yet, do some research, find some local companies that use UNIX, search their web sites, looking at the company to learn what they do as well to find out if they have posted any job openings. Try to someone on the "inside" that you can talk to (you may need to join a user group to put yourself in a place to meet them) to gain an inside track on a job opening. I read this stat once and my personal experience confirms it, 80% of job openings are never advertised for.
When doing the research on the company, learn about what they do to make money. This way, when you go to an interview you can ask some intelligent questions of the manager(s). Such as "How does your UNIX systems support you in the business of XXXX and provide value to company and shareholders? " I believe that asking the "big picture" questions shows that you know what the roll of technology is in business, which is sometime forgotten.
Kent
Well, I'm not an 'admin' anymore, other than my personal systems. However, it all started for me while studying EE at uni. The ultix systems were the easiest to develop on, although the VMS systems were nice for 'real work'.
So I got used to developing/using unix back in the late 80s, then I switched to a CS degree, grabbed linux for my PC in the early days (around the time of 0.13/0.96) and got used to using unix systems all the time.
Of course, leaving university with a mix of admin ability and development ability meant that finding jobs that needed a mix of both - many companies with smaller (20-30 workstation) unix nets don't need a fulltime admin, but someone that can act as a developer 4/5 of the time and admin a couple of hours a day is ideal.
When I arrived at my current place of work, I admitted to knowing a few linux hacks. Suddenly I'm the sysadmin, in addition to my real job. Now I get to spend hours and hours helping newbies configure their systems, cut ethernet cables, and clean up the carnage when we get hacked.
Don't make the same mistake I did. Never admit to sysadmin knowledge, or you will be marked for life.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I started out programming MUD's on Windows 95 using Cygwin (which really sucked back then). When I complained on the list about compiler problems, somebody told me to try Linux. Slackware 3.4 made me into a Unix Admin. I installed it, screwed it up, fixed it, broke it, fixed it, et infitesimo. After a long time doing this, I said to myself, "Self, why not be a Unix Admin? You like it, you're pretty good at it, do it." So, I dropped out of college (3.5yrs Music School and .5 of CS) and started applying for jobs. No certifications, no degree - just my knowledge of Linux. My education was (and is) based entirely on the generosity of all the other admins out on the net.
In short, your best bet is to learn everything you can about unix. Even more importantly, learn just as much about networking and programming (C, perl, and shell) as those are just as important as your system knowledge. Good Luck!
Mine was a great ooportunity. I used to live in Austin TX, we got broadband @1.5Mbps with static IPs for less than $100/month at our appartment complex, and having installed linux just for learning purposes a year earlier I decided to put my own server on the net through the T1 I had for myself. It was great for 2 years, until the apartment management switched companies, and they switched to dynamic IPs through DHCP and lower speeds in order to being able to have more customers without installing more equipment.
:-)
Then, a year later, I moved out of the country
Looking back, would I do it again? Maybe not... my worst private sector job had me answering pages repeatedly from midnight to 6am, my best one is now, where I have little after-hours activity. It's a responsibility, and the bigger the company/org is, the bigger the responsibility gets... don't confuse doing it as a hobby and doing it for a living. Outside of IT, it's probably one of the lowest-regarded careers; people get images of data gnomes who never see the sun, and in some cases, the image fits.
The pay can be good, but right now the job market is awful, and there are a ton of experienced ex-admins out there looking for the same jobs you're considering. If I were you, I'd pursue a career in something more interesting and, frankly, more substantial than being a sysadmin.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I've been doing Unix (and other OS) administration for almost ten years now. I started out in college, getting a student assistant job with the Computing and Network Services department at CU Boulder. My only Unix experience at that time was a one semester C/Unix workshop I had to take for CS.
:) I spent two and half years in that student job learning about ten different Unix variants, got a job three weeks after graduation doing Unix admin. I've picked up a lot of networking knowledge, NT, and even some VMS skills along the way. I've worked for government contractors, done classified work, and even shared in the dot-Com Internet startup bust. Its been a wild ride.
Day one:
Boss: "Go ftp this new patch from UUnet."
Me: "What's ftp?"
(Boss smacks forehead and groans)
The rest is history.
To date, I don't have any certifications, but I plan to change that with the job market getting so tight. My one word of caution would be that many experienced Unix admins are out of work right now, and are going to win out for a job every time against a newcomer. The best advice I can give is to try and find a volunteer or entry-level part time position to build up some experience before trying to jump in full-time.
- Necron69
First, nobody chooses to become a SysAdmin. They are told to do it and get stuck doing it. That, or they get hired into a job that suddenly turns into a SysAdmin job (often different than what they were hired for).
There is no formal education, no particular degree required. Anyone who tells you that is in management - do not trust them. If any degree is favorable, then Philosophy is a good one (or Psychology) because one of the questions you're going to be asking yourself alot is "Why on earth did the idiot do that?" (and several slight variations).
To be a good one, you must have excellent reading and comprehension skills - this is because the management and users in the company that will hire you do not possess these skills in even the tiniest amounts and you will need them in spades to not only survive but to keep the company rolling along. Not only are these skills required, you must practice them (you know, by actually reading stuff - books like fiction and tech refrences).
Some people will say that you must also be either a sadist or a masochist in at least some small part. I would say instead that a better quality would be a Zen-like attitude - you know, shite happens. But if you have to kill someone at some point, think of it as a perk.
Your first few months will be difficult and frustrating. Making the transition from junior sysadmin to full sysadmin skillsets mostly requires being in the hotseat and screwing up a few times. If you can, find a good mentor who can tell you where the documentation is; that's often the most difficult part.
I'm making a comfortable living now as a UNIX admin, and I owe it all to the number of reboots and crashes in WinNT. I couldn't stand it anymore, so I went to CompUSA and bought SuSE Linux 6.1 and installed it that very day. I vowed to myself that if I couldn't do it in Linux, I'd die trying or do without. I quickly learned how to do most basic sysadmin type tasks, and got a job testing software at a local company (Novell!) and NFS interactivity between their software and Linux. From there I went to a Jr. SysAdmin position at another local company, where I picked up Solaris, and FreeBSD. I soon thereafter migrated to FreeBSD for myself (couldn't be happier), and picked up another new job! This time I got to experience HP-UX 10.20 and 11i, and Tru-64. This job only lasted a short time before I was head-hunted to work for yet another company (finally in real sysadmin pool, not a jr. anymore) for my FreeBSD and Solaris experience.
The bottom line is don't stop learning and take every opportunity to move up you can get. The rewards are satisfaction and an endless increase to your skill set. Good Luck!
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup.
... you need a four year degree, preferably CS to start with. Then experience with admin work on Unix. Solaris certifications or extensive experience with solaris are required, and we also try to hire people with experience with enterprise technologies, IE EMC storage, SANs, big tape arrays, etc. Good communication skills are a must (if you hate writing, find another job).
I'd start with a college degree, then get a job for experience at an ISP while you get professionally certified in an OS. Then take classes in Enterprise level technology from Veritas or the like.
If you want to make good money doing sysadmin work, then learn enterprise management. It's relatively easy to find a Linux admin nowadays, but it's much harder to find someone who can run an E15k with a good level of competence.
Erik
just install one of those damn thingies
who needs a cs?
how many 10 year olds are out there who f*ck around with *nix?
did they need a cs?
just my two cents...
...wander the way of the PFY, before you venture upon the path of the BOFH.
yes, we have no bananas
I played with *nix for about 5 years (at night, when I should have been in bed so I wouldn't sleep in high school). After high school, I made a pathetic attempt to start my own PC repair shop in a small town, when that folded I was offered a job as a *shutter* web developer. I took that job (crappy pay).
About 3 months ago the Systems and Network admin left when we purchased a web development company and web hosting company. With this purchase came a new webdeveloper, and I said 'BOING! I'll take over the sys/net admin job!' And viola, here I am. I imagine after a few years, I can probably throw a resume out there and land alot better paying job in a bigger company, but I'm happy for now.
Our company is really small btw, 1 Sys/net admin, 1 web developer, 1 webdeveloper/vb programmer(ew), we run linux on 12 servers. We provide dialup access for 1500 customers and webhosting for about 50 customers.
I get alot of freedom here, and I like that. As far as certification, I would say get experience first, then get a certification. Sometimes thats not possible, but *shrugs*. I got this far, and I'm happy with what I've accomplished to this date. Reading some of these other posts has also given me a few new ideas for furthering my career goal.
The truth is their is no really 'out of box(tm)' method of getting there, except for:
Start Small
Know what your doing
Get experience
maybe get a cert
Thats the only advice I can give =)
Can all fish swim?
So, you have a BA in Philosophy. So what? My degree is in Paralegal Services.
Three years ago, I went from being a married, stay-at-home mom to divoced mother of three. I can't say I'm a true geek at heart. I'm interested in computers but not obsessed. The model is the same for Paralegal Services and Computer Science -- research, discovery and investigation, and analysis -- only the data is different.
I've only been in this field two years. I'm 45; I was 43 when I changed careers, so to speak. I changed the format of my resume to draw attention to what I was learning and the fact that I was continuing to learn and to draw attention away from my lack of work experience. I installed linux on a second partition on my Windows machine at home and learned both Operating Systems. I added a linux firewall to my home network and learned system administration and network security. I learned programming languages and protocols. I put all this down on my resume -- experience is experience. I provided copies of my executable programs when I went on an interview. I joined the local LUG, and as I got to know other members, they pointed me toward job openings, and I was able to use them as references.
Thirty-three is not too old to change careers. Statistics show that people change careers as many as three times during their lives. If this is your heart's desire, you owe it to yourself to go after this.
Just because things look different doesn't mean anything has changed.
Universities don't alway post jobs except on their own websites. They have lot's of boxes and need people to run them. Check you local universities for entry level positions...
Someone asked me this same question before, and he's what I told them:
:-)
> I would like to start working toward relevant certifications, but I am not
> sure where to start. I have been researching the RHCE certification,
> which would seem to me to be a good place to start, but I am not really
> sure. What do you think? What would your suggestions be? MCSE, Cisco,
> RedHat, or something else?
Really depends on what you want to do. I'm a Unix guy. I love Unix. If
I had the time (and someone to pay for it), I'd get certified in RedHat,
Solaris, AIX, HPUX, and anything else I could find.
But, there are more MSCE jobs out there. That's not to say that having an
MCSE is better. If you don't mind working with Windows, and can (at least
superficially) buy in to the Microsoft (learning) mentality, then it's not
such a bad deal. I personally lost faith in the MCSE exams when I took
the 2000 exam without ever touching 2000 or opening a book and passed it
with around an 80%.
There are a lot of employers that won't consider you for an NT/2000 job
without one. Do they realize that the exam is really a joke for
experienced IT guys? Probably not. Especially for recruiters, it's easy
to say "well, person A must be qualified because they're certified, even
though person B has more experience".
Then again, as the economy slows, there are a lot of people who were never
really qualified to be IT guys who are MCSE and are out of work. There
are a lot fewer qualified unix people out there, so even though there are
less jobs, it's easier to find work. Don't know if that makes sense, but
think like this:
If there are MCSE 10,000 jobs, and 15,000 MCSEs, only the top 66%
can find work. However, if there are 1000 Unix jobs, and 1500 unix
people, well, it's easier to get in that top 66%, because you only have to
elbow your way above the other 500, not 5000. Sure there's still a
percentage who are incompetent, but if you get enough experience with
different Unix flavors, you will always be needed.
Just to give you an idea, I've worked with Linux for 3.5 years now,
FreeBSD for a year, dabbled in OpenBSD, Irix for 4 years as an end-user
and 6 months as an admin, Solaris for about a year (SPARC and x86), HP-UX
and AIX for 6 months, and some VAX/VMS in college. Sounds much more
impressive than "3-4 years of Windows 9x/NT/2000". And the truth is, once
you've learned the concepts of one Unix, the others are pretty easy to
guess.
So, back to your original question: What do you want to do? Do you want
to get certified to work with Unix, for added job security, extra pay,
etc? Are you comfortable with Windows? Do you like working with it? You
don't really have to hate Microsoft just because 5% or 10% of us do. One
of the things I love about Unix is that Unix guys typically make $15k more
than MCSEs because there's more of a demand.
If I was going to be a Windows guy forever, I'd get an MCSE, possibly +I,
and probably a CCNE (I think the path is CCNA->CCNP->CCNE now). At the
very least, take the first couple MCSE tests and be a basic MCP, and get
your CCNA.
If you like Linux, and think that's the path you want to follow, then I
have some better advice for you: Go buy a Sparcstation 10 or 20 off ebay
and some other hardware. Be prepared to spend $1000, but get yourself a
P200 you can play with, a Sparcstation 10, and maybe an SGI Indy and an HP
A-class (or some other basic HP box). Do a little research first, to find
out what OSes run on what hardware (google is wonderful for this kind of
thing), and check out the spec.org pages for speeds (so you don't buy
something too old). Make sure you get copies of media (OSes), or buy
them, install the OSes on each box, and start working with them.
Dedicate an hour a day to doing things like trying to build SSH, learn how
thei admin tools work on that OS, and everything else. Configure the
network. Convert your P200 to a firewall, configure firewalling, and use
it to cruise the web. My firewall at home is a Pentium 133 with 32 megs
of RAM,and it uses a modem for the external internet connection.
Your goal should be to be able to build a little network at home, make
sure all the machines can communicate, and can interoperate. Try to set
up your own DNS. Configure Apache. Play with Sendmail. Try to get a
feel for basic admin things. Once you get really comfortable, teach
yourself a little Perl or shell scripting. A little Perl goes a long way.
You don't have to be a guru, but knowing how to read a file, parse it for
key words, and reformat it can go a long way.
Figure it will take a year to really learn the systems, but you'll learn
very quickly being forced to work with them yourself. Six months of
administering your own systems, and trying to run all your own services is
like 2 years of work experience. Don't be afraid to ask for help, but
always try to find it yourself - Unix gurus usually don't mind being asked
once where something obvious can be found, but when they have to
repeatedly point someone to websites which could be found on google, man
pages, and howto's which are included in the distribution, they tend to
get bitter
After you learn everything, you can go take the exams for a few hundred
dollars, and you'll be able to pass them with your eyes closed. The key
is not spewing out what you read in the book - it's understanding the
systems. Once you understand the underlying questions, you may very well
know the answer without ever reading the books or touching the system.
Did I answer your question, or confuse you more?
I was working at a tech, when it was decided that our sysadmin needed a backup. I started taking Solaris courses, and will have my first cert by the second quarter. After that, it's only a matter of taking over some of his responsibilities and arranging a little "accident" to get him out of the way. WARNING: This course only recommended for the true bastard.
I started my Unix experience while going to Ohio State as a Computer Science student (Arts and Sciences, not Engineering). There we used Sparc Stations (for the OS, long time ago), then upgraded to HP-UXs, now theyre back to Sparc, this time with the Ultra series. The basic programming classes were all required to be done on their system, which was a very good primer to the unix OS. (My first experience with it at that time.) The first couple classes in the program emphasized using most of the important commands to gain familiarity with the system, in addition to learning the goals of the course itself. It was a pretty good introduction to Unix.
From there, I got a job at the university tech center as a student, using only my experience in my classes with unix. I learned a ton there, due mostly to the fact that 1) I was interested in it, and 2) I was constantly surrounded by people who knew what was going on.
My experience just grew from there. With respect to being too old, you're never too old to start a new career, especially in the tech field. I know a lot of people who are in their 60s who perform just as good (if not better) than some of their younger counterparts. Whoever told you that was probably denied a unix admin job, and likes to use age as a reason for the denial. (It ain't just a river in Egypt anymore for them!)
Anyway, get a good *nix book, or a couple for that matter, sit down and start typing away. Get some books on basic security, stuff like that. When you've mastered something, put it on your resume. When the interviewer asks you what you've done at that big interview, don't tell them you have no professional experience. Call it 'freelance experience', and in-detail explain what you did. If they are interested, they won't care that you didn't get paid for the work. They want to know if you can do the work or not.
Once you finally do get a couple years experience as a sysadmin, the doors of opportunity will open to you a little more often than before. (Except for our crummy job market right now.)
And they said zombies weren't real!
My first access to UNIX systems was via hacking. This was the only means of access for a working class guy at that time. In the early 1990's ISP's started popping up and I got legitimate access. Then Linux came out and I turned my machine into a dual boot one, with a crappy early version of LILO.
I got my first job by telling the boss I wanted experience and wanted to work more for experience than money. It's unfortunate I had to do that, but that's the current situation in America. I also lied and said I had a CS degree. I was paid little, but worked very hard and learned a lot. I also stopped hacking totally the day I got a job as a unix administrator, some years ago. About a year later, via a headhunter, I interviewed at a company, breezed through a tech interview and was hired. I lied at that point as well, and grossly inflated my salary.
Since that time I have not had to lie about education or salary in my job interviews. I have been paid quite well. The way I got there was by hacking, then lying, then lying again. Now I don't have to do any of that now that I'm "in".
In retrospect I don't regret what I did one bit. I regret more on caving in to my employers on salary and time worked demands than I do on other things. You'd be amazed at how many of the best people in the systems, network or security industry come from a similar background. Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak once said if they never built and sold blue boxes, they probably would have never built the Apple. I think that admission by the godfathers of the computer movement outside of large corporations (and the military) adds a lot of weight to what I'm saying about the birth of the Internet movement outside of large corporations (and the military)
http://www.adminspotting.org/
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery
Subject: ADMINSPOTTING
Message-ID:
From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary Barnes)
Date: 28 Jan 1997 14:49:18 -0000
Organization: Ripoffs R Us
X-No-Archive: Yes
Choose no life. Choose sysadminning. Choose no career. Choose no
family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose hard disks the size of
washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers and electrical coffee
makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose
fixed interest car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no
friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel
chair for your office in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose NNTP and
wondering why the fuck you're logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose
sitting in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web
sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away
at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup,
nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers
Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate. Choose your future.
Choose sysadmining[1].
Gaz
[1] It might fuck you up a little less than heroin[2].
[2] ObFootnote.
--
gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary "Wolf" Barnes) "Do not ask any lady to take wine,
until you see she has finished her fish or soup." - Hints on
Etiquette and the Usages of Society
Here's the short story...
:) So I started looking around for any work related to computers. I had computers from age 12 (go 4K TRS-80!), and had some clue as to how they work. I found a job with a small company that had a network of Macs and began to learn how all of this LAN stuff worked. This was also about the time of the Internet's rise in popularity, so I was able to use my LAN experience to beg another job with a company that sold a unix-based (mostly SCO) app to Doctors. In two years there I learned a ton, and eventually felt ready to look for a higher paying position. I now admin about 75 unix boxes of various types (and about 100 windows boxes as well, you have to take the bad with the good) for a major University's Physics Dept. It's great to see the looks on the Prof's faces when I tell them I have a BA in History!
I graduated with a BA in History and quickly realized that it's really hard to get the good jobs in History!
So the moral of this short story is: Get any job working near computers to pad your resume, and then keep looking for new opportunities!
M
How the hell is this offtopic?
anyone who has actually DONE unix admin will know exactly how stressful a job it can be. A few joints makes it bearable, not to mention when other people keep breaking the systems you setup so carefully.
Can people stop moderating on discussions which they have no clue please its a waste of time.
I had not considered a job as a Unix Admin before this one kinda fell into my lap. I've had years of experience using and semi-admin with HP-UX, going back to 1987. This was in the US Army. I've been to HP-UX training, Solaris training and since I've started this Unix Admin job, several Compaq Tru64 classes. Even though I didn't have any "real world" admin experience, I was able to successfully interview for this job. All the technical questions I answered easily. I'm not sure what experience you have and can put on the resume to help get your foot in the door. But sometimes it just takes the right timing and a "what the heck" attitude. Good Luck!
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
I was a senior mainframe computer operator, when the account I was on started to close down, the sysadmin who was on the job, left.
My boss came in to my cube, he said, "Doug, you know that LINUX/UNIX stuff right?, its like a hobbie of yours?"
I said "Well...uh..yea"
He said "Well, our systems administrator who set up the dialup server for the mainframe, and the ftp gateway left yesterday, poof, you are now a junior UNIX administrator!"
I said "Cool!"
Next paycheck I noticed my that I did not get any overtime pay for the extra hours I worked trying to figure out the UNISYS SVR4 system and and old Slackware system the other guy had set up.
I went to my boss I said
"Hey, where's my overtime pay!"
And he said...
"Oh...did'nt I tell you, dang....Junior UNIX administrator is a Salalried position, no overtime, oh and by the way, the customer has some requests for the UNIX systems I need you take care of THIS WEEKEND"
I screemed!
And I have been overworked ever since....
...and it just turned into a full-time career.
;-)
For many years, I was a PC tech/support guy. Well, let me rephrase that: Since at least the early 90's, I've been a frustrated electronics engineering tech masquerading as a computer/network support guy. I didn't realize that I really wanted to go the EE-T route, complete with 4-year degree, until I turned 37, but that's another story.
One day, I suddenly realized that I was completely, utterly, burned out on maintaining PC's, and wiping the collective noses of the computing-skill challenged (ha!) crowd that tends to use them.
I had been, at home, developing and polishing my *nix skills by putting together a small server farm to provide our 'net presence. My goal was to be entirely self-hosted, dependent on our ISP only for a pipeline and some static addresses.
Finally, I started hunting for an internal transfer (Boeing is big enough that you can do that) into the Unix admin side. Took about two months of digging, but I finally found a slot that was a good match. I've been a Unix admin ever since, and I'm just completing a course in PERL scripting today.
The moral of the story: Get a broadband connection (preferably DSL), gain as much skill with *nix as you can on the side by making your own 'net presence, and USE that accomplishment on your resume and in the interview! Would-be bosses seem to be impressed if you go through the effort and learning curve required to set up your own server farm. There's plenty of surplus hardware available dirt-cheap, and NetBSD and all kinds of apps are available free for the downloading.
My long-term goal is still to dump computing support and go into avionics mod/refit, but that's a different story.
Good hunting.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I started out applying for a job in the application development dept. They didn't have any available but offered me a job in systems, I've loved it ever since.
I spent 10 years in the navy. The whole time they made me sit behind a hp unix box with nothing to really do on it except run the software that started by default. Well after a few years I got bored and started hacking on the system. At the 10 year point I was offered a job by a DOD contractor that built and maintained the system.
Got Code?
you need it!!
Hey, I'm old enough to be your daddy, and I've been working with Unix since just after it stopped being Multics. And the only good a degree will do you is to get you in the door, some of the most useless bastards Iv'e ever encountered had degrees, and almost without exception the best and brightest did not. And as to wanting to be a Sysadmin, if you like driving in to work at 3am just because BB is malfunctioning etc, more power to you!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
as a ISP admin, they were running this kludge of NT and Novell servers. Well needless to say after about 6 months of them crashing every few days the admin was fired and i was told to "fix the servers". I fixed them allright, but not in the way my boss had in mind. He had spent about $15000 in total on all the OS's these servers were running and after i switched them all he was pissed that i did with a $1.98 what he spent so much on. I installed FreeBSD on everything, used cistron radius, apache, squid, named, sendmail/pop3d, MySql, asked for a check to buy a billing program, and bought platypus. The first year we had a uptime of 320 some odd days, and only rebooted the servers to go from 2.0 to 2.2 kernels. The only problem with this was i put myself out of a job. My hours were cut back because their was nothing to do. Now im working on an OS/390 for a diferent company, but i still consult for the ISP.
I will bend your mind with my spoon
I was wire wrapping boards for a company, they wanted me to run some software on some big machine. I said I needed an account on it to do anything. They gave me root, a book and said you figure it out. Now 24 years later I am still at it. Before the web, Before AOL, The Source and Micronet were the only thing going for the hobbiest. Before fido net, Late CBBS days, Before the PC, Pets ruled. Long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
I'm not quite sure how I started, I studied cs at uni. Although the course was very good, it didnt actually teach you how to admin unix on any scale bigger than maybe keeping your own mail/home account in order. When I left there I thought I wasnt good enough to try for a job as a full time programmer, so I blagged my way thru and interview for a sysadmin with a small london based internet company. My first day there I was given root on 4 suns, so it was time to learn solaris. Since those early days things got easier, and I've realised that a lot of what I learnt in my CS course is damn usefull.
;)
;)
Now I'm one of two SA's running a 2million user free email site, still just taking things one day at a time
I guess what I'm suggesting is, as long as you understand the basics, and you can learn new stuff relativley quickly you should just go out and try to get a unix sa job. In a small company where the buck stops with you will help you learn stuff quickly
I got a job as a phone tech for a local ISP. During that time we start doing wireless networking. One of the first customers was an IRCd/eggdrop hosting company. I was about the only person within an hour radius that knew anything about UNIX and everyone knew it.
After 6 months of working for the ISP they fired me. I was down right fired, no layoff, just gone. Well, that was first thing Monday morning. I went home all bumbed, 'cuz I live in Branson, MO which is like the polar opposite of the technical world. What was I to do, now? Well, I was chatting online with a friend of mine that worked next door (at a gas station, no less) to the IRCd/egg host and he said that the manager of that company wanted to hire me. I was stoked.
Interestingly enough, the reason that I was hired was not for my UNIX knowledge, but for my NT knowledge. They were going to get an NT 4 server and had no idea what to do with it, or how to set it up. I was an NT admin at the ISP.
2 or 3 months after working for the hosting company, the manager quit and I was bumped to sys admin. I'm sure that's not a normal way to do it.
I fell into my job by accident. I don't love it, but it is a paycheck, and my experience might be useful.
I installed Linux in grad school (Psychology) while fooling with some web stuff. I learned just enough to write Perl scripts, move files around, configure interfaces, build Apache, set up virtual hosts, and configure my MUD client. Really minimal.
After grad school I took a job as a programmer for a few months where I did no administration. Then I started working for a pissy little young web development company. They needed someone to write Perl CGIs and they wanted someone with an academic pedigree, which I had. After meeting with the owner I bought a book on CGI programming, and learned how to write very minimal CGIs (with Perl). A couple of days later I was working for them, writing all their CGIs.
At this point they had their own 'administrator', which meant a tech guy they had off-site who could answer their questions. We had to telnet in to a box at the provider to do work. Our company had no "production" or "development" servers; all development work was just stashed under a hidden directory (of course this caused problems when an HTML monkey overwrote files in the wrong directory).
I quickly realized that I could run Apache in the office, and use my box as the development server. Our company also had this problem where we had only 10 I.P. addresses, and greater than 10 employees (part and full time). You can imagine the chaos this caused for a company working on Web work: people were literally stealing each other's IP addresses if they went to lunch or the bathroom, and other people were perplexed as to why all of a sudden their Net connections weren't working properly..
So I set up NAT on a Linux box, and the problem was solved. By this point I had *become* the de facto sysadmin, not by design or calculated career path or formal training, but by accident. I knew how to do some things, and I knew how to find out how to do the things I didn't, and I just went ahead and did them. Once you solve a problem or do something that needs to be done you start building credibility. Just make sure you do it right. Once you start doing some things you will be surprised at how many other things people ask you to do, and how many things you find yourself having to learn how to do.
So my advice to a would-be admin is - anyone can get into the field. Just start doing it. Set up a Linux box at home and host your own domain. Figure out how DNS works. Get a book on CGI and Perl and learn to write some CGIs. Host virtual domains. Set up email accounts and give them to your friends and family, and thereby learn how to administer users and mail and all the headaches that come with it. Design workable backup schemes even if you have nothing worth backing up. All this work *does* count for something, if not full-fledged work experience, it is better than nothing.
Then find a company that is willing to hire someone who is industrious but maybe not too experienced. Often times these are the tight-wads that don't want to pay for a 'real' administrator, but you're not a real administrator yet, anyways, so that's perfect. Look for companies that haven't yet figured out they need a UNIX-like solution, then go in and provide it for them.
Or do pro-bono or volunteer work. Just do something.
Heres the deal, I am now 32 and Ive been in the IT world as a career for 8 years now. Before that I was a Union Plumber/Pipefitter. I was forced to change carreers from a serious back injury, and my newborn son had serious liver problems which eventually lead to a transplant. The doctors told me find another job, the risk of bringing hepatitis or CMV or some other nasty home was too great. I had to agree as over 1/3 of the union hall had one form or another of Hep sometime in their carrer. SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo
I was lost, I asked my dad who has been in IT since 1963 , what do I do, now granted I had a serious grasp on IT previous to this so I am going to assume you at least understand the basics. I used CPM and Xenix and Minix growing up on whatever the toy of the month my old man brought home was but hadnt touched a systems seriously since 88 or so.
I told him whos going to hire me , he said well youve got a good grasp on languages, from assembler to C and a tad of VB, which was hot at the time, then he told me hey this internet thing is going to be big, find yourself a niche whithin that, so I did, legacy application migration, I was familiar with the older systems, many still being used, so I focused on the app migration and database integration, while others were screwing around with the warm and fuzzy look and feel front end I was doing what everyone at the time liked least, I got a job after about four months of self-training.
I was hooked on Linux from the start redhat 2.0 , I managed to find a job at a small company 6 guys that also happened to have 2 Sparc servers , the owner was the only one who could even half administer them, so when I hired on they gave me those, linux was a great jumppoint back into the *nix world, althoug at the time there were many more differences than there are now,
Pay sucked and it was simply we didnt have enough coming in, so I looked around and found another company that was looking twoard the future and Linux, they were 99% Win32 , but had a few clients that wanted *nix hosting enviroments. Soooo, I set em up and after about two years of that on to Higher pay, and so on , I am now in a great position, reporting only to the owner directly , in charge of all IT decision, yes basically a MIS , but a little sweeter.
Just do IT , dont lie on resumes, make it abundantly clear who you are and what you are after , start at the bottom, set up a system at home, or better yet, like me co-locate a box and host friends/family, tightwad busness on it. Do it on the cheap and dont rn any mission critical stuff too start, play around have fun drink lots of caffien , get edgy before 11:00 am is a must and you of course need the unix admin shuffle which can only be earned by many hours hunched over at the keybord until your leg mucles atrophie. Consulting gigs are good to start too, I did a few, shows you what the real world lunacy in IT is all about without putting your ass on the line.
GOOD LUCK, It can be done but its not going to be instant.
With very little knowledge of nix.....
Defense contractor hired me as an electronic technician to work on some IRIX-based SGI training systems (USAF), and pulled an "Oh, by the way...".
Fortunately, IRIX came with a very comprehensive set of man pages.
sine puella vita suget
I was a programmer for a site, hired to do a website. They used NT. I hate Windows. I had heard of "Linux". I installed it. It was cool. I got hacked. I cursed. I reinstalled and learned a little more. I got better. I got hacked again. I cursed and reinstalled and learned more. I de-Windows'ed other machines. I learned more. I bought my own server and learned a shitload about security before plugging it in. It's been up for a year and weathered hack attempts every day. I still fear people who know more than me and I try to keep up. Life is good.
Certification? School of Real Life, baby.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
My first job after university was as a UNIX sysadmin for a network of about a dozen UNIX systems, all of them pretty old. My BA was in physics, but in my last year and a half in school, I had realized that I was more interested in computers than in "real physics".
In my final year at university, I landed a programming internship at a small geographics company (a friend of mine worked there, and recommended me, since I had the requisite C fundamentals). Working there helped me get to know the other guys on the IT staff, so that when I got my BA, I was able to score an interview for their tech department.
For me, my opportunity was timing; the sysadmin had just quit about a month before, and was still "on retainer" as a consultant until they replaced him (a practice I still find odd.)
I guess what helped me the most was that I had a good sense for problem-solving on a UNIX system, which is something like 90% of a sysadmin's job. I was also willing to learn a new UNIX system (I already was familiar with HP-UX, but they also used the old Apollo AEGIS variant of UNIX). You don't need to have several years' experience in the field with any particular UNIX system to get a job as a UNIX admin. If you can show that you are familiar with one UNIX at some kind of admin level, and can demonstrate an aptitude for learning new things and solving problems, then you shouldn't have a problem. Go for the smaller companies, where they are generally more willing to take a junior-level person to do admin stuff.
Don't be discouraged by the fact that you are 33 (that's not all that old, even in the tech industry).
Since you don't have a big UNIX admin background, your first step should be to get a copy of some UNIX system (BSD, Linux, ...) and run it as though it were a production system. Don't use GUI admin tools - you'll learn more without them - do everything from the command line or by editing files. Preferably, get at least two boxes, and set up a small network in your house (even if they are side-by-side). Experiment with setting up accounts, allowing different users to share and edit files, setting up (and managing) an NIS server and an NIS slave, setting up (and maintaining) a DNS server and a DNS slave, and setting up a web server.
As an added bonus, learn sh scripting and awk/sed (you can get a lot done with these). For extra points, learn perl.
I started the admin path when the company admin while logged in as root typed the O'Dear sequence 'rm -rf *' in / when he thought he was cleaning out his own directory. He looked up to see all of us coders banging on the keys and shouting about lost work. He got up, never said a word and left the building. Since I had done a couple of backups the manager handed me the box with the distro, told everyone else to take an early day, and I became a fledgling admin on the spot. It's been 20+ years and I still have to double check every rm.
Education: I've almost got a BA in Comp Sci
Experience: Did 5 years on the front lines (Help Desk work) and started playing with Linux because I hated windows. Moved from Helpdesk to Junior UA position 2 years ago and started doing routine stuff. Got a feel for HPUX / Solaris stuff along the way. Also took an HPUX class. Got involved doing Disaster Recovery Planning and Backup stuff.
I'd say go and shoot for a Junior position and just start building your skills. Your never too old todo anything, as long as your willing to learn, not even the sky is the limit.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
No, really. I admin six boxes at a state agency, and sort of backed into the position. Coming out of college, I had a BA in International Studies, and (most of) an MA in International Affairs (suffice to say it's a bad idea to seriously annoy the profs on your committee). Upon realizing how valuable THAT was, I got a job installing computers in junkyards, then VB programming, then Web programming.
Took a job at this state agency as a programmer, then filled a void when it turned out their UNIX skills were crap.
I do not currently hold any certifications.
It used to be that you could apply for a job with a fraction of the experience stated as "required." I don't know whether the economic crash has changed this substantially, but it never hurts to apply. The worst that'll happen is that they say no. So tip #1 is: just apply, and see what happens.
#2) Don't be a snob. Before I started here, this was an NT/Novell shop, which has (slowly) changed into a UNIX/Novell shop. The migration has gone pretty smoothly, but required some handholding along the way. OTOH, you may have to take on some NT admin stuff en route. Once people see that you don't have to reboot *nix boxes daily, you're in pretty good shape.
#3) Don't ignore your local and state governments. Is it sexy? No. Does it pay well in comparison to other IT positions? No. On the up side, they still have positions to fill, and you may find yourself at the top of a middling crop of non-traditional IT resumes. Being a medium sized fish in a smallish pond has its advantages.
#4) Use your strengths. One of the big problems in IT is that the people who staff the positions can't communicate. This certianly doesn't apply across the board, but the stereotype fits for the most part. I'd think someone who can write effective emails and describe the situation to PHBs would deliver significant value to an organization.
#5) Practical experience over "home use." Can you start something where you are? It doesn't have to be big, per se, just functioning. Email/WWW gateway for your students? I know that getting something into production will greatly increase your value over "well, I set SAMBA up at home, and I've got Apache running on my home network." This'll also give you an idea of whether you actually want to do this.
Good luck.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I learned UNIX after I had gotten my MCSE and was working in a mixed environment. The UNIX admin was overworked, I was underworked, I helped him out. It was all over after I discovered PERL. Take my advice, get some base knowledge and then find a mentor. They really should set up a journeyman SA program in SAGE or somewhere. I learned more from my mentor than I ever have in any classes.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Take a shot at adminning for a small ISP, they usually can't afford to pay an admin. Be prepared to get paid squat, but you should at the least have very flexible hours.
Review your job situation very frequently and objectively. Don't get caught deadending or in a rut.
Don't be afraid to change up jobs after a year. Its hard to do, but it seems like unless the company you work for allows you to advance within, you can only advance by getting out of there.
A CS degree or EE degree does NOT an admin make. I think out of the group I work with only one has that degree (Actually he has both). The rest of us have our degrees across the spectrum.
Apply for some of the jobs that you see in the papers/web. Chances are the ads are asking for the moon while hoping they'll get someone with a telescope.
Just because a company is asking for a CS or EE degree shouldn't scare you off. Alot of times they want someone with any degree. It has to do with the stupid traditions that companies have, but it also shows you can stick something out for 4+ years.
Honestly, if you have some decent programming skills you should at the least be able to get a job as a programmer. If you find one at a small firm, you'll be the programmer and the admin so your dilemma is solved. Good luck.
I have no formal *nix education. "Everything I learned, I learned from Slashdot ..." Well OK, that is an exageration.
... basically joe-boy for whatever tasks the boss did not want to do. But fortunately I was an "IT Technician" that ran combat simulators running on UNIX boxen. So even though I got all the mundane tasks, they were mundane tasks on UNIX systems.
...
I started working on UNIX boxen in 1991 for school, and then Linux in 1993. Been "doing" *nix ever since. Sounds to me like you already have a good skill set.
But anyway, I started out in an "IT Technician" role
Then I moved on to a University, an intermediate position in UNIX Admin, and from there to my current job.
In every case, I got my jobs because I was able to sell my skills despite the lack of a stick of paper that annointed me 'edcated
- Mark
Ancient Budo Master once told me: "All your bruises are belong to us."
"Oh, and *never*, *ever* reboot a system just to se if the problem goeas away... Instead use the opportunity to learn some new stuff"
/.
Truly one of the best statements ever on
Learn why and why not something did or did not happen. As a sysadmin your best attribute is the ability to determine the cause of a problem, for there many great things will come.
If VISTA is the answer, you didn't understand the question
My short story is:
.com revolution, so finding good people who knew something was really really hard. Now that the bubble has burst, companies know they can find quality tallent and don't have to train people.
1) Started doing PC desktop support
2) Company wanted me to help with the Novell servers, so they trained me. Started playing with Linux on my own.
3) Next job did pc support + novell and learned about IP networking and routers. Did more Linux on my own.
4) Next job hired as a network engineer (manage the routers, switches, etc) and started helping out on the Unix side of things. By the end of the job (4 years) I knew more about Unix than most of the Unix admins and was basically doing Unix admin 50% of the time.
5) Current job doing all sorts of Unix and security things.
Honestly, I got luckly. My 3rd job was a small internet startup which wanted someone who was smart and was willing to train since they didn't want to spend much $$$. Of course this was in the middle of the
My current company layed off most of it's technical staff a number of months ago, and of my friends with 2 years experiance, none have found anything. (Well, one friend moved to Switzerland and just got a consulting job yesterday.) One of them with just under a year experiance, hasn't even gotten an interview. At least here in the Silicon Valley, things are the shits for people who don't have years of experiance.
Not to discourage you, but I haven't seen many companies interested in hiring Linux hobbiests as sysadmins. In fact, I've seen job openings listed that said just that: "Real experience needed, no Linux hobby admins." Or something to that effect.
I think you can get into admining if that's what you really want, but I doubt many companies are going to take a chance on hiring a person for technical work that has no technical experience.
Heck, we declined to hire someone who *had* tech and unix admin experience because he wasn't technical enough.
Good luck,
Sean.
...or at least, used to sell: "It's a tough job, but somebody said I had to do it."
If a particular employer won't hire you based on your capabilities, but is insisting on some silly technical degree, then you probably don't want to get stuck with them, anyway.
I agree 100%. Any workplace that considers a piece of paper to be more important than true knowledge and experience is NOT a place you want to be. Many times those places are filled with people that are in I.T. strictly for the money, and do not enjoy (or care about) their jobs.
Keep Austin Weird!
I started coding at the age of 15 w/ turbo pascal. Then attended eletronic engineer classes for a year, never finnished it though.
After that, Then i did a freelance gig for one company, automated a their strorage ordering thru network of modems. Got good feedback from that company, and was hired by another company in the same business because i had year's worth of linux skills. It was small unix shop with only 1 or 2 technical personel and about 400 customers running Sco variants. Did a lot of different stuff there from fixing broken db's to setting & fixing up hardware and os's. This lasted about 5 years
In meanwhile i managed to grow a beard and attitude. Now i work as portal sysadmin in second largest portal in my country and we have branches in all major european countries and states.
I know i a freak in this business but my motto has allways been thats its not up to the schooling to judge person's knowledge. If you know your thing, stick to it and you will be rewarded. And ofcourse, you can never go wrong when buying o'reilly books =)
yush
I was the computer guy in a small hospital when we purchased a unix-based pharmacy system. Even though we had a 24/7 support contract, I started reading the man files. Soon I was a unix administrator.
To address the last bit in your message. Nah, you aren't too old and don't worry about the experience factor. If you can get an interview you can get a job, because most people hire based on intangibles (personality, body language, etc.) more than on resume qualifications.
I had really no unix background coming out of college, but for almost 5 years now that's what I've been, a unix system administrator. I was fortunate enough to land a job with a very large corporation, which therefore had quite a varity of unix: solaris, hp-ux, osf (True64), aix, and later Linux (after I introduced it). My experience? I had maintained FTP and Apache servers under Linux, that pretty much nailed it. If you spend a lot of time with Linux (slackware for me at the time), then that's certainly something I'd have on a resume when looking for a sysadmin job. I do see a lot of jobs which specify 5 or more years of experience, but I don't really pay attention to that all that much. If they bring it up in and interview, count some experience you may have had at the university, or as a hobby with either Linux or FreeBSD. As for certifications I'm not sure, most of the various unix flavors offer their own certifications, check their respective websites under training/support options. I recently got my RHCE, and at some point will try for an AIX certification, although I can't say if they've helped yet. Better yet, get the sysadmin job first, then get the company to pay for your certification, that's the ticket.
I was fresh out of college and had a CS degree. While I was hired as a programmer, I was the only person in the company of about 12 people that had any interest in learning to setup email on our AIX machine.
At some point my boss decided that after I managed to setup POP and made a few changes here and there that I was ready to support 28 servers in 4 different locations in varying O/S (including DOS, *nix, Netware, and VMS) and machine types. FYI, I didn't know a thing about VMS when my bos took the contract.
Too make a long painful story short, after a 70 hour week working on rebuilding a DOS box, I found a head hunter and ran screaming and laughing to where I am now.
I don't miss the 3am pages or the users and managers screaming at me because something wasn't working because I (a) didn't know how to get it working yet and there is only so much you can learn at a time or (b) my boss had promised that I would do something and then never tell me.
.. You begin as a Windows Network Administrator, and once you tell them you want all of their licenses for all of the software, they say 'uhhh' and then "tell them, linux is free!" and switch over the whole network. It works wonders. Trust me.
Well, I am PhD candidate in Computer Sciences, and nobody care about those computers in our office. Then, two years ago we were told to clean off all Win stuff out of all computers (license issues, of course). I was already an Solaris and Linux user at that time, and I needed that boxes to develop my work.
The only way was install Linux in that computers, and I liked the idea! Everything works pretty well, and I really don't miss that buggy Win... boxes.
I don' think so. I got my start at 33 working as a contracted sys admin in a small department in a large telecomm company. I had been working with Linux for a couple of years, took one of those sys admin career programs at a sub-par college after I left my dead end job at a bank, and I haven't looked back since.
Fact is, being 33 is probably a big advantage if you have the skills to go with it. There are many young, talented linux/unix whiz kids out there, I've learned from them, they've learned from me. Often, IT departments are full of these young people who are really smart about technical stuff, but are lacking good communication skills and "bedside manner". Being older and having more epxerience is a huge advantage in these environments.
Ideally, you enroll in some kind of college level program that gives you a solid background from which to start. The college I went to wasn't much good, they hardly taught Unix, with the emphaisis being entriely Novell and Windows NT. Out of 23 kids, I was the only one interested in Linux and Unix, I spent my spare time studying and learning linux while doing well in the college courses.
When I finished the course, I spent a hard winter on social assistance and hit the jackpot by the spring - a company had heard about me through a fellow student who applied for a job requiring Unix and NT knowledge and experience. This company had a contract with a small department within Nortel , and they were desperate to fill the position. So while I was pretty desperate, they were even more desperate, and I got the job.
The position I got was perfect for my skill set at the time. It was varied, required good communication and service skills, and I got to support HP-UX, NT, and Novell servers as well as Windows 95 (ARGGHH). The latter was the hardest part. I wasn't over my head with this position, but I got my feet wet.
I left that job to go on to a real linux position a year later, and there I learned tons about linux and networking and I never realized how little I knew until then. I worked side by side with a young man who had very little social graces, but knew tons about Unix since he'd been into it since he was 12. We taught each other a great deal in a year.
Certification can be important, but not essential once you've got the experience. It might be more important in this economic climate. I have university history, a technical diploma from a private college, and that's it.
It's been a great experience for me. I built a new career for myself by 33, after spending 11 years in a dead end job. You can do the same if you want to get out of teaching. In fact, the fact that you're a teacher will be of great help to you if you get into unix system administration.
Any way, all the best you!
Well, I was working the night shift in '92 shoving tapes into a DEC and was usually totally bored. There happened to be a nice Sun with a color monitor sitting in the server room that they usually left logged in as root. Well, I decided that it would be better used playing XTank and loaded it up. I got busted the next day but when they noticed that I new how to pull something off a tape, run make and then debug the compile problems they were pretty impressed and gave me an admin job and a nice raise. Of course I learned all this stuff in college since no one ever used the unix machines (next, sun). I had a Poli Sci/German major, but spent more time playing in the labs compiling crap and learning scripting languages. They also really needed an admin.
-J
but I started a job as a telephone support tech for a company that runs software on SCO UNIX. About 4 weeks after I started, the "senior" administrator quit. I ended up with a good jump in pay, got sent to school, and when I got back to work I was called "System Adminstrator". I worked for about 2 years and decided to take the certification tests for SCO and passed, but by no means do I consider myself a "senior adminstrator". The cert tests for SCO are a joke. Open book. Talk about a let down.
If you ask most people here, they will tell you that SCO is not a "real" UNIX, but it keeps me busy. I am working now to port our apps to Linux due to the death of SCO.
What can I say, its a job.
I got in by being a BFA in theater (with a CS minor). I just showed up knowing next to nothing but with a "I'm your go to guy" kind of attitude and a "I RTFM. when I don't know". It's a year later and I love my work hate my company and wonder why I stoped doing art.
Being serly is defenetly key thow.
>> Any workplace that considers a piece of paper to be more important than true knowledge and experience is NOT a place you want to be.
Yes, let's all live in magic-land with all the magic people and happy happy trees
Work - qualification important. C'est la vie.
I was in my last year of school and got the project of moving all schools novell servers to samba running on linux, building a linux firewall and mailserver and building solid documentation on all this in one schoolyears time.
I was done with the year got a job working as Junior Unix admin followed AU14 and AU16 and now two years later I am keeping 86 RS/6000 and Pserie's running. (not alone thank god)
Linux got me on track, I just neede to learn about the VM on AIX and some ODM stuff and I was ready for the job. I still miss my Linux boxes sometimes when I'm scripting and find myself blocked by AIX'es binary config. JEGH..
I say Linux at school is a GREAT way to get into Unix and if you start with strickt documentation you force yourself to actually understand everything you do.
First off... my background: Psychology degree from a respected Canadian University.
Secondly, I was using Linux and OpenBSD as a home user for at least 2 years before.
A few months after graduation, a friend of mine, working at a medium sized ISP/web design firm, told me about the position, and said I should apply.
At first, I didn't feel confident enough, and didn't feel as though I knew "everything".
The thing to keep in mind is that: No one knows everything, you have to be willing to learn, experiment, work hard, and not quit.
I was accepted 30 min within the interview, after I answered the technical questions with ease and was honest about the things I did not know... the interviewers response when I didn't knowe something was "Hmm, well that's not a problem, you'll figure it out".
And I did.
I was hired, worked in a very fast paced environment, admin'ing Linux and Solaris machines, taking care of all postmaster/hostmaster tasks (for over 900 domains!) and started getting used to it all within three months.
I started out with a REALLY miserable salary, and reviews would come every 6 months (or whenver I would whine and go see my supervisor) and left after 1.5 years.
Those were my best years. Literally, the school of hard-knocks.
Since then (now 3 years later) I'm in charge of Network/Systems security for one of the worlds largest telecomm/IT services company, and get to play with nice toys.
Essential ingredients to starting out as a UNIX Sysadmin and moving up.
...and you're set.
It's not too difficult to be a sysadmin. I came into this world from a degree in Physics & Math. The trick is to know what you're doing (for the most part) ahead of time. Now I'm in a senior positions, and I'm doing the hiring. So here are my easy steps to getting hired as a sysadmin:
1) Install and run as many different kinds of unix as you can get. DON'T just stick with Linux. When I do interviews and stuff, I get a million kids with Linux experience. Truly motivated sysadmins will also install xBSD and Solaris x86 (it's free -- go get it now). Run them every day. Make them work together over a network(NFS, NIS, etc). And when you apply, write all this experience down! Of course it counts as "real" experience!
2) Read all kinds of books. Develop your knowledge. You need to demonstrate a depth of understanding, in lieu of experience, when you're at an interview. If you can converse intelligently about the pros and cons of various topics, that's a good sign.
3) Here's an important one: do _NOT_ try to get a job at a small development shop run on Linux. This place will do very little for your career. You'll learn (guess what?) even more small-scale Linux skills. Woo. Now you're just like the vast majority of the people I interview but don't hire. From a career development point of view, it's far better to get into mid-sized or larger companies. Find places that can -afford- to buy EMC storage, Shark arrays, E6500s or 10ks, Cisco 8500s, giant robotic tape libraries. Find places that have fleets of enterprise servers, multiple remote offices, dedicated frame networks, and whatever other cool stuff you can find. Yeah, you'll be hopelessly lost in most of it, but you'll -learn-. If you're keen and enthusiastic, most places will let you get involved with the good stuff in some way. And if they don't let you watch over their shoulders while they're doing the cool stuff, leave and find another job if you can.
Sure, the "enterprise" stuff isn't the be-all and end-all of sysadmin. Buuuut having that stuff on your resume opens up a lot of doors, and gives you a lot of room to maneuver with your career. Small-scale shops are run very differently from "real" enterprise shops. That's not to say they're bad, it's just that it's a very small subset of the sysadmin universe, and it's vastly overpopulated right now.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
I had my friend install UNIX on my system, and I forced him to give me the root password. Now I am a UNIX administrator.
While I agree that plain software engineers can write damn good technical programs, they sometimes totally miss the point of what people actually want to have because they know nothing about a subject matter.
In my experience, some of the industries (especially medium sized business with appox 50-100 employees in special sectors like business selling medical care equipment) rely on a program without a proper database, but the software is really the only one they can use because it has all the features they need, e.g. automatically sending bills in the correct format to the health insurance companies etc.
The software companies that produce this software has now after years and years started writing a new version using an SQL server, but no client wants to use it yet because it is too new and they don't want to be the one beta testing it.
But to write technically good programs, you need to have a lot of experience and knowledge. While you can get away with sloppy programs in a lot of cases, in the majority you cannot, especially when programes grow. Writing scalable programs just takes a lot of practice and experience.
And you cannot just learn how to write good programs by going to a school a year or two. You need a lot more than that.
Same is true for would be admins. People come to the company who used to work in a totally different field (ie social studies teacher or something) who was laid off and went to an MCSE course and now thinks they can do everything.
I have seen a couple of these.
Some, who always worked in the past with computers as a hobby and have maybe administered a school network get on OK after a while, but the majority, no. You still have to explain what a subnet is to them, what a default gateway is, and when you see them repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again, and you gently suggest why he's spending so long on the task and doesn't write a script or but when you give them a book, they just don't understand a simple loop or even how to go about explaining a problem to a computer in a step by step way needed for scripting.
This may be contraversial what I am about to say now - there are two kind of people, and you can only be one or the other - and not both.
You are either artistically talented or technically.
The artistically they can draw, write poems, and stuff. Then there are the technically minded. When they write something, they prefer plain prose as they want to get on with things and don't see the point in cryptically expressing things. They can think more logically as they take things as given and do not question them. While the artistic tend to think around a lot of corners and have problems sperating stuff into simple steps.
As far as age goes - it is not really an age thing but of experience and if you can think logically or not.
When I came in for the interview, I went around to several workstations to speak with people who were on the job.
One was having a problem, and needed to reboot. He did the old "sync; sync; sync; shutdown", and with both he and my supervisor-to-be present, I said "if you just use 'reboot'" it's a lot faster, and you can go get your cup of coffee or go to the bathroom because it'll start back up on it's own.
I honestly think that got me the job. I'm a programmer, though, and after a couple of years I told them they needed to get a real system administrator because we were adding too many machines for me to both administrate and program.
I agree with the parent of this thread, though, I think you have to be a real masochist to WANT to be a system administrator.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
What is it about us philosophers and computers? I got my BA in Phil also, and I've been in the IT industry for years. All self-taught. Makes you say "Hmmmm.....?"
I had no formal training but I had a PC at home that I had spent many hours playing with.
Later we bought a Novel server so I had to learn that.
Later still we bought a server that ran SCO Unix Openserver to run an MRP application. So I began to learn UNIX.
Finally we upgraded to Windows NT workstations. I kept lamenting to a friend how much I hated windows. He told me about this cool OS called Linux. I'd always wanted to learn UNIX as it seemed to me to be what the "Professionals" used. With some reading and alot of help from my friend I setup a dialup internet proxy for all the NT workstations.
The big step came when I bought a new PC. That's when the learning really took off form me.
Finally, sick of my part time Sysadmin job I started looking for a full time one. I found one and my learning again took off. My boss knows alot more than I. He is a great learning tool.
The final learning tool for me was setting up my own domain. It really helped me bring everything together.
Use your resources and learn for yourself:
Good Luck!
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Truly?? I knew how to use the editor (vi) on a Sun box. No one else did, so I became the SysAdmin. Now I maintain a Mainframe (OS/390 to the unwashed), 25 AIX machines, and some Linux machines.
Oh, and I helped I had been an MVS/CICS Systems programmer for 10 years prior to the work on the Sun box.
Honor est omni
The quick story: I lucked into it
:)
The long story:
'94 I transferred to the University of Toledo, majored in Computer Science and Engineering. Met a guy in my CS class who was deep into unix. Got accounts on SunOS 4.1.3 servers, learned the zen of reading man pages and weaning myself off of DOS/Windoze.
'95 Unix loving friend helps me install RedHat on my home PC (he got sick of hearing about my failed attempts with slackware). Got a job in a unix (solaris) lab with the math department as a monitor.
'96 got a fulltime 2nd shift job to pay for way through school. It was a night operator job. Basically backup the novell box and run printouts and crap like that.
'97 starting playing with HP/UX at said job.
'98 realized I knew more about unix than the current admin. Current Admin left for much better job. I took over said admin's job.
'99 dealt with y2k stress. Installed several linux boxes at job.
'00 got Sun Ultras in the door to handle new e-commerce project.
'01 got job with Sun Microsystems...no longer an admin, but life is much better.
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
...than a comp sci degree. I started out as a physicist. As I made my way through grad school, I was always interested in computers. Gradually, I started managing machines for our research group and helping out with the management of the departmental machines. These were all VAX/VMS at the time. When we got our first Ultrix workstations, I was at the same level of knowledge as everybody else -- zero. I took over the management of these and some other Unix-y workstations owned by other research groups, and learned as I went along. (I learned the hard way, for example, that partition "C" in Ultrix means "the whole disk"!)
After I got my PhD, I worked as a post-doc and research scientist for a while. I still did a lot of work with computers, including a wide range of odd machines involved in the experiments I was working on at Los Alamos and in a couple of places in Switzerland. (If you like to travel, go into particle physics.)
After a few years of that, I took a job as the system administrator here in the Physics department. I'd long ago decided that I liked doing computers more than doing experimental physics, and my job security isn't quite so much subject to the whims of the funding agencies.
Anyway, I just sort of worked myself into it. Linux helped a lot. I started deploying Linux machines around 1993. Being able to poke around in the source code was useful, but it was also useful having a large, active community of enthusiasts who were all strung out along the same learning curve I was climbing. Another big help was the first edition of the "Unix System Administration Handbook", by Nemeth, Snyder and Seebass. Excellent book, and the newest edition looks even better.
One last thing: a big factor in my becoming a competent (?) system administrator was the support of the people directing me, who gave me a lot of latitude and let me experiment. Being able to spend time trying out new things (i.e., playing) is a vital part of learning system administration.
If you have the skills they need lie! I am sure everyone who wan't to be a unix admin would have an extra phone line and hopefully a few friends... So just lie through your teeth on your resume, and if you've got what it takes to be a unix admin, then you should be able to BS your way in somewhere. GOOD LUCK!
It's really easy
Forget the CS degree, or any 'official' training
Forget Unix
Look out for cheapskate companies trying to run their IT on a shoestring - CS majors etc. won't go near it with a bargepole, but you WILL! Your competition will be college guys who either got poor scores or never finished - you win because your mature with real world experience to use in interview situations, and a self-starter with technical nouse.
So stick it out for 9 months to one year then start looking again.
As I said, forget the Unix side - you want an OS admin job. Moving into Unix is easier at the next company, who might have a mixed environment and opportunities for you to impress.
After a few years, suss out the market and then go for the money. Hint - its not the admins who get it, its their managers!
I used to work at a university managing PC and Mac Labs. I had installed Linux on a PC and did reporting for the labs on a SunOS box. Since the university didn't pay well (Imagine that) I took my experience elsewhere and was hired to be a consultant doing NT admin stuff (Been running NT in the PC lab since 3.1, upgrade from LanMan 2.1!!)I made the mistake of telling my new supervisor that I knew some Unix... Next thing you know I was being farmed out to do Unix! Kind of fell into love with the power and ease of management of Unix and been doing it ever since!!
Most of the *nix admins I know had similar beginnings...
*narf!*
hmm.. you still bother with the jeans??
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
and very bogus. Isn't there better news than
old war stories. There's plenty of stories
to report that are not being carried by
CNN (Cheney News Network).
I had been using FreeBSD on my desktop for about 6 months. When I applied for an operations position at flush.nut, I told them that I had been an admin at my previous job. That got my foot in the door and the rest is history. Four unix jobs later, I now work in the noc at one of the largest phone companies in the country.
-- ghx
I work with a lot of clueless people who have the title "sys admin". Its mostly in big companies who care more about filling seats so they can say we have n people on staff at all times.
I started at my company having a BS degree in Comp Sci, but there are people who I work with who went to school for totally unrelated majors
who do the same thing that I did when I started. Some of them actually do it quite well.
The problem is that for most entry level Sys-admin jobs, once you get over the learning curve (which isnt that high) it gets a bit mundane. Basic trouble shooting includes clearing disk usage, checking to see if a machine is pingable, restarting server processes, checking that backups ran ok, and reading logs. Thus as stated above, anyone can do it. Its second level support and above that gets interesting. You get all the problems no one else could fix.
This is not my sig
Wow, big question!
My path was fairly convoluted: I started out as a programmer and....
Wrote software for a dental lab to select teeth for dentures.
Moved on to write COBOL code for a newspaper's billing system.
Wrote a problem tracking database for the International Space Station.
Took a job working at IBM's RS/6000 division as a hardware tech. Cut my teeth on AIX and the first Slackware Linux distro.
A layoff began my dark days as a Windows NT system administrator. 3 years of 80+ hour weeks later...
Went to work for an aerospace company as a AIX SysAdmin.
Not hard to become a Unix Admin as long as you are willing to learn new things and take a chance. Sometimes you have to look for an opportunity in obscure places; say, offer to teach a course on webpage design or writing documentation using SGML on Linux systems and offer to be the SysAdmin for the machine used by the class.
Also realize that many of the job listings you see often are looking for gobs of experience, but are not willing to pay the money for the right person to fit the job. See if you can find an employer who would be willing to send you to training to help you fit the position.
Don't let anyone tell you you are "too old" to start a new career in the tech field. The day you're too old is the day they bury you!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I had worked as a COBOL programmer, drafted to recruiting duty, and then was assigned to network simulators. Talk about shock treatment. This is going from mainframes to DOS (at home) to IRIX was a kick in the pants. Crash course, rude awakening. "Adapt and overcome". Fortunately, Linux at home saved my *ss.
My mother got a degree in Electrical Engineering, then after not being employed for about 15 years (raising kids instead) she applied to do admin on VMS machines (high end at the time) for a large organization. The organization gradually switched to SunOS and HP/UX, so she gradually switched from VMS to UNIX.
In university she did a very little bit of programming in Fortran on punch cards. Programming is not a very large part of administration, though it can make dealing with peculiar situations (which nobody else has dealt with) easier.
After some five years of applications programming on the QNX platform, I got to be more expert at it (the OS) than my peers, and often resolved problems at that level. That led to a higher interest in systems software (I ported a lot of stuff to QNX). That, in turn, led to more involvement with the network the machines lived on, which led me to more "mainstream" U**Xes.
In short, I evolved.
And no, you're not too old. I'm in my forties, and am still learning!
I've personally found every job I've ever had from just meeting people in the hallway at LISA. The "hallway track" is the most important thing, because you get to rub elbows with Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Aeleen Frisch, Paul Vixie, etc.--you can ask them questions and get the real dirt rather than just speculating with your friends and coworkers. Those same experts give all-day tutorials for three days teaching about Sendmail, DNS, sysadmin, security, etc. And then there are three days of papers and talks!
It's in San Diego the first week of December this year. You can read about it here.
(In the interest of disclosure I should say that I'm involved with SAGE, one of the co-sponsors of LISA.)
1) Get a job at an ISP (that uses UNIX) even if it's just Tech Support to start. Ask the sysadmins lots of questions. Show them you are eager to learn.c t=1054), or even that Linux thing, on an extra machine you hopefully have. Toy with it, don't be afraid to fuck it up cause you'll want to be familiar with the install process anyways :-)
2) Install FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org, http://www.bsdcentral.com/catalog/index.php?produ
3) Buy some O'Reilly books on UNIX (http://unix.oreilly.com/) and read whatever appeals to you in them.
4) Learn about UNIX security (http://people.freebsd.org/~jkb/howto.html)
You'll probably find yourself "backdoor'd" into it... I know I did.
;-)
I was actually interested in programming at the time. I did plenty of research into compilers and such for the Windows platform, and found out what a crappy experience it would have been. Started reading a lot about this "Lee-nucks" Operating System... decided to finally bite the bullet and dual-boot my win95 box with RedHat 5.2 (boxed version).
That was about 4 years ago. Next thing I knew, certain projects (web servers, ftp servers [ick!], remote access [ssh], perl/shell scripting, databases, networking, firewalls, VPN's... were filling up my time and my knowledge base. The drive to continually learn more and more about *nix drove me to try other OS's as well: Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, etc.
I finally managed to get a Systems Engineer position (read: glorified SysAdmin with networking abilities) with a [non-dot-com] startup during the dotcom boom that really blossomed my experience with Sun and Alpha Hardware. This alone will probably help me get my foot into more doors than anything else I've accomplished (before or since). It also gave me plenty of opportunity to refine my perl and shell scripting, as well as network troubleshooting (learn tcpdump... love tcpdump!).
Moral of the story- if you really want to do it, it's never too late, but it will definitely make it more difficult... on a geometrically progressive scale. Get in the industry as someone's Jr. whipping boy and you should be ok. I'm almost 30 myself, but I still garner my share of respect from my younger peers... as long as you show the desire to learn and expand your knowledge base, you'll be ok.
Of course, that doesn't mean you're not allowed to be a prima donna as well.
-FP.
Got drunk in a server room one night.
next day our file server was running on slackware.
god knows how I did it.
I was a graduate student and the physics department had just acquired some UNIX systems. It was decided that a graduate student should handle the admin tasks and I got the call.
Yet Another Web Site
You'd be amazed at how many folks come up from the dregs of their university helpdesk. Unfortunately, as you're already 33, and most have had a job that actually pays well, and you don't have to deal with abusive people, this may not be the best way for you to go.
For me, and quite a few of the folks that I've seen, they get a part time job during college, supervising the computer labs in some way, then once they're seen as dependable and hard working, they might be given a few extra tasks to do by your manager, or they might just been seen as the person that everyone keeps refering questions to.
From there, you either use that as a job reference to go someone else, or if you like working for the university, you wait for a good job opening (expanding the department, someone leaving), and work your way up from there. [I did a little of both -- I left for a couple of years, then came back]
Of all of the folks I've dealt with in the past dozen years or so, I've only seen one person recently make the change over once they were over 30. [Quite a few did so decades ago, but it doesn't seem to be a common thing these days]. Unfortunately, he was a little bit of a black sheep, as he kept making poor decisions which affected other departments, and many of the other system admins wanted nothing to do with him. The person who hired him had also been stripped of all of their hiring abilities. Of course, he didn't try to take the slow route, but went to a certificate course, and then applied for the job.
I would say that the folks who don't come from an all-computer background tend to make better system/network admins overall. I've worked with some great folks with Psych/History/Art/construction backgrounds, and because they don't think in the conventional CompSci/CompE terms, they can sometimes circumvent many of the problems. There have been quite a few CompSci folks that have made spectacular system admins, but there also tend to be so many of 'em in the field who suck, and bring down their average.
So, well, where's that leave you? Unfortunately, there aren't many places to go. You say you're a teacher, but not where. If it's in higher education (college, university, whatever), you might be able to teach a class with a computer slant once a year/semester whatever, come up with a reason to put up your own server, so that you can work it all back into fleshing out a resume. For high school/middle school, you might be able to do some of the same stuff with extracurricular activities...maybe be an advisor for a computer club, etc.
If you're a seasonal teacher (eg, high school, and have 2months off for the summer), or you have enough extra time, you might try moonlighting for an ISP helpdesk, and flesh out your resume from there. Although it might be possible to take some certificate course, and then get some manager to hire you when you have to experience, you'll do better in the long run if you get a good foundation, and build from there.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
These things are nice, but I'm looking for when I interview you are these:
- Can you show that you learn and adapt on your own.
- Can you deal with people.
- Will you work a problem until it's solved.
Here's what I don't give a rat's ass about:I used to give applicants a 10-question quiz that was designed to see what you did under pressure and when you didn't know the answer (one guy came close, but nobody ever got a 10). My boss made me stop when its reputation kept even good people from applying. :)
I guess they didn't realize it wasn't supposed to be like the lame classroom exams they were used to around here.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
After getting mugged for the third time, two by knife and another by gun, and surviving happening in on a gang turf war while trying to make a single delivery, I realized that I bet I could get a safer job where I could wear t-shirts and jeans too. I had been dinking with UNIX boxen up to that point and saw and ad at the local library to administer a small system they had (the thing is while it was UNIX getting a shell on it was impossible).
I bullshitted the entire interview including my age.
You can't grep a dead tree.
For education, I got a EE, but a CS degree is just as good. The college degree can mean the difference between being a SysAdmin for a local ISP making $7/hour or being a SysAdmin for a large company making $50K/year. In my experience, the Sun/SGI/HP certifications don't mean anything unless you want to be a contractor or a consultant.
As for actually learning anything, 5 years ago I picked up "Unix for Dummies". Now I'm a Unix sysadmin for 125 systems. You need to read any Unix book you can get your hands on. O'Reilly's "Essential System Administration" or "Unix in a Nutshell" are good starting points.
Also, learn shell scripting, perl, python, basic html, c, java, and maybe even some basic SQL commands. Also learn how to set up tcp wrappers, apache, tomcat, and maybe even samba. All those products have plenty of books or online tutorials.
I know the above sounds like a lot, but in the long run its well worth it.
The local ISP may be the place to start. Some of them will hire anyone. Then you can start building your resume for the larger companies.
Best of luck.
YMMV...
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
I started at the bottom years ago, worked as a Help Desk tech for a university. Took care of Windows 3.11 machines and Macs.
Moved up to Help Desk manager after a couple years, and had a few pleebs under me for about a year.
The sysadmin at the time left for greener pastures, and I was offered the position. Never really messed with Unix/Linux before, but my boss was willing to help me out. It was great!
I have no degree, no formal training in anything related to computers. Experience really counts in this field of systems support, and I was able to recently land a new job for a scientific research company fairly easily. I now get to play with SGIs, IBM clusters, tons of Linux machines, and a handful of Alpha based machines.
It is not easy being a sysadmin sometimes, but I love it.
I slid sideways from a CS PhD I got bored with. An
opening as an admin in the department came up, so I
took it. Never looked back since.... and I think
this is a pretty common scenario, and not just for
CS. EG David Dawes (xfree86 dude) was the sysadmin
in the physics department at my uni and he started
out the same way IIRC (sorry David if I'm mistaken!)
Many moons ago, I wrote and used scientific
:-)
applications on NASA mainframes. When time came
to buy a new computer (we had only one, and
replacing it was a big deal) I was on the
selection committee as a user representative.
I became convinced that it was time to make
what was at the time a controversial change,
to go with a new, upstart vendor instead of
just another CDC. I pushed that decision
through.
Then I had to make it work.
That was a decade and a half ago. I still
occasionally do development, but spend an awful
lot of my time helping other users/developers
on one way or another - keeping their systems
running, debugging their code, whatever.
And I still remember that the reason I'm doing
this is to help the users. This tends to make
me unpopular with the bureaucracy, but the users
trust and stand behind me. Even when I tell them
that I can't allow something they would like to
do, they trust that I've got good reasons.
I broke into unix administration in college. I was working on a fluid-dynamic simulation code and made the mistake of asking the school's sysadmins to mount/unmount/dump/restore/whatever one time too many. Found myself (reluctantly) with the root password. Then found out that Next machines (this was 1989; NextOS 0.8beta had just been released) ran much faster than 1/4 of the school's 11/780. Soon I had root keys to four NeXT machines running mach, a DECstation 3100, some sort of (then-) screaming fast 386 machine running SVR4,and a sort of klunky Tektronix terminal. The main guidance I got was, "Don't break anything, and whatever you do don't bother us."
That turned out to be excellent experience, and in graduate school I administered a VAX and a couple of Ultrix workstations just because we needed to do work on 'em and there wasn't any money for a sysadmin.
My point? Just start administering whatever way you can. The problem-solving and man-page-reading skills are far more important than anything you might put on a resume.
This worked for me (current UNIX admin, former teacher).
Easy Part:
1) Read lots of trade rags, technical web sites, etc.
2) Take some for-credit college classes (networking, programming, telecommuications). I had 20 credit hours in technology courses before I tried to change fields.
3) Do stuff on your own. PCs are cheap; get a test box and install Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris X86, etc and make up your own mind about what you think is good and what is not. Do networking, programming, database, build a broad intellectual base.
4) Apply your skills somewhere in your current job (is there a student computer lab at your school?) Find someplace to get your hand in.
Hard Part:
Now get your resume in line and find a place to break into fulltime. Do not downplay your previous career. Many of the best "computer people" trained for other professions.
Good luck and be persistent.
I've personally found every job I've ever had from just meeting people in the hallway at that conference. The "hallway track" is the most important thing, because you get to rub elbows with Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Aeleen Frisch, Paul Vixie, etc.--you can ask them questions and get the real dirt rather than just speculating with your friends and coworkers. There are three days of tutorials where these same experts teach about sendmail, perl, dns, security, etc. And then there's three days of invited talks and papers, too!
It's in San Diego the first week of December this year. You can read about it here.
You have to give up your social life. Then comes the years of intense training, making sure they don't run away before it's been done. Then you want to make sure their voices are just perfect, and they speak fluent Latin. Then, one great day, you just *snip* *snip*, and it's done.
What? You said *UNIX*? Oh, sorry, thought you said eunuchs...
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Well, I was happy just being a Linux user, but then
;-)
I got married and guess who the Unix administrator
at home is now?
Keep this in mind if you're thinking of getting
married to a Comp. Lit. major.
I was a taxi driver and my best friend is this lesbian who works at a gay website that needed tech help, this was of course in the giddy days of 1998, when the US handed over the entire economy to mentally ill people on cocaine, anyway I took the job. The only experience I'd had was I used Linux at home because I couldn't afford a Macintosh and certainly didnt want to use Microsoft. The FSF anarchist mentality appealed to me. Pretty ridiculous huh? My last job paid 100k, unemployment pays $230 a week! Pretty sweet!
Before i was a Unix admin, i was a senior helpdesk tech. I had experience with Linux & Solaris on x86. The director of IT operations was interviewing inside the company for a Unix position and I submitted my resume. I was not the most qualified of applicants, but I was certainly the most professional. Unlike the others I wasn't zealous about UNIX and I acknowledged the fact that NT had its place in our environment. I had the maturity and professionalism lacking in many in the tech field at that time. Much to my surprise, I was given the job. I proved to them that I could do the job by spending almost every waking moment studying and tinkering. 3 years down the road I recognize that I got very lucky, right in the middle of a dot-com rally. However my background has been tremendously rewarding - My stance on Unix & Windows interoperability makes me much more attractive to the employers that I would want to work for, as opposed to someone who would say to hell with standards and throw the Free-and-CoolUnix-Variant-OS-of-the-day on production servers. Now I'm certified as a MCP, SCSA and SCNA. I'm a few tests away from my MCSE. I'm getting paid way under market value though, after getting laid off from my last job and taking a position with a television broadcaster. :( Damn the economy - DAMN IT!
I started out as a Novell gofer, running disks around for people in a small company running ARCNET and Novell 3.11 on a $5000 486DX/50 and doing Windows for Workgroups installs. The pay sucked.
Then, I moved to a company that was starting up in the ISP business in '95. That's where I first started learning UNIX. After that, I went to a real, national ISP as a junior admin and learned perl.
Basically, I started out in the kitchen scrubbing plates - I did the crap work and moved up from there, getting real world experience. I also got extremely lucky, with the popularity of the Internet starting up demand for UNIX admins, and there being a complete absence of such people at the time.
These days, the supply of junior admins is much greater than it used to be, so getting an easy break like I had is harder, but if you're willing to make almost no money for the first six months to a year, you can get some real world experience.
Fix it. Didn't know root passwd. Cracked it. No idea where the manuals were. Learned to use man. Discovered BSD and switched to that. Discovered Linux. Switched to that. Learned to program because no one was developing apps that did what we needed. Undergrad: Philosophy and Classical History. Grad: Cultural Geography.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
- get some (or to some) UNIX like workstation and get accustomed to using it as regular user
- get some (or to some) UNIX like server, preferably with some users others than you and get accustomed to let the users do as much of their stuff with as little limitations as possible
After all that, if someone considers you to be UNIX sysadmin either by telling you so or by paying you for such job, you are there.- required: learning
- requirements: learning
Note: Learning is still required!
hany
How much money?
I was swayed by money in my teens. I hacked, I played with gadgets, and I need the money to buy gadgets and pay for dinner. Sysadmin work payed the bills nicely. Why? Because there's always more sysadmin work than coding work, if only because most code is execrable filth used by illiterate idiots. Someone has to get paid to clean up the inevitable mess.
The problem is that the position of sysadmin is much like the position of janitor. You do a necessary job. You get insulted. No one cares about your other talents. You don't get paid anywhere near enough money for the sheer volume of shit (and sheer number of shits) you have to deal with every day. You quit. You get a job somewhere else and you never, ever, EVER mention that you were a sysadmin -- or even that you know what root is.
But eventually you start to care. You do good work as a hacker somewhere, but that somewhere has no sysadmin. You slip up; you're dumb enough to open you mouth or even stupid enough to fix something. Then you're a sysadmin again.
Here's your pager, here's your boss. There's an e250 talking to three gladiatior arrays holding five years of our data in a combination of oracle 7.mumble.foo and flat text files. Our lead developer is a seventeen year old in Pune and his assistant is a drunkard in Antwerp. They both have root access. We have no backups and no budget to buy tapes. Oh yeah, and the water pipes for the fire sprinklers have leaky valves right over that rack. Have fun. And I'd like an estimate of the costs of switching over to Exchange on my desk Monday.
How do people become sysadmins? Bad choices, bad mistakes, and punishment for sins a previous life. You don't want to do it. Asking this is like asking "How do I get my left testicle run over by a unimog?"
Trust me. Give up now. Go eat granola, smoke dope, sing hippie songs, and live under a tree somewhere. You'll be happier.
You are one sick bastard. Why would anybody voluntarily become a sysadmin? The way it traditionally works, is that your job is something else, but you (foolishly) install or set up something correctly (because no one else around, knows how, and it's something you need to get done in order to do your work) and forever afterwards, you're known as the guy who knows how to do that kind of stuff. Sysadminning is a trap for unwary programmers. It's something you should be running from, not to.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For me, I've spent my whole life avoiding the inevitable.
I went to college for History and Music, and though I spent most of my free time with computers, I absolutely resisted the pull.
I went to Grad school for French Revolutionary History, a topic about as non-CS as it gets.
However, I needed funding so I took a part-time grad assistantship with a UNIX server cluster.
I'm now a full-time SysAdmin at the University and have not yet finished that Doctorate.
In answer to the questions: I have absolutely NO certification of any sort, and I have NEVER taken a computer science class. I am completely self-taught. It was all about being in the wrong place at the right time...
Some might say I'm completely unqualified, and they would be right. But then, I'm employed in a fairly high-paying job with a reasonably loose schedule at a University that has never laid off any of its tech staff, so I'm staying where I am.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
First, just don't. Go away. You really don't want to become a crotchity, nasty, old, bastard. Especially by the age of 25.
Second, know your skills. Learn, learn, learn, learn. I highly recommend the O'reilly books, especially, Unix administration, Unix security, DNS and BIND, TCP/IP admin, and some random specifics, like sendmail, NIS, whatever takes your fancy. Learn shell scripting. Learn it the right way. Learn it before ANY[1] other scripting language. Then learn Perl, or Python, or the next nifty scripting language.
Third: Maybe this should be first, but it's hard to tell until you've spent time on 1 and 2... Figure out if you really have what it takes to do this job. Answer these questions:
Do you mind going upto 3-4 days with no sleep, on a semi-regular basis for part of your life?
Do you mind knowing that at any moment, on any day, you could be paged by an irriate customer blaming you, personally, for thier outtage, only to spend 5 hours of your "off-work" time to find out that thier clueless idiot changed a config somewhere?
Can you describe yourself as stubborn, pig-headed, or unwilling to give up on a problem?
Do you think you have troubleshooting skills?
Can you learn mission-critical things, on the fly, while doing mission-critical changes? Layman's terms: Could you learn to fire a gun, while being fired at? Or learn to fly a 747, after it's already in the air, without a functional radio, and the pilots are dead?
Are you squeemish about the site of blood? (Ok, joke, blood sacrifices aren't done these days, honest!)
Forth: If after all that, you still think you want to be an admin, go read alt.sysadmin.recovery for several weeks, and go read the Bastard Operator From Hell series.
Then, if you still want to be an sysadmin, go walking through a highway, jumping in front of cars as they speed by. It'll be less painful, and less life threatening.
I'm purposely discouraging anyone from choosing this path. The path generally chooses you. Abuses you, and thoroughly screws you.
Still, I wouldn't go do anything else in the world. *shrug* Some people are born deranged. Like me.
How'd I do it? Fell into it. Was really disliking developement, really enjoyed the hardware and low level guts of admining. I'd had a linux home network since Slackware 2.0, did most of my CS degree on unix machines, and have done all my own hardware/software repair since my first XT. *shrug* It was natural for me, and all I had to do to get a job was look. This was pre-IT boom too.
[1] This is debatable, but I feel is a necessary blood sacrifice to prove you have what it takes. Perl/Python/Expect/etc are better, no doubt, but when the system is hosed, and all you have is a boot disk kernel, and a few utilities, knowing how to use and program Borne is a _really_ necessary thing.
More important than luck though, is some skill or background. I started with Linux in 1993, and we set up a 2 pc network in our dorm (way before I'd ever heard of anyone doing it, but I'm sure we weren't the first.) So I turned into a Linux monkey. And back then you really had to know it to get anything going. I spent an entire weekend downloading Slackware onto floppies.
One summer some CS friends of mine got co-op jobs and they got me in too. My future boss liked me, and the linux stuff and hired me. I ended up staying through the summer and for a semester writing shell scripts to do various little things and helping out the sysadmin when there was nothing else to do. Cool stuff.
Then I got away from it for a bit, graduated, got a job, and they needed some help moving from 95 to NT, so I helped out a bit since I was already running NT. Then most of the systems guys left and I asked for a job. Now I'm the linux/2000 guy.
So it took some luck, some knowing someone, but mostly the ability, the skill, and the confidence to tackle systems problems. Cool stuff - best of luck.
Let me start by saying: I've been Sr. UNIX (mostly Linux) / network admin for a medium sized, still in business dot com for about 2.5 yrs. Couple of hundred servers, about a dozen web sites and all the related hardware. Like alot of others in this field that I know I'm on the 7-10 year college graduation plan and currently have no degree. Diverse and qualified experience were more important, atleast to my employer, than a diploma.
Now to answer your question, How do I get started?: In my opinion, the best way is through a small/medium sized ISP. Unfortunatly there aren't alot of those around anymore, but its a great way to get started. Since money/resources are usually tight there's alot of creative thinking and solutions. Also, because there usually aren't alot of employees, but still a need to support many services (smtp, pop, imap, nntp, radius, dns, etc...) you'll get alot of exposure to a variety of hardware and software. They'll almost always have a tech support department and without alot of prior experience thats a great way to get your foot in the door. 5-6 years ago, while just beginning to dabble in linux and without any relevant experience to speak of, I sent a resume to a local mom and pop outfit. I got hired as first level tech support in a company of about 15 people. I left three years later as a sys-admin with not only OS (Solaris, Linux, M$) and software specific experience, but also alot of LAN/WAN (Cisco, 3Com, HP, Alteon, Bay, etc...) experience to boot. Lots of learning under fire and if you're looking for a decent paycheck find another alternative, but I can honestly say that there's not a chance in hell I'd have the job I do now without having been there. Just my two bits...
Suddenly, I realized, everything had gone terribly wrong.
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in LV
Speaking as a sysadmin who deals with a shitload of NT servers along with a number of Unix and Linux servers, I can agree with this. Whenever I'm having a bad day at work, I just think about how that first bowl is going to taste when I get home. When a user has a stupid request, I think about it. When the tape drive goes on the fritz right when a user needs that really important file back right now (if it was so fucking important why did he DELETE IT?), I think about it.
Thank heavens for upper management that knows better than to drug test our IT staff. We'd lose all the good people in the department. Gotta love this sort of "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
First, let me echo some advice given earlier: You DO NOT want to become a sysadmin. Having said that, here are some things I've noticed about the hiring process as it applies to sysadmins in particular.
First, you have to realize that (assuming you're applying at an organization of any size) the people you would be working for are not the people who write the job descriptions that get posted in the paper or on monster. When we're hiring sysadmins, we fight constantly with HR to allow us to at least look at the resumes of people who graduated in something other than CS or MIS (shudder). We like looking at these resumes because we tend to not consider anyone with a CS degree. If these people are any good, they generally want to be software engineers, not the guy who gets paged into the office at 7a on a Sunday to switch somebodys monitor back on. If a CS degree holder is applying for a SA job, they are either stupid or looking to extend an H1B for a few months while they are applying at microsoft.
The things I want to know about a SA candidate
-Will this person go postal when things go bad? Things will go bad in this job. If you can't handle the pressure, then it doesn't matter if you're the greatest technical genius ever.
-Can this person learn independently? This is key. I don't have time to hold your hand. I may have time to show you how to do something, but, it's a safe bet I only have time to show you once.
-Does this person know what they don't know? 'Uh, well...I was trying out the various switches to the rm command while logged on as root and...' No. Ask. I may not have time to explain just then, but I always have time to say, 'Just leave that the hell alone for right now.'
My point is: certifications are useless, degrees are useless. Being a certain type of person is the only thing that matters. If you just like tech, then give it up. The personality of good SAs is closer to that of ambulance drivers than it is to any other technical profession. People who enjoy tinkering with their home pcs and want to be SAs becuase they think it's easier to become an SA than a programmer may get a junior job, but they won't last.
Having said all that, and bearing in mind that you don't really want to become a sysadmin, let me say that being a SA is the greatest job in the history of the world. "These are great days we're living in, bros. We are jolly green giants walking the earth...with Leathermans." If you really are one of the tribe, I wish you luck.
As a matter of practical advice, you might try applying at a local college or university. Colleges and universities can generally pay significantly less to technical staff than private industry and are sometimes willing to take a risk with a marginal candidate.
I took a night job to do end of day processing at a place that had UNIX. I was taking classes at the local college so the job provided beer money. The company bought a couple more server and decided they needed a REAL admin. I took the job and quit school.
Since then I have changed jobs several times and now run the UNIX operations for the east coast for an ISP. still don't have a degree, though I do have one certification (laugh). One company was required to have a certain number of people certified by sun to get their discount. (30 minute test I took one friday afternoon when I didn't feel like working)
Try a call center for an ISP. We occasionally bring people in from our call center that have shown to be good.
1> Learn the material. Tinker with it constantly, it's the only real way to learn.
2> Get a job in the biz, ANY job in the biz(help desk, gopher, whatever). You'll learn more about real admining doing this than you ever will at home.
3> Constantly look for opportunities to apply your home built skills.
4> Know when to move on. Once you build up some solid work time for your resume, don't be afraid to leave your current job for something more inline with what you want to do with your career.
I, too, was an English Major. I've been a Solaris enterprise SysAdmin for eight years, have worked at Sun, IBM, MCI, FannieMae and for the local govbernment of a really cool ski town in Colorado.
/hate relationship with SysAdmin. I thought I would only do it for a few years, getting out before 30. Now I am 34 and still a SysAdmin.
I started off working in the Business Department's computer labs because I had to write so many papers doing my dual degree. Then I got into hacking the old compact Macintoshes for fun.
Upon graduation, all of the traditional business roles I thought I would be perfectly qualified to enter into were inaccessible to me without experience. But as soon as word got out that I could network heterogeneous systems and build PCs, I got to do that. Then by coincidence I met a VP of a development shop who needed a NEXTSTEP sysadmin. Since the Mac command keys worked seamlessly on NeXT, I bluffed my way in. NeXT morphed into SunOS 4.x work, which became Solaris, a little Linux was picked up starting in '96, and the money kept me coming back each subsequent Monday.
I somewhat agree with the "Advice" thread above. I have a love
It gives me what I want, but is a very taxing job that can make you old before your time.
I was self-employed and did freelance Windows support and programming. One of my friends, who I trust very much, told me to have a look at Linux. I didn't. Some time afterwards, he repeated himself, and since I trust him very much, I bought Red Hat Linux 5.0, but didn't get a clue about that, and I didn't have time enough to spend on it. I chose Red Hat because I called my webhotel and asked what they used, and they used Red Hat.
Later I found out a way to learn Linux: I set myself the goal to be able to set up a file and printer server, and then I would set up Linux-servers at some of my customers, earning money on servicing Linux-servers. It took some time to learn all the necessary stuff before I could administer Samba: File system, security, user administration etc. The first Linux I set up at my customers was a Red Hat 6.0.
After having set up a couple of file and printer servers I started to get more and more knowledge, and today I am the only system administrator on 18 servers at different companies and create all types of solutions for these companies. I spend less than 10% of my time on Windows now, and I find my job much more interesting now.
Some special tasks I have done since are:
- Troubleshooting Debian and Slackware installations.
- Helped a webhotel track down a hacker.
- Helped another webhotel structure their business.
- Certain administrative tasks on Siemens Nixdorf Unix (I think it's named Sinix).
- Troubleshooting a Voice-over-IP box that was based on SCO Unix.
The conclusion is: Define a configuration you would like to be able to administrate, like a Webserver or a file-server. When you have reached that goal, improve your skills. After that, set yourself a new goal. The rest is easy.
My education is M.Sc.E.E.
As far as formal education goes, I dropped out of collage after ammassing 20 credits in two years.
At the time I was just looking for a job and my first one was as a computer operator. This was in the "olden days" of punch cards, etc.
I did this for a few years, then got talked into applying for an internship as a programmer. Imagine my supprise when I got excepted. Again, this was in the "olden days"... COBOL/CICS programmer on MVS.
Well, after doing this for some more years I found myself in the position of having to make some information available on the niacent web. I had been playing with this thing called Linux since November or Devember of 1991 and, since I had to get the data up but had $0.00 budget, I did what I had to do. OC, once the system was up it needed to be maintained. Thus, for the last 6 or 7 years, I have been a SysAdmin.
The way I learned my "craft" was through books, experamentation & lots of questions. Dumb luck had a LOT to do with things.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Seriously. 200 acres for the Army Corps of Engineers... That was in high school, though. :-)
Having the capability to teach yourself new tricks quickly is a definate "must have" for being a sysadmin.
Although I am mostly a programmer my job also requires me to do some remote Unix Administration for other companies. But How did it get into Unix Administration.
Well it started in 1994 when I Installed Linux on my computer and learned how to use it. (I was in high school at the time) So I learned how to Use Unix like systems from them. When I went into college with a CS degree I did most of my work on the Sun Unix systems. I also took a course on Unix Internals (It was mosttly about Unix IPC). I also got a parttime job (they usually hire any CS students who have good grades) in the CompSci Lab as a System Admin for Both NT and UNIX systems, I concetrated on the UNIX systems. So I learned more about Administration for a computer network. When it came to the real world jobs I just put that I did Unix System Administration at my college. That and a extensive Unix experence helped me get a Unix Admin job.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I became a UNIX admin by hanging out around a bunch of other UNIX admins until they let me have root. Then I started to get rid of them...
Well, after dripping out of college (oops... I meant to type dropping... but it was in Oregon), I went to work in agriculture and then construction.
After plumbing for 2 years, a local network consultant who knew my sister wanted to interview me. I told him I didn't know anything about Windows but had some Linux experience, so he hired me.
Now I'm an admin for several Linux servers around town. Best job I ever had, and I've learned more here than my whole time in college.
Except for yesterday, when I had to install Microsoft FrontPage Extensions on an Apache Server on Linux.... Microsoft doesn't make anything but the most common tasks (i.e., changing your desktop background) easy.
P.S.-- Plumbing is a great motivator to learn something else.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Summarized to:
If you see a problem, fix it.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
In my case I sat next to the Jr. Sys Admin in a 4 man cubical. I had an
Associates Degree in Electronics and a lot of free time being a Lab Tech. I
spent 2 years reading everything I could about unix. I read all the manpages,
books, newsgroups, webpages, and magazines I could find until the Sys Admin
started asking me questions. Then when he left, he pointed to me to take over.
So here I am 5 years later a Sr. Admin teaching a Jr. Admin the ropes.
Well, a friend of mine was an English major in college, spent ten years editing books and whatnot, and decided to become a Unix admin/engineer. Fortunately, he made his decision in the 2000 economy, not the 2001 economy. So, he went to an employment agency, and they placed him with the company I was working with. The employers look beyond your experience and certifications to see what kind of an employee you can be.
If you can find a company like that, you're in. The problem is, in this economy it's hard to find that kind of openness. My advice is to wait a year or whatever for things to get back to normal, then try going to an employment agency and seeing if they can place you. And, ignore the stated qualifications in newspaper ads. They ALL say BS in that, whatever in this, it's just for show. That's never a requirement.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
As a university student, CS major, I worked the Helpdesk answering moron question like "Why won't it print?" I soon tired of this and had recently discovered SunOS 4.x. Pig in mud. Without permission, I repartitioned a WFW machine to give me about 200MB, reloaded the now shorter windows partition, and loaded Slackware on the other partition. I booted from floppy so no one ever new it was on the machine. This was in the kernel < 1.0 days, everyone running COFF execs.
In short, when they found out I had stolen an IP address off a dead workstation they were totally unmotivated to fix, in the far corner of one of the nastiest computer lab we had, they threw a fit and fired my rear end. The experience I gained from having a machine on the network, connected to network resources taught me about the hard stuff like DNS and routing. I also learned an awful lot about HD partitioning in that short time frame.
I was tore up that I'd lost the job, but I knew then that knowledge was power, I now had knowledge, and those who held the power didn't want to surrender any, so I had to go. I've been thankful every day for the experience it gave me. I don't do sysadmin every day. It's not rewarding enough, but I know so much about the underlying system, it makes my programming all the better.
And yes, like others have said, I have two Linux boxes at home, and am starting to play with Firewalls.
Oh, the power hungry moron who thought I was trouble: Patty Vendt, Wright State University.
I wanted to write some server code--specifically a talker and a MUD--and I looked around on the 'net (back in the days of Netscape Gold) and heard that Linux was cheap and provided a good base for such adventures. My boss (a Unix admin) loaned me a distribution and I just installed it and started trying to mess with it on a spare box. I broke it a few times, but I learned just by doing.
I started out as a tech support person at an ISP around 93 || 94.
(medium local one) then everybody either quit or got fired. I was just kinda started to take care of the Unix servers.... After some time I was basicly running the whole show, while the owner did the customer billing. Moved up to an Edu and now i run the network and all the servers for my department.
Go find a local (not national or even local office of a national company) web hosting company or ISP. Find one that is small but serious (if such a bird still exists out there).
Get an entry level job doing tech support, (yep that means phone support for sometimes trying customers).
Let your employer know you have Unix skills and experience. Most likely, within a few months, you will end up doing backups, patch installations and other mundane, yet mildly educational tasks.
After a year or so of this, start checking job sites and putting out your resume, (if you have hit the proverbial ceiling at your current job).
Find a jr. admin job at a larger company (hint: look for a company that uses a variety of hardware and OS's - best chances for exposure).
Be willing to be the backup tape swapper, user admin, Unix help desk (oh boy, that's fun), whatever.
Oh yeah, don't get married, have kids, expect to have a life, plan on sleeping in, going to bed early or never have a waking hour without a pager and cell phone attached to you.
That sounds like the title of a great poll to me. Imagine the poll:
How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator?
o Programming too stressful.
o Some script I got off IRC.
o Told to "upgrade the NT servers" (apologies to Shoten!).
o Read "Tricks of the UNIX Masters" over thirty times.
o That's GNU/UNIX administrator, thank you very much.
o Everyone else laid off, also CEO and Janitor.
o Defeated CowboyNeal in hand-to-hand Nealmatch.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I got saddled as the UNIX "SysAdmin Guy" by knowing how to type 'ls'. Next thing you know, I'm being asked to set-up Internet connections to SUN Workstations, supporting engineers with mount woes and backing things up. The problem? I'm a programmer, but they keep asking me to do UNIX sysadmin stuff. *sigh*
I also used to be a Windows/NT IS support grunt. I'd rather admin UNIX, thank you very much...
I am still officially a programmer and spend most of my time programming (Thank Ghu!), but I'll get an e-mail or phone call and I'm back in the sysadmin trenches. What's really sad? I've had our company's UNIX sysadmins call me for help!
Yes, I do have Linux at home. Why do you ask...? :-)
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Choose no life. Choose no career. Choose no family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose disk arrays the size of washing machines, modem racks, CD-ROM writers, and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose chairs for your office in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose SMTP and wondering why the fuck you are logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that swivel chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pushing you last in some miserable newsgroups, nothing more than an embarassment to the selfish, fucked up loosers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate.
Choose your future.
CHOOSE TO SYSADMIN!
Currently, I play on both sides of the fence, both Windows and Unix (does that mean I go both ways? don't go there...). Anyway, I like working with Unix OS's alot more than NT/2K. I started out a Mac guy then quickly RAN (not walked) to Unix and then Windows just crept it's way in over time, with new jobs and contracts. Anyway, once you "get" Unix, it's not hard to grasp other OS's since they almost all are based on Unix, or Unix services, in form or another (or at least have a deep influence from them).
I started in the Unix world many years ago by going to work for a shop that did tech support for video/audio editing systems that lived on both Mac and SGI's. I was one of the Mac guys and struck a friendship up with the Unix dudes. They were at GURU level to say the least. They were well schooled in engineering, and both guys were extremely smart and at the top of their game when it came to knowledge of hardware, programming and tuning. So I convinced them to "mentor" me some because I was really curious about this whole kernel thing (and how could everything be a file? that didn't make sense to me at the time). Besides, they were eager to convert (or enlighten?) me.
I shadowed them when I could, helped out where I could and eventually started to take support calls for minor issues. I spent alot of time playing around on my own after hours. I read books and just watched. I would go off and try stuff or get stuck and pump these guys for info (or used usenet, which was alot better in those days because there was alot less junk).
I don't have a degree in computing (BA in Communications) and I've never taken a paid course outside of what an employer has paid for. Mostly I read, watched and just followed my curiousity, asking a lot of questions. Eventually with time I built up enough knowledge to be comfortable (and you know when you are) and started moving more in to the Unix group. When I left that job it was for a Unix admin position across town.
Everyone's story is different, but my advice is to get a Jr. level job that has senior level guys working with you (or near you). Look for a smaller to mid-size company because generally you will get more work and more of a chance to learn and do things. Going out and getting certified on Solaris doesn't mean alot in my eyes. But if you've never really used Unix much (which I don't think is the case here) taking an intro/basics course would be worth while because you have a captive instructor you can ask questions to. Unix is something you "get" or you don't, although that's hard to show on a resume. Working towards "getting" it can be achieved however you feel you learn best, getting a job work with Unix OS's is just a matter of finding the right place at the right time. If you can't land one of those nix admin jobs, find a company that has Unix OS's in house get a job doing something that you are skilled at and work towards getting yourself in to the Unix group (i.e. make friends and show you know what you're doing).
-s
Like a lot of people, I started off doing good ol' tech support for an ISP. However, while the rest of the techs were playing Quake, I had my nose buried in O'Reilly books and played with various flavors of *NIX. Then, I got lucky. Someone finally noticed that I knew my stuff.
:)
I worked part-time as tech support and part-time as a Jr. Sys Admin for a while. Eventually, I went down the networking road instead, though.
I went back to school at 35 and now at 37 I have quickly moved up to a senior developer job with an excellent consulting company. Being older with experience can get you a lot of milage and having another degree, I am also a phil major, is very useful, i.e. I can read, write, think for myself, and learn, more than I can say for most of the kids that I went to school with that wanted to be game programmers. On the SA think, don't do it. Development and Architecture are better job, and fiddling with the box is a good skill to have and something you can do on your own time. Good Luck LT
I started getting into Sun Unix boxes when I was in senior high. We used to dial into the Universities Unix boxes and play MUD games until all hours of the morning. The University admins tried to keep us out. We tried to get in. I learnt all my *nix skillz by hacking into these systems so we could play games. Eventually when I started working as programmer when needed a back-up sys admin so I was it. The senior admin took me under his wing and completed my training. The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master!
you can't swing a dead cat in this industry without hitting at least 3 "unix admins"
Everyone and their duck wants to be a unix admin because it's "cool" or whatever, so a) there are a lot of clueless people out there who suck, we don't need any more, b) because there are plenty of clueless admins (and more clueless managers to hire them) it will be hard for you to find a job, and c) because all the clueless idiots are happy to make $30/hr, those of us with a clue have a hard time convincing the clueless managers that they really want to hire the clued seasoned admins and tack on a couple of the newbies as Junior admins.
But if that rant doesn't discourage you, then first, get a clue. Educate yourself. Listen to people who sound like they're being overly cautions, they aren't. Never trust the users, give a user root, and he'll fuck up his machine, it's a fact. NEVER trust developers, they either want to be admins but aren't good enough, think they are admins but haven't a clue (worst type), or used to be admins and are in recovery. Give the last sort root on their machine and they'll make your life hell just to educate you.
Learn perl, you'll need it to automate all the mundane shit managers (aka manglers) will want you to do.
Learn networking. You should be able to find your way around inside cisco kit at least, preferably configure it from the ground up.
Learn how to program. You may not do a whole lot of it, but a good sysadmin needs to be a good programmer, if just to shit all over the "programmers" that are hosing his machine.
Never invent a new way to do something. Whenever you want to do something, it's already been done. Use google or freshmeat to find what you're looking for. If you can't find what you're looking for, look harder. If it's still not out there, then shut up and write it yourself.
And finally, never hit the enter key unless you are ABSOLOUTELY SURE what's going to happen when you hit it. Really. No, REALLY.
I'd tell you to develop a bad attitude, but that will happen on it's own as you deal with people who don't really know what they want, but expect you to provide it for them.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
It seems like this trade is still handed down in the very traditional way, by masters to apprentices. I learned what is still 90% of what I know from an older grad student when I was going to school (presumably to be an engineer of some kind). When he left I took his job for a while, then moved on to industry. There I learned a few more tidbits from one of the most experienced admins in the business (hint: LISA chair, Usenix board member). I have never taken a class and hold no certifications, but I feel confident in my abilities. So find yourself a master willing to guide you (he or she won't actually *teach* you of course, that's your problem) and then make your own way.
Basically, it's a combination of adaptability, breadth (not necessarily depth) of knowledge, persistence, and luck. Like many trades, it seems that the tech industry, especially in today's IT economy, is very much about being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. Skill and experience are certainly very important, especially when getting to the enterprise level, but in my experience, and that of many friends in the industry, is to just keep trying and hopefully get lucky. It sounds as if you already have some decent programming skills are and quite comfortable in a Linux/BSD environment. This is definitely a plus. If you haven't already, start teaching yourself admin skills. You don't have to be an expert on everything, but knowing a little about a lot goes a long way. As has been suggested, set up a webmail gateway for your students. As far as skills, I recommend the following: - Mail: Get familiar w/ sendmail and alternative MTAs. - Web: Know the basics of Apache installation and administration inside and out. - DNS: Be able to setup and administer BIND. Both the 4.x legacy versions, and 8.x. Familiarity w/ 9.x is also a big plus. - Have a STRONG grasp of TCP/IP fundamentals - Have a good head for security issues and best practices - Be able to program in at least on popular shell (preferably sh). Be able to at least read and modify C and Perl code. - Be familiar w/ good backup procedures and fault-tolerant design prinicples. - Be at least familiar w/ SQL. MySQL is the easiest to learn, then move on to Postgres. - If you're familiar w/ PHP and Java, this is also a plus but not too important. - Make sure you have good documentation skills. For practice, document stuff you do in a thorough and comprehensible manner. Be able to write for other techies reference and also briefs/updates for PHBs. Now that's a lot to know. But just having basic skills in each area will do a lot to get you in the door at smaller operations. Now how do you go from knowing that stuff to finding a job? There's a variety of paths, but here is what I did (if you care to hear another personal story): I kept playing w/ Linux and FreeBSD while in college for History and Sociology. While in school, I took jobs doing help desk work for the university and also worked at a large corporate call center in tech support. This was dreadful work and I didn't take it too seriously, but it was enough to keep tech work on my resume for a couple of years. After school, I took a job w/ a local network consulting/integration firm doing primarily NT/2k/Novell work w/ a little bit of *nix here and there. That lasted for about 8 months. My break into Unix administration was w/ a state-wide ISP, which is where I am still. I got this job basically by being active in the local LUG and getting to know other techies in the community. The job wasn't ever advertised but was filled by referral, which in my experience, is how a lot of tech jobs at small to mid-sized companies get filled. Since you already work full-time in another profession, I would recommend brushing up on a variety of administration-type areas of knowledge and finding some way to get referrable experience doing tech work of any variety at this point. Going the gov/edu route may be easier for you, or you may want to look at volunteering as others have suggested. There are lots of non-profit orgs on the net that can use good volunteer admins/techies (e.g. if your politics fi, try www.indymedia.org). With some reference-able experience on your resume and connections through a LUG or other local user group of some sort and being enthusiastic about helping out other ppl, something will pan out for you eventually. I highly recommend pursuing the small to mid ISP route once you have some experience and references, as many of them are all Linux/BSD shops and typically provide a flexible learning environment w/ a lot of mobility from the start.
I started when slackware came out, and i dicked around with it for a few years. came into college with an IT major, and a few years of linux experience to back me up. we had to do some stupid 'lab' where we made a resume with microsoft word. i just copied mine from my machine at home and printed it and handed it in. apparently it worked its way to the academic computing department. their admin was graduating at the end of the year, so they picked me up to manage the school's academic webserver (not bad for a freshman). i did that for 4 years. when it came time to get a job 'in the real world', i contacted the guy who was the previous admin at the school before i took his job. he was at IBM doing aix sys admin and handed my resume to his boss. they snapped me up in November, 6 months before my time at college was up. I came in with no AIX experience at all, but by having 5-6+ish years of linux experience, with 4 years of adminning/webmaster experience, it looked damned good. ive been there since May 30th, and i seem to be well ahead of a few folks who were there before me.
In Mark Twain's day all the boys wanted to be steamboat pilots.
A generation later, the boys wanted to be railroad engineers.
Firemen, etc.
Now the kids want to be a 'Network Engineer' which is a laughable title.
Engineers are people who have gone to an accredited college and gotten a Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Chemical Engineering degree.
All the other 'Engineers' are wannas sold a bill of goods by matchbook cover operations.
Deal with it.
As clifford Stoll might say: "I got into *ix via a 75 cent accounting glitch."
+++ath0
Hiya. I agree that reading a few books and starting out at the bottom (help desk) would be a great way to go. I started my road as a med admin that just happened to understand databases. read a few books, did a lot of research, and parlayed that into a dba/developer. learned sql/vb/and a few other things along the way and now am a database manager. my degree is in latin american history. i graduated at the age of 26 (military first) and am now 31. have faith and just go iut there and do it. the neg feedback is something i encountered as well. just a bunch of guys that don't want to share. god forbids someone talented come in and show these guys to be the slackers they really are. too bad they are more interested in guarding their jobs than helping those that ask. good luck
Advice:
I can't say it enough to enjoy yourself, if you don't then go back to teaching English.
Regards
"I want to know God's thoughts...The rest are details." Albert Einstein
Here's how I ended up as a SysAdmin:
Graduated with a BA in English, and worked at my alma mater essentially a secretary, but became responsible for all the PCs, anything computer related in that office. Then took a job as a Computer Operator, still at alma mater. Being a computer operator *sucks*, but you get exposed to many different OS-es and tons of hardware. You also get to know all the admins and managers, and if they know you're intelligent and can learn new stuff they can be pretty cool and teach you stuff you wouldn't necessarily need for the operator job. Had a cool boss who let me do things other operators wouldn't normally do, then got promoted by her to an Analyst position - basically prepping all the new hardware that came in, dealing with nitty gritties of backups, swapping failed hardware, working special projects, etc. Unix Admin position became available in another group, and because the admins & managers knew me, knew I was capable and smart and had a clue, they hired me and let me learn as I went. Took about 6 mos. till I felt entirely comfortable in the job, but I got there. Been doing this 3 years now and still dig it. *Many* of the admins here (*nix and otherwise) started as operators - like I said above, its a crappy job, but its a really good way to expose yourself to everything that lives in the machine room and to get to know the people you need to know to get your next position.
Boss: "Hey, you know that web site we've got, running on NT?"
Me: "Yes?"
Boss: "Well, the developers have built the new site on Solaris. The new boxes will be here in a month."
Me: "Yes?"
Boss: "You're going to have to learn Solaris by then."
That was over two years ago. Since then I've learned more, to the point where I can install Solaris, Linux, or FreeBSD on a new box, configure networking, install applications, setup user access, secure what's not secure, patch and upgrade as necessary, etc.
Age has nothing to do with it. I was 31 when I started with Solaris, with a background in business and marketing, plus creative writing. I've always been a gadget fiend, but never a hard-core coder or OS guru. Now I've learned some Perl and some shell scripting. The only way age is a factor is if you think you're too old to do it.
Someone suggested the wonderful world of academia; I'd at least suggest taking a course in Unix admin if you can find it. Get an old PC and install Linux or FreeBSD on it. Spend more money on O'Reilly books; I like 'Essential System Administration', and 'Learning the Unix OS' was very helpful in the early days, along with Sobell's 'A Practical Guide to Solaris'. Others will recommend Nemeth's 'Unix System Administration' and other titles.
Are you sure you want to do this? :-) The hours are long, you get paged a lot, you'll develop a caffeine addiction you never thought humanly possible. You'll find yourself longing for the good old days of cluelessness, where the computer was just a tool at your disposal.
Oh hell. Good luck with it.
Jack
I always wanted to be a lumberjack!
I played with AIX in an institutional setting years before, but never did anything serious with it. Then I moved to Boston one summer and decided I'd do Administrative Assistant work via a temp-agency. I got an interview at this one company, and once they saw I had networking and winblows skills, they hired me as a Systems Administrator. As the company grew, they introduced me to Linux, which I have to say changed my life. Ever since I've been doing various admin work across multiple platforms for a variety of companies in many locations!
I'm 23 now, and I started this rollercoaster ride when I was 21)
Start a small company with too few people for a dedicated sysadmin. You have to do everything yourself.
My first job out of high school was selling crap for Radio Shack. It gave me exposure to computers and got me hooked into hacking (in the original sense). A friend who graduated two years before me was writing code for a tiny software company. They were hired by a retail chain to convert an old POS system to a modern O/S. One day I got a call at home asking if I was interested in a week's worth of work converting the old inventory/accounting database over to ISAM. They needed a hacker who could reverse-engineer the database structure (the old company was out of business and there were no docs around), and their regular programmers were too busy putting together the application code.
To make a long story short, I converted the database, wrote a driver for their bar-code printer, did some wiring, etc. If I didn't know specifics I would either read the manual or just try things (or both). The boss thought I was pretty handy and took me on full-time. Although they were a Unix shop, they had never bothered to designate a specific person as the system administrator simply because there were so few people and the tasks (to that point) had been focused on software development and not deployment. As the new POS was nearing completion they brought me a box of parts and asked me to put together a server and install the O/S. I became the system administrator more or less by default, and soon thereafter was assigned to maintain the customer sites as well (as a value-added service).
For me, the path to becoming a system admin was just a matter of being unemployed at the right place at the right time.
That was all so long ago. Now I am part of an operational data management team (no, NOT "IM"-- those weenies install MS crap in the admin section) for a large company. I oversee about a dozen databases on systems ranging from 70's era mainframes to bleeding-edge distributed systems.
Really, these days no one cares about anything else except whether you can get the job done.
I am 34 and consider myself to have 2 years of professional unix experience (with Linux mostly).
The only reason I feel I am here at my age is because I really enjoy it. You have to.
Other than that, you may feel uncomfortable with peers much younger than you so you have to be able to deal with that aspect.
Good luck.
p.s. I used to be a Science and Math teacher.
First I got bored of being a roomserver at a hotel, then I started @ 8 bucks an hour as a technician for some lame ass company fixing broken ass windows boxes all the retards would bring in. Then I moved to another lame ass company and here I dumped NT, and installed FreeBSD and Linux on all the servers. The MIS could barely create a user on NT, let alone log into the *NIX boxen. Thus my position as MIS was secured :-)
Well, in my own experience, the easiest way to start is getting a support position. Expecialy if you are new to the trade. That is where I started, and where most of the admins I know started.
On a side note, I have some specific informations that may not hold true for the USA market, so excuse me if this doesn't apply. I'm now kind of a head hunter in this field here in Brazil. Here are
some facts:
- You age does not matter. It may influence your
salary, but not if you get the position.
- Your formation does not matter. Again, it can
incluence your salary. There are so few good administrators avaliable on the market, the companies are looking for knowledge and experience
- Past experience with various platforms is a must. The more the better.
- English knowledge is a basic requisite. Of course this is not the case in USA, but spanish may eventualy be, expecialy on a support position
- TWO WORDS: CONTACT NETWORK. You must know people. This is a good way to get a good review, if someone can question about you to a known and
respected administrator
Hope this helps
morcego
I used terms I'd picked up from BBS'ing to BS my way into the computer admin position at my high school. They had a bunch of Franklin Ace 1000's (Apple IIe knockoffs) that I knew how to take apart and put together. More than half the time, just doing that would "fix" the problem.
I was also a clerk at a dingy warehouse, mostly handling inventory updates on 4x6 index cards (the "database" was a box filled with these cards). There was some sort of "microcomputer" then, but not like a PC/Apple/Atari, but with 5 terminals. As a side note, the accounting package did have an inventory module, but no one knew how to use it.
The hours were very flexible and I did most of my work late at night. Every once in a while the boss would come by and say something to effect that "There's a computer problem. I'd fix it myself but it is too easy or too far beneath me as a task that I'm going to give this job to you." Most of the problems were hardware/terminal related -- enter the setup menu and change a Baud setting, change to DECVT52, etc.. At one point I realized that my Atari ST spoke VT52 or some frankensteined version of it. Brought it in one day, diddled with the cables, and soon had a working terminal. The company we'd leased the terminals from were asking something exorbitant for each seat. The cheap little Atari paid for itself after 1 month.
I used this knowledge to land a part-time job at a large shipping company. The interview consisted of troubleshooting a broken PC, reinstalling Windows 3.1, connecting to a Novell network, and answering a questionnaire. The broken PC was easy -- forget what the problem was. Reinstalling Windows was easy. I had never seen a Novell network but I had the disks with the drivers. In the hour long test, I tried loading each driver in turn. Luckily, the DOS mode drivers would give informative error messages about what was missing so I was able to put them together in an AUTOEXEC file. I got the job.
At some point they starting sending me out to customers because I knew what a terminal was. Many of the customers had large mainframe systems talking over Twinax or Token Ring, and since I knew those words and no one else in the department did (they were all CNA/CNE) I was chosen. Learned a lot very quickly. One thing I found out about the companies I dealt with -- their administrators were often clerks who fell into the position or bosses' sons or someone who had a PC (computers were not so ubiquitous then). The administrators actually respected me as a computer person -- little did they know!. The best line I used was "You seem to have a pretty standard installation. Let me review your documentation so that I can get an idea of what I need to do." Take their documentation and READ and READ and READ all night. Come back the next day and pound them with questions in an offhand way (go on the offensive!).
From that point on, it was a matter of reading everything that came my way. Though I started my Unix career with SunOS and HP/UX, I've been using various pc unices for almost 10 years now. I've learned more from the PC unices because I can experiment without any concern about taking down a department. So definitely get yourself a separate PC to install Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and play with it.
You don't want to be tracked as a SysAdmin, it is a thankless job involving long hours and no advancement. If you are good at your job, you become essential and cannot go anywhere in the organization.
I would suggest learning software that requires extensive OS knowlege (something like Tivoli or Databases or SAP) as well as the ability to develop solutions to complex problems.
After a disk array craps out for the second time or after you create your 2,000th user account, the appeal of being a sysadmin diminishes. Also, that machine room gets chilly.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
(and that I'll be -1 Redundant, as I generally am).
My educational background was in philosophy, too, and I didn't even manage to complete my BA (I still have one year left). I'm not a Unix Administrator, but I have held positions in systems administration which involved administering *nix boxen.
I started out at the lowest possible tier in a company -- a very junior position that paid slightly above minimum wage for doing GUI mock-ups to spec. Pretty fun, huh? Well, I held it for 8 months and used that experience to take a tech support position at a very much bricks & mortar business.
I then applied my independent learning to that company, and started talking to management about upgrading network infrastructure, implementing databases, etc. This is basically what launched my career -- I went from a Technical Support Flunky position to a management one in about two years, with a year of that spent as a DBA/Unix Administrator.
And that is what it took, and I have every confidence that this will work for you, or anyone for that matter. All you have to do is find the right company -- don't pick a place that's geek-heavy like a development house, aim for an established business, preferably one that does not have a global presence. A local company with 100-200 people would be great, I'd say, but even bigger companies can work out for you. It just tends to take longer (more red tape before your ideas get heard).
If you do things right, you can basically define your own position within a company like that, and bring a serious amount of value to them through your expertise.
As for "too old", I've worked with (and above) several juniors your age (I'm younger than you are), and their age was not a barrier to either hiring or advancement. It may be a problem at some places, but it won't be at all places.
If you've ever given nieces / nephews advice about getting their first job, it probably went along the lines of "Make 50 resumes. Drop them all off, and sit by the phone". Well, that's what you have to do, now. If you distribute enough copies of your resume, you'll get enough callbacks that one of those callbacks will result in an interview, your interviewer will like you, and off you go.
The only caveat is that to succed in the IT industry -- or any industry -- through this method, you have to work like a dog. You do not have a piece of paper saying you know lots about computers, so you have to demonstrate it. Repeatedly.
If you decide that Sys/Unix Admin isn't where you want to go, by the way, that philosophy degree will once again have career-value if you move into project management / general management. Logic, communication, and lateral thinking play a large role in both.
Good luck.
-l
One of my great joys is in shutting the lights off in the server room and just watching all of the blinkenlights. I know there's a lot of activity going on behind those lights and I take pride in the fact that I'm the person who designed and put it all together.
As a sysadmin, your job is to essentially make the network and servers act like the telephone system. It just works. In fact, you're surprised when it doesn't work. That's the way computers should work and that's the goal you should always shoot for. Always use established standards, know your technology and slowly put together a network of peers to rely on when the going gets tough.
To become a sysadmin you have to love the big picture and be good at putting apples and oranges together based on the established standard (if there is one). You also have to have a sense of humor, be able to get along with people and you have to care what they think about you. Developer types like to act like they don't care what anyone thinks of them. Sysadmins have to be just the opposite. You absolutely cannot sell the boss on some new technology or expect to explain a new concept to some thick headed user if you are a jerk. If you find yourself constantly frustrated at "all of these losers around you" then you are a jerk/asshole, get over it.
Since I was 5 years old, sitting next to my father at the punch card machines at Purdue university I've loved the technology. Every chance I got, I took the opportunity to play with cool toys and pick the brains of people who were giants in my eyes. My first real admin job was a college summer job about seven years ago for an ISP. That's where I was hooked on the sysadmin bug. Once I graduated from college I was on the very cusp of the
As for schooling, IMHO CS/MIS/CE degrees tend to make the worst sysadmins. I personally have a mathematics degree. I started out in electrical engineering, went to physics (where I found out that physics profs simply do not know how to teach) and finally ended up in Math. My interests are extremely broad. I am an instrument rated pilot as well as SCUBA certified. I also play the Trumpet, enjoy cooking and am busy raising my 3 year old son (although I'm single so if you are a geek female and cute...). As for certifications, good admins should get certifications, but certifications don't make good admins. I'm usually a bit turned off by people with a lot of alphabet soup after their name. What makes you a good sysadmin is being in the trenches day after day, not a wall of certificates.
As for the downside, the only real downside is dealing with people who don't understand their own ignorance. Don't get cynical though, they're everywhere. Just learn to deal with them.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I, too, have a BA in philosophy. My career in computers began quite a while ago (I'm 29 now), when I was in college. Like others who have posted, I got a job with the college's computer support group, where I learned basic troubleshooting for DOS, Windows 3.1, and Mac OS 6+. I enjoyed fixing things, so I pestered the hardware guy for a bit, and he took me under his wing and made me the junior repair person. By my last year there, I was managing the student workers. While I was there, I had no exposure to Unix at all; instead, we had a VAX/VMS that we students were never allowed to touch except as users, and all networking was DECnet and was also the domain of experts/full-time staff.
:). Anyway, my year up I went back to school and graduated.
I took a year off from school, and parlayed my experience into full-time jobs doing tech support -- one on a contract, the other at a company that went Chapter 11 and got dissolved (anybody remember Dove modems for Macs?
After graduation, I got another contract job, working for (dons flame-retardant long-johns) Microsoft, doing telephone tech support for Word and Windows 95. They gave us some pretty amazing training before letting us loose on the phones... then some bean-counter came on board as a VP, and decided to make his mark on the bottom line by eliminating as many contractors as possible.
After that, I went through a series of short-term contract jobs, then got a permanent job as tech support/project manager/computer trainer for a (very) small hospital. That was my first exposure to NT administration. I had another brief stint at contracting after 18 months at the hospital, and am now working (for the past three years) at a much larger hospital as the "network administrator" for a particular department.
I've been here for 2.5 years now, and have not done much network admin in Windows; our centralized IS department keeps the servers. I've done tons of tech support, and worked my way through a certificate program in Java & Oracle development, taught myself VBA and built some Access databases, and got myself promoted. Now I do database programming (currently working on a home-grown lab management system using PostgreSQL and Tomcat), and have been introduced to Unix in a neat way -- we are a research department, and we hired a statistical geneticist. He brought with him a couple of Sun Ultra 10's, and the department shipped me off for Solaris training in order to support him. We expanded the number of machines, and have been installing FreeBSD on our standard Compaq desktops, and running Linux on one Alpha machine and Tru64 on the other.
The statistician introduced me to O'Reilly, and I've been reading like crazy and practicing on the side, constantly learning (Python at the moment).
So now I have a very wide range of skills, and a fair bit of depth in a couple of different areas. I'm not a full-time Unix sysadmin, but I probably would qualify for a jr. level sysadmin job somewhere. I'm not a full-time Java programmer, but would probably do pretty well in a junior-to-mid level position.
Hehe, anybody hiring...?
These days, it's a tough job market in the IT-industry. If you're not the BEST at what you do, you'll probably not get the job. A company on the beak of bankrupsy will not hire more people than they need to! I'm in you exact same situation. -six months ago I posted a "Ask Slashdot" question, on about the topic as you. (almost!) See it here Well, some things chanhes in my life since then, so now I'm studying to get my Civil-Engeneering degree in Electrical Engineering (with as much IT-cources as possible) Good luck!!
I got my first real UNIX admin position through a friend who was graduating and giving up his UNIX admin position (he ended up being emergency-promoted to the UNIX engineer and not graduating). It's a part-time student position that doesn't pay well but lets me work whenever I want as long as I get my work done, and I've earned some *amazing* experience that I wouldn't have gotten admin'ing my own box(es) (NIS, NFS, LDAP, sendmail, management of over 3000 users). If it's feasible for you, I'd try to find a part-time student position at your local university which allows you to work whenever you want. I know you're not a student, but someone will hire you part-time at student rates -- full-time non-students are expensive and usually do less work than entusiastic students. :) Good luck!
Bored of being broke, I got an administrative assistant job at UC Berkeley's Space Lab. They were using troff to format documents and I happened to know it, which is how I landed this job.
Nobody knew I was a programmer until the sys admin discovered me screwing around trying to use the "sudo" command. He was desperate for help, so he asked if I was willing to take on some sys admin dirty work (tape backups and the like). This sys admin was then one of two people who comprised the Berkeley SETI project.
Long story short, I ended up also helping port some programs for the SETI SERENDIP project, and eventually moved from being an admin assistant to a full time sys admin. Next thing I know this SETI@home project comes around and takes over all my time.
So.. Lessons learned: hackers get jobs and universities are great places to learn about sys admin.
- Matt - SETI@home
I think he means Must Call Someone Else.
From my experiences as a Unix admin, you must have experience in the field. Unix administration is not like NT administration where you can go get your MCSE certification and find a job anywhere. In the field of Unix Administration, it is a must that you know what you are talking about. You must know your stuff. There is a reason Unix Administrators make more. Tehre is a reason Unix Servers have longer uptimes. I would sugegst maybe doing some consulting, or maybe search fro a school that had a unix box and needs a part time administrator. Experience is the key.
Whatever you do don't become a tech support. Especially those where you just sit at a table and answer telephone question all day. If you put up resume on internet or someplace, then you will surely get some phone calls from a half baked head hunter, if you are interested in those sort of things, and he/she might try to convince you that it's the pathway to becoming an admin. Don't take it. Tech sup position is mostly dead end. Also if you get hired into a large company as a sys admin, office politics play much larger role than tech savvy. You may have noticed that many current sys admins made lateral movement. The fact is in unix world(especially commercial ones), it's essentially an apprenticeship model. Your chance of getting a sys admin job by sending out resume is slim. Another thing to note: many sys admin jobs work hellish hours. and you will almost certainly have to wear a pager. these thing can wreck havoc on your relationships with other non-sys admins. unfortunately they don't pay you enuf to compensate for that.
You need to sleep your way to the top. And don't be picky who you sleep with.
Once upon a time....
:)
Well, my first brush with Unix was at university. Solaris on very slow Sparc stations. I did pick up some Unix there, but as I flunked and dropped out I didn't get much experience, but I had seen bits and was intrigued. I then, more or less, slipped on a banana-skin into a job with IBM in Stockholm, working in the AIX Competence Center. I had no previous experience, so they gave me an AIX Administration course and off I went, learning from the others in the team and doing the easier problems first. I was not good enough to keep when times got a little worse, so left IBM after six months, but managed to get the ASA and ASP certificates in the last week I was there.
I moved to UK, got a job as Field Engineer, roaming around the south-east fixing problems at customers, but also helping out on the helpdesk side as AIX was the prefered Unix this company sold its customers. Due to various reasons I had to move up to Midlands and changed job at the same time. This time I had sufficent experience to be hired as a Technical Analyst. In real terms I was still a helpdesk person but was doing system admin work as well, looking after the SP and all the smaller AIX boxes in the computer room.
Since I left there, I have been working as a contractor and mainly IBM has been calling on my services. I still do System Admin stuff, but I have steadily been moving towards Linux. I will not give up AIX, but Linux is more fun.
The morale of the story? Know what you want, work towards it and have a degree of luck. I have not had a degree, and no-one has ever bothered to ask about it. My CV speaks for itself and my customers are happy. Curiosity, a desire to learn new things, ability to pick up and understand new things quickly and not being a social moron/disaster counts for more than you think.
Hope this helps in some way... Good luck!
Swedish, but resident in the UK since 1996.
I spent the last 10 years in computers but when it came time to get a real job i found only 1 good way. I LIED! then after i got my foot in the door i've learned as fast as posable and have been doing it now for almost a year. Use a lot of buzz words or better yet let a unix admin help you with your resume. they'll also tell you what you need to know to fake your way through an interview. Good luck.
I don't have any certifications and I never finished my CS degree (1.5 semesters was all I finished) and I was the Network & Unix admin at a regional ISP near Chicago for 2 years.
;)
:) But don't worry, there are alot of such places.
Being a geek by nature helped. I learned BASIC at 10 & ran a BBS in the 80's, etc. I already had some Unix and Net experience when I started at the ISP doing 1st level tech support. I owe a great deal to the boss I had (he was the owner and was an engineer at Bell Labs for 10 years before starting an ISP) who encouraged me to continue learning. I wrote scripts and read O'Reilly books. I setup a home network, I reg'd a domain and did my own DNS & Mail over nailed dialup.
Eventually I became Senior tech and then Administrator. I setup new domains and websites. I configured ciscos for new dedicated customers. There's more but this isn't a resume.
I also got involved in FreeBSD. I'm a contributer to the Ports Collection. I've been to both BSDCons.
Now I have the knowledge (thanks to O'Reilly) and the Experience (thanks to my former boss) to get an admin job anywhere that doesn't require a degree.
My current job is as a network application programmer using interpreted scripting languages. We're an ethernet provider for residential complexes & student housing, and my ISP experience is what got me the job.
I wouldn't mind a Cisco cert or two, and I could use some decent Solaris experience, but if I were to go back to school it would be for fun and not in a tech field.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
i started out as a user administering an application that ran on AIX (yikes!) and sybase on AIX. i had a little prior unix user experience. i tried to exhaust my capabilities as a user/power-user, writing shell scripts, cron jobs, reading man pages, learning all i could (or i thought i could). then i applied for a junior level job in an admin group that hosted the same type of application so i had some experience with it that compensated for my lack of admin knowledge to some degree which was okay for an entry-level/junior position. i went from there.
....
you should get a unix box at home as your user skills progress and then start learning admin stuff. you should also learn how to compile packages with make and stuff.
a very good understanding of tcp/ip is necessary. make sure you get involved with troubleshooting lots of problems as a unix user and then as an administrator. network problems, disk i/o problems, etc,
I entered the field when the market for systems administrators was hot. All the job descriptions I looked at asked for things I didn't have: experience and/or a bachelor's degree. I told myself that because the market was hot, I might have a chance at these jobs anyway -- and I was right.
I also spent some time doing jobs that didn't really challenge me intellectually, but gave me something to put on my resume. They also helped me get used to an office environment.
Well, now the market's not so overheated, and companies are in a position to be choosier. I suggest that you should not let that stop you. Even though you have no formal qualifications, even though you are older than most entry-level applicants.
Why?
Because my sense, from experience and from gossip, is that many hiring managers are looking for knowledge and intelligence more than they're looking for youth and paperwork. Stock-market bubble or no stock-market bubble, youth and paperwork don't make machines work. There are fewer entry-level jobs than there were, but I think that in any market, you'd be a solid entry-level applicant.
Don't give up. My stepfather started law school at the age of 50, and now has a good job working for New York City.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Like you, I chose to become a sysadmin instead of being drafted into the position. My degrees are all in the liberal arts so I started taking random continuing education classes at local colleges and picking up random jobs helping out home users and small businesses. I eventually got a job doing desktop support. It's difficult to move out of desktop support into unix because people think if you know how a pc works your mind is somehow damaged for a real OS. Just refuse to accept "no" for an answer and keep at it.
As for certifications, I have none. I've found that experience is the only thing that really matters. However, every time I take a class in something IT, I put it on my resume.
I just fell into UNIX ... was working for a company, a techincal operations job opened ( scripting, tape monkey, installs etc etc ). I was hired, the sat me in front of a terminal and said "work". I installed linux at home. I have been an admin ever since. I even tried to become a DBA, but "every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in". I gues it boils down to .... do what you know.
When I was in college, I chanced upon alt.sysadmin.recovery about the same time I started playing with Linux.
For some reason, the stories there seemed attractive to me. Perhaps it was heavy drug use, perhaps it was an as-yet-undiagnosed brain tumor. At any rate, I started learning unixy things at an insane rate, pretty much to the loss of everything else. Still haven't finished my degree yet.
My first commercial gig was setting up a network for an architect. I used a linux box as a SAMBA server for several DOS and Win 95 machines. The really cool thing I did there was set up another linux box as a plot server for a couple of Autocad workstations. It was Autocad 12 for dos, I used the dos lanman client with tcp/ip, and samba for print spooling. Worked like a charm.
Then I did some programming for a while, and eventually moved to Boston. My first two gigs in Boston were sysadmin jobs, and the second one, maintaining a lab of about 200 machines with about 50 different crufty versions of unix, from old weird Fujitsu, Sequent, and Data General machines to the newest things Sun had, pretty much killed it for me.
Now I downplay sysadmin work on my resume, and try to only interview for programming jobs. I'm much, much happier this way.
2) Read newsgroups related to sysadmining. This is the single most important recommendation, IMO.
3) Attend sysadmin conferences
4) Programming classes are useful, but optional. You can become an advanced sysadmin in some places just by knowing how to interpret truss/strace/trace/par output. If you can also write glue code in C, /bin/sh, and python, you're in really good shape.
5) Get a box you can yank on really hard without upsetting anyone. Do your evil experiments there, not on production machines. If you want to admin linux, get a linux box. If you want to admin sun, get a sun, even if it's kind of low-end, as long as it'll run a current release of solaris.
6) I have a rather large collection of intro links here.
7) A four year degree helps, but you wouldn't necessarily have to make it computer related. One of our better admins here has a poli sci degree. With this degree, he showed he could jump through hoops, which is the most important thing a degree does for you, IMO. Then again, I went for an MS in CS, and I haven't regretted it, despite its not being all that directly applicable.
I started out as a developer at a small company where I had to do some sysadmin tasks as well. When I started looking around for a new job, I found a cool opportunity as a sysadmin.
I come from a traditional geek background (CS degree, programming experience), but I think you can make a good go of it too. It would be really helpful if you could find an experienced sysadmin mentor, perhaps at a LUG meeting or the like.
I love the work, and I encourage you to give it a try, but it's not for everybody. Good luck.
I am an electrical engineer (Analog IC Designer). At our shop we lost 2 out of 3 sys admins. One day my boss came to me and said that the CAD dept wants to talk to me about my experience with linux (run a small network of 6 machines at home and a few people at work knew about it). They asked if I would be interesed in being admin and I said sure, that's it. They did send me off to a training class at HP to get their HP-UX sysadmin and network administration class. Really not much different than Linux, you already know what you want to do, they just stick it in a differnet spot:)
Now I am doing a 50/50 role of designin and sys admin.
I recieved a BA in CS and MIS, intending on getting a programming job. Well, after working at a low paying tech support job for a couple years, I got a job at a local college (also low paying), doing database programming. Well, as you probably know, in most small IT shops you tend to become a man of many hats. I ended up doing some CGI/Web programming (helped set up their online registration system) and doing some UNIX administration (actually more of a backup/junior admin) on a couple small IBM RS/6000's, as well. I then started getting interested in UNIX and Linux. I installed Linux at home and played around with it. About a year ago, I saw an add for a UNIX admin position at a local non-profit orginization (ends up they are bigger than I thought, about 24,000 employees nationwide). I was basically a backup for the guy primararly in charge of doing the administration. He has now left and I am the only UNIX admin here (with no current plans to have a backup or junior admin). The pay isn't the best, but the experience will be well worth it. I am 30 (not too far from your age of 33). I don't think you are too old to get into IT. One of our developers is a 60 year old woman. My advise would be to get a job at a small college , non-profit or government job. They usually don't pay as well, but they are usually not a picky about who they hire. They are great places to learn and gain experience. Then move on from there. That is my plan anyway.
How does someone move from being a Microsoft VBitch to programming UNIX/Java?
In Republican America phones tap you.
It all really depends on what you're after. If you want a McJob in the tech industry (and there's nothing wrong with that, it's respectable and pays well), go get a degree or some certifications, and start lying to trump up previous experience, and go for it, you'll do fine.
If you're asking how to be a unix/linux/networking/coding/everything guru like some of the top end unprofessional professionals of slashdot, well, you just can't become that. Either you're born to do it, and you're doing it, or you're not. It's like being a Jedi Knight, except you don't get chicks and the movies about it suck.
In 1997, I dropped out of PhD program (in philosophy, no less) at the University of Rochester, because my funding ran out, my dissertation was going nowhere, and the job market in academia was bleak.
:) And they're the ones that make the call on hiring.
A friend got me a job at a Mom 'n' Pop ISP in Memphis (Magibox, later bought by U.S. Internet, later bought by OneMain, later bought by Earthlink, which merged with Mindspring) as tech support and HTML jockey. We used Digital Unix, SCO Unix (*shudder*), FreeBSD (2.7.x, I think) on our servers.
I learned enough Unix administration from the brilliant Ken McCleaft to land a Unix admin job at a small company with a mix of Irix, Solaris, and SCO. I added Linux to the mix. (No senior/junior business there: I was it!) I've gone on to two other Unix admin jobs since.
Unfortunately, the Mom 'n' Pop ISPs, which were a great source of on the job training, are no more.
My advice: send your resumes for the positions anyway. The job market ain't what it was a year ago, but I'd bet that the job requirements are still inflated. My first Unix admin job asked for 3 years experience: I had 1.5 years. Job descriptions are of the "ideal candidate," who doesn't exist and whom they couldn't afford to hire even if he did. When you interview, you'll meet the actual admins, who know that if you can handle one flavor of Unix, you can quickly learn another. They'll ask you questions, and they'll be able to tell if you know enough to handle the position. They all run Linux at home, so be prepared to defend your distro of choice.
The English teaching experience may turn out to be a big plus. Every company needs someone who can write clear technical documetation.
I read once where someone wrote that all the philosophy students he knew ended up as Unix admins. I wonder why that is.
Good luck!
Just a thought.
Assuming it means you can write well, the English degree might provide a base for a career in tech that has little or nothing to do with being a sys admin.
I'm a creative writing graduate myself, and I've found that since I've started teaching, one thing that I've done that really helps the students offset the problem with dense documentation is digesting and regurgitating it for them. The amount of IT-skilled people out there is pretty big. On the other hand, the amount of IT-skilled people who can explain things in a way that a fool can understand without making that person feel like a fool, is pretty small.
You might want to try pushing that English degree as much as possible, maybe helping out to document systems for companies with a high turnover or something.
I know this is a little offtopic, but I thought it might be helpful.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Speak in a thick foreign accent and pretend you're on an H1B visa.
My experience seems to be a little different from the rest. I joined the Navy and became an Intel analyst. The command that I got sent to did not need an Intel guy, they needed a Solaris admin so I got the job. With no training I had to jump right in and I have been doing this job for over 19 years. I got out after being in the Navy for 9 years and have not looked back.
Doing Latin and Greek just made unix seem really easy to understand...it's all the same, really, just lots of text. A little Ars Technica goes a long way.
Also just messing with computers...I think it all started with dos batchfiles. I don't know...it just happens.
I changed careers at the age of 32, and became *shudder* an MCSE. Took a entry level job at a dot.bomb, and from there moved into better jobs. Started in with BSD after a coworker introduced me to the daemon, and I've never looked back. Learned two of the BSDs, Solaris, and some Linux, as well as kept in touch with the Windows stuff.
While I can't say I love every part of my job, I do look forward to it almost every day. More than any other job I've held.
If you really love it, your best bet is to try and get a job as a Windows admin. It's easy to do, and you can work *nix into the work environment. Then as you gain experience, you'll be able to move to a more narrow focused position. I love having the variety of 10+ operating systems to work on.
I also am the sole administrator at the company, so I get to run things largely my way. I doubt that you'll end up this lucky, but I'd rather do something I love than make 3x doing something dull.
Good Luck
You obviously haven't used anything on UNIX that isn't free, then.
UNIX license managers are as bad as, if not worse than, NT/Windows licensing schemes.
People bitch on slashdot all the time about hardware-locked licenses. The fact of the matter is, this has been the gold-standard in the UNIX world for a very, very long time for any sort of high-end software package. When you're spending $80,000 per seat on CATIA, you can be sure there's no way you'll be able to pirate it. Ever been faxed a 3-page license, with separate keys for each *feature*? Sitting there and typing them all in manually is... annoying. And, unless you're using floating licenses, you've got to do it for every machine. (Thankfully, we used floating licenses...)
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Being a UNIX SysAdmin (to specificially differentiate from VMS, NT, Novell or any other OS), is more a STATE OF MIND than a specific set of skills.
...). (then there's Cliff Stoll - he started as an Astronomer if I remember correctly.)
You need the skills, and the ONLY practical way to get them is from experience. Some employers want certs (e.g. LPI, Solaris, RHCE), but they won't make you a better SA.
It's a state of mind regarding your approach to technology and tech problems. Aeleen Frisch in Essential System Admin (Oreilly) describes it best. (And if I recall correctly she started out as a History or Art Major
I was a database administrator/troubleshooter on Air Force Unisys mainframes and we got an AT&T 3B2 in the office. I asked if I could play with it since I was taking a C programming class. Two months later the powers-that-be decided they wanted a system ported from a DEC they wanted to decommission and asked, "Who knows this 3B2 thing?" It's been great ever since.
GIGOwiz
Back in the day, I joined a small startup. Their policy was to make the new guy, the most junior one, the sysadmin. It was SunOS on a network of Sun 3/50s and 3/60s with a 3/1xx file server. Our connection to the outside world was UUCP over a modem, so we didn't have too much to worry about in terms of external security.
Before that, I worked full-time in academic computing, both as a programmer and as a junior sysadmin for a VAX/VMS network with occasional care and feeding of an AT&T 3B2. Mostly, I set up user accounts, installed software, and made cables for the terminals we used.
I had (still have) a CS degree. I found that it was hard to escape the sysadmin ghetto for a job as a programmer. Leaving the ghetto was the best thing I ever did for my career. It was fun at times. Sometimes I was the hero but most of the times I was the goat. People don't thank their sysadmins for making the computers and the network run smoothly. People always bitch at their sysadmins when something goes wrong.
I started as a desktop tech (I too, have a degree in Philosophy). It was a small enough shop (two of us, supporting a Hospital's research clinic) that I was able to take on some simple sys-admin and work my way up as I showed ability. I agree with the comment that a University is a good environment - my experience, too, is that it is chaotic becuase the different areas have such divergent needs. This chaos gives you more flexibility and opportunity to learn.
And don't worry about your age. There is always room for someone who is good (or at least competent!). Where I've been, age was never an issue, ability was, although I havae seen younger peopler get a little more slack. But if you are good, you will find people that will want you.
If you don't know UNIX well now, throw away windows and subsist entirely on some flavor of UNIX. It's amazing what you learn when you have no choice.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For me it was a simple case of "just happened".
I was working for a company as a technical writer / instructor and also did some systems design (mainly NT at that point). We had a Sun Box that did all the webserving but that was it.
Then one day we got a new product in, it was a Unix based WebServer and I was supposed to translate the documentation as well as write a "how-to" instruction book. I already had played a bit with Linux so the transition to some "serious Unix" wasn't all that hard.
I realized that I liked it, plus it got me a bit away from technical writing (which IS boring as hell) and I ended up doing Unix consulting.
The training I received was purely in house and by some of our vendors as such the certificats I have are mainly based on Vendor courses, Veritas, Sun etc.
Right now I am doing this for almost 7 years and are heading a Unix department in a mid sized company.
So, how to get into it? Show enthusiasm. That's what I told a guy who is currently at help desk and wants to come into the Unix group. If you show your boss that you "can do it" and that you "want to do it" that's your first step.
Michael
So there it started, I w
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
I worked in a record store during Highschool. At the time I didn't realize that the inventory/cash register system was based on Xenix on a 286, with wyse terminals and cash drawers for the cash registers. Up till then my computer experience was limited to Commodore, AppleII, Mac, and Dos PC home computers.
I was bored one day at the register, so I started hitting random keys at the menus. The ! key triggered a back door which led me to a shell. I freaked and thought I crashed the program, so I hit random keys until I finally hit ctrl-d and exited back out to the POS program. Later I tried exploring the shell. Still not knowing it was unix, I tried entering one char commands, which did nothing. Then I went through each combination of 2 letter commands, and came up with cd, ls, etc... It blew my mind.
Anyway, I chatted with the vender and eventually they disclosed what os the system was running. I went out and bought a few books on Xenix and unix, and learned absolutely everything possible about the system between customers. At one point the developers removed the ! backdoor, but by then I already knew that the more command (which the system used for reports) would also allow me to escape to a shell, so that didn't stop me.
Anyway, 12 years later, I'm a sr. engineer and run a smattering of *nix boxes, everything from my personal BSD and OSX systems at home, all the way up to the UltraSparc Sun Fire servers at work. All thanks to some boredom and a little hacking.
BTW, the system the record store used was called RecordTrack, and I actually saw it still being used in a record store recently.
_______
2B1ASK1
I know a lot about various unixes myself and I'm pretty confident I could get through any interview. My problem is taht I have no formal education and no one will even consider me for a job...
I see all these people saying that learning Unix is "good enough" - I don't think it is. At least the employers in my area don't.
Find a local UNIX user group.
Make friends, bring donuts(not in the order);)
User group are a great way to get started in any computer field.
I would argue that a degree in philosophy is better then an engineering degree. You probably have a stable work history, and are articulate in speaking and writng, something more admins need.
Almost all Jr. positions will be filled by peopler who knew smeone at the company. The solution? get to know people in the companies.
of course, once you're in you have to be motivated to achieve a huge personal knowledge base, otherwise you'll fail.
and finally, UNIX admns do not get the summer off like most teachers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I heard that system administration was the job to get to meet HOT CHYX!
I learned as much UNIX as I could on the University's unix servers and loaded UNIX (linux) on my computer. After a little while I got a job at the University as a Student Assistant in the main computer labs. I just kept of learning more and more UNIX (including shell scripting) and just migrated over as a junior admin and just kept on learning more and more. Now I am a Senior National Consultant doing UNIX and SAN work. The first certifications I would get (probably easier to get) are the Brain Bench ones. They are not easy but BB is much cheaper than something like Sun Cerifited Solaris Administrator (2 test at $150 each). Once you have the BB certifications, then work on something like HP's HPUX admin or Sun Solaris certifications. Personally I would go with Sun's but I am biased. Degrees and Certifications are great to get past the Head Hunters/HR/Personal departments but the IT managers will look at your skills and past jobs. Some IT managers will look at cerifications to see what areas you are profecient in but not having them will not prevent you from getting the job but will hurt.
Load linux on your machine (or FreeBSD) and learn as much as you can. Learn how to build kernels on your own, build packages/software from source, learn as much administration (from the commandline) as possible. If you can, get access to Solaris (for x86 might be an option) or HPUX and see the differences between them and just play.
Hopefully this helps,
Scott
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
The real stuff that got me here was having an apple ][+ as a kid and lots of pirated games with no documentation. You learn how to apply the formal scientific method (ie fart around systematically until you figure out all the controls!) with a good carrot hanging in front of your nose that way..
I was alway using some kind of terminal/elm/pine setup for email in collect (late 80s, early 90s) before guis were big, so I needed to know how to get around.
The point I'm getting to is that good systems administration skills come largely from experience. The important experience is rarely taught, you need to accidentally hose some files to learn to make backups. You have to have a box or two cracked to learn how to do security. You need to install linux on 10 different PCs to be able to figure out why it isn't working on the new laptop, etc. I recommend installing linux on your home pc, re-installing windows, making dual boots, changing distributions of linux a lot, trying BSD & intel solaris, asking anyone you can get shell accounts from for shell accounts, setting up apache, playing with sendmail, installing networks at lan parties, etc.
It's not hard if you have the right attitude, basically that "I am a generalist and a problem solver", and that no problem can withstand a good debugging technique. You may find something is unfixable, but at least you'll be confident it is "definitively unfixable".
If you can find books by C West Churchman (_The Systems Approach_), that's probably the only academic-style text I'd recommend. Learn to see things as systems that interact with each other, and how to view feedback & control loops..
_Unix Power Tools_ by ORA is a great almanac-style book. It does basically contain answers to just about any "how do I" questions, with the warning that if you're 5 minutes off the turnip truck you won't know how to ask the questions.
Go to users groups, install fests, read freshmeat everyday, install & maintain (and depend on) your own servers..
Simply speaking, I became a UNIX sysadmin by hobby. Screwing around with computers led to creating VectorStar Communications, which led to creating VectorStar Networks, a free hosting network. In parallel, my interest and enthusiasm got me moved fom NT administration to *NIX administration (FreeBSD mostly) with a company, then moving to another company where I am now, managing UNIX servers across the nation. Not bad for a college-dropout 21 year-old.. :)
I actually wrote out the history of VectorStar recently, which covers this topic.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
--Princess Leia, in the prologue of the novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope.
My first sysadmin gig (and my first gig in IT as an industry) came about when, one day about 6 years ago, I went in to pay my ISP bill, and was confronted with
Of course, I had a couple things going for me in IT at that time: a M.S. in math (in fact, I had just interviewed for a JuCo faculty position that morning) and some "related" experience (some volunteering I did in grad school, and helping out the IT department at a JuCo I had worked for previously). But the fact was, I went from zero to sysadmin in a matter of minutes; it was increasing the likelihood of something like that happening that led me to move to Dallas at the time in the first place.
So, short answer: play the percentages. Do things that are likely to get your IT skills noticed, and put yourselves in a position where they are likely to be. Look for small companies that aren't going to have as formal of requirements for technical people, and be willing to settle for less money (at least, initally) than your more-formally-prepared counterparts. And don't be fooled into thinking that your age is an obstacle: a lot of these companies have very young demographics, and would perceive someone "older" as bringing much-needed maturity to the table.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
I learned all of my UNIX and networking knowledge communally and eventually got a job as an assisstant sysadmin at an ISP. I quit school in 9th grade and did homeschool by myself, and never got any certifications. I feel that your talent and knowledge can be enough to succeed, although I have not yet had to look for a job in the current economy. Anyways, as in any career, your first job leads to other, bigger jobs with more responsibilities. This is the same for me and i'm sure some of my contemporaries. I guess my point is that one should not feel limited by schooling or training, if you care enough to learn and show that you know, it will be enough.
Maybe i'm naive.
-biv
I work at a company that is primarily a Design/Branding firm but also has a six person IT department. We host some Fortune 500 sites and try to provide whatever services our clients request of us, we use a lot of coldfusion, a lot of java. I entered the company as a temp to do pc support and build boxes for employees. When the old systems administrator left, i being highly proficient in linux (which is what all 20 of our servers run), filled the void. I am 18 years old, been working at this company as the systems administrator since June of 2000, when I was still a junior in high school. I am self taught. Working here is a pretty good deal, the pay is sorta pathetic (35), but I have free run of the network and they know not to call me at home unless its a *real* emergency. Plus I get dual-t1's to enjoy whenever I want :)
Landing this job was a mixture of being able to fix every problem they were having and doing an expert job overall - My manager trusts me to keep everything in good working order, w/o his direction. Pretty much it came down to practical experiance and knowledge. I will prolly end up going to college in a year or so to get a CS degree so I can go do really cool stuff at some research house in the future.
Here are the stories of three people I know who got admin jobs. they are all true, though I don't think they read /. (hence I'm posting...)
guy A. Programer at some company when the system administrator quit. Only one person thought to ask for the root password as the old guy left. "He was leaving so he didn't care, I staying so I did care." The only person with root is by default the administrator. There were no added monitary benifits, and his other responsibilities didn't decrease, but he had the power to make sure the comptuers worked and they did. (they way he wanted them to, so a lot of uptime)
Guy b: At 65 he retired from his job as a security gaurd from a goverment job. He had good benifits, but after sitting around for a few months he realised that was boring. He Basicly started knocking on doors looking for tech jobs for someone with no expirence. The company I work for has a few well paid admins, and a lot of poor paying admin positions. Our well paid admins are very good at teaching untrained intelligent people about comptuers. (it is a matter of pride that most baddly paid admins move onto a good job after a few years. So they guy found a job as level 1 tech support. However he had access to a lab filled with all kinds of equipment he could do whatever he wanted with, a computer on his desk to play with, and most days he didnt get that many calls. Soon he was changing network cards. (after all if level 1 script determins it is a network card, level 1 tech can replace it) there was plenty of time to play with things. When windows 95 came out all the admins put it in the lab to see what it could do.
Guy c: Came from a technical family. He at one time had in his bedroom comptuers running MacOs, windows 95, linux, and freeBSD. All connected to the family network (though a 28.8 modem and nat) to the internet. After playing with these comptuers for a while he went to coledge, droped out, got a retail management job... Hanging out on #distributed one day he discovered someone in the area who was hiring technical people. Went to the interview and he was the only one who didn't screw up baddly. when asked to solve a MacOS problem. (They are a graphics arts company so they are an apple shop).
So you can break into admin at any age, including afer retirement. It helps a lot to play with computers. Get as many cheap comptuers as you can, and start playing. Break things and fix them. Then look for a job. (Accually guy b jsut decided he wanted to work with something different and found a job that would train which is just as good.
I started just using linux and freebsd when I was like 16 and just learned everything on my own. Then I got a job at a small isp doing techsupport which required some use of adminstering user accounts on their freebsd server. This was not too techincal but I was able to learn more from the other people working there. Now I'm a system adminstrator for a computer engineering lab. I've learned more just working there than probably anywhere else. I'm still in college (a Junior CS major at Virginia Tech). I've found that being a CS major, you don't really learn too much immediately usefull stuff. It's all theory for the most part here at VT and nothing that would really pertain to being a systems administrator. Personally I wouldn't recomend any systems administration job because if you don't have patients for people who don't know what they are doing, you will burn out fast. I'm only 20 and already I've come close to losing it. Also if you have your system setup great and you never have any major problems, you'll be doing a lot of sitting on your ass waiting for stuff to break. Just my 1.5 cents.
I'm not a sysadmin by profession yet, but I am the sysadmin of my house. A good way to learn the necessary stuff would be administering your home network - all aspects of it. Hardware, software, users, connections, etc. And don't take the easy Windows ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) route - set up a FreeBSD or Linux box as a firewall and another as a file server. Get Samba/NFS going. Get a friend to test how secure your network is. At my house everyone's got their own computer (or two). I'm in the process of upgrading all the 10mbps parts of the network to 100mbps. The main file server is on Linux - it's been that way for a few years now. It feels good knowing exactly what to type when you SSH to your router after someone complains that they can't get IRC to work. Successfully being in control of a large amount of machines and keeping them secure (even if it's just at home) would look good on your resumé, as long as the person reading it knows what they're looking for.
Follow me
Phase I: Linux at home
Phase II: Linux at work
Phase III: Linux users group
Phase IV: Become 31337
Phase V: Prosecution
Phase VI: Sysadmin
Before you get too far along the road to SysAdmin-hood, ask yourself these questions;
1) Can I handle high stress? Or, am I willing to trade frequent moments of high stress for moments of huge job satisfaction and the ability to play with tech toys?
2) Are you someone who likes order to your day? As a SysAdmin, even if you are a highly organized person yourself, your day tends to be very fractured. You are having a good day when you come in the morning with five things you would like to work on, and actually get to work on two of them.
3) Are you a 8-5 person? The pro here, is that I can come in anywhere from 6am to 10am, and with arrangement with my boss, even later than that, or like today, I'm leaving at three. The con is, I'm on call 24-7, I'm working tomorrow rebuilding the filesystem on a production server and I rarely work a 40 hour week.
4) Can you handle people getting in your face, being pissed at you, yelling at you, etc. Can you tell a VP, "NO" and make it stick? One problem with being a SysAdmin, is that one day you're a star, the next you're an asshole.
If you can handle all of that you're probably well suited to being a SysAdmin. Learn how to accumulate browny points with upper management and spend them on pay-raises and trips to LISA and InterOp. Become intimately familiar with the O'Reilly book catalog, because you never know when you'll be told: We need this "insert technology here" next week (next week if you're lucky). Also, not something all SysAdmin's do, but one of my preferences; Make friends of other SysAdmin's, don't worry about calling for advice on situations you've never encountered before, and be willing to accept panic'd calls from friends on how to handle various problems.
Because, while I've worked in a lot of tech jobs before I became a SysAdmin (I've been one for eight years now), I've never had a job with more job satisfaction and less boredom. But it's not easy.
Good Luck,
Brad
Well I started my career pulling cables for the university I was attending and then moved up to computer operator and worked outside of University as a computer operator and being UNIX savvy, many of the places I was an operator were usually mainframes, I was given the task of taking care of the UNIX systems. Then I became an official UNIX SysAdmin when I moved to California to work at some special effects studios (c. early 1990s) but thankfully I'm out of the 'BIZ' now and working for a software startup in LA. I would recommend at the age of 33, join USENIX and SAGE go to LISA, build some Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris X86 boxes or pick up a SPARC/Solaris box and get a job as a NOC operator or computer operator that or a tech support or some job where you can get exposure to UNIX. If your MSNT/2k savvy, try to work in a shop that has both UNIX and MS stuff. I don't have a college degree, even though I spent nearly 7 years in school, I studied everything from physics (major), computer science (minor) to filmmaking and economics. Study, study, study, read alot and experiment with your home built UNIX systems. Build a small LAN at home, with NIS, NFS, LDAP, Kerberos, download the 'trial' copy of Oracle, play with MySQL and learn, PERL, CSH, BASH, KSH, SH. Learn about the concepts of the UNIX kernel. Tune your systems and customize it. etc, etc, etc.... One thing I have noticed about good sysadmins and bad sysadmins, is not necessarily knowing alot of things and remembering alot of UNIX trivia, but being able to solve problems and see the whole picture, not JUST some aspect it. Being able to see how a given problem, task and project affects the whole system. Being able to see various sides of a problem. I hate to sound somewhat elitist, but being a good UNIX sysadmin is somewhat of a craft. I have worked with UNIX sysadmins and they did everything in regards to that one small project that they worked with and could never see how it affected the other system. Because of this I have walked into some shops that have almost no infrastructure and everthing is a complete mess. No organization at all, no thought to how they were putting things together. But most importantly, learn to have contempt for everyone else, assume everyone knows what you know and pretend you don't really like being a sysadmin and would rather do something else.... :-)
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough...
C()
My recipe:
1. Install linux (or another UNIX like OS)
2. Play with it.
3. Read the how-to's of things you don't know.
4. Set up a home network.
5. Configure your DNS , SMTP, IMAP, POP3, HTTP, FTP, Samba , and DHCP server.
6. Set up a firewall (use masquerading) and OS security (tripwire, tcp-wrappers, ssh).
7. Set up dial-up networking.
8. Set up fetchmail and leafnode.
9. Use your other PC as a client.
10. Be part of a computing project at your school and try to use the things you learned above.
1. You're right, job market is pretty tight now. In Germany, where I live, this means that having a Diplom (highest university degree in Germany) is no guarantee for getting a job at all. Companies seek for high educated people with work experience.
;-)
2. There still are some companies that are doing very well, e.g. specializing on PC hardware installations or user training. These "smaller" jobs are a pretty good way for the not-so-experienced lateral entry to get employed in this sector and to learn how to work in productive environments.
I don't know if this exists in the US too, but in Germany and many other European countries there are labor offices who support you by paying a vocational retraining, when you've been unemployed for a year or so. I know many teachers and history students etc. who did retrainings like this, and it seems to work.
At this time, switching to this economy sector is like going through a door labeled "no entrance". Don't expect people behind it to be happy you're there, but also don't let them spoil the party
I was about to graduate from college, haven't even started looking for a job. I was going to barely make it out with a ba in cs. anyways, a fraternity brother of mine said, "hey, come work with this isp in chitown." i said, "okay." got the job and became a solaris admin.
what it took? knowing people with punch
and the Irishman took the fly in his hands and yelled, "spit it out!"
I just expressed that I wanted to get involved to the current voluntary despot and the response was 'alright, here's the password, here's a list of things that need to be worked on'. At the time I hadn't done much more UNIX experience than how to start an IRC client on the terminal server.
I learned everything about UNIX and networking 'on demand'. If our router broke I browsed through the investigated the startup files like 'I see, that "route" command probably changes where the packages are sent to. Looks like all the machines are identified by four numbers between 1 and 255 ..'. To my experience, to actually have to configure some system to work teaches you more of UNIX adminstration than any CS class can. Of course having some older students as mentors helped much.
Later on all of the students that had worked for the system (including me) started a small firm that sells these adminstration services to the school. I probably still get much less money of the hacking than I would from a 'real company', but I can pay the rent, study and spend my free time pretty much as I wish, so why complain :-)
As for me, I just lucked out really, was working construction, my best friend was doing webpage design, in the evenings after I got off work, I'd hang out at the ISP he worked for and help out with whatever, when I got laid off of my construction job, the ISP offered me a position on the spot. 4 years and 3 positions later, I'm now working as network admin in the cable modem industry.
I started by getting a tech support position for a now defunct software house. Once in, I put in all the hours they requested of me, as well as started hanging out with the SysAdmins. As I was a newbie Linux user at the time, I was not ready for big responsibilities, but they through me some "soft" balls to give me a chance, like writing scripts for tedious jobs and the like, and I put my heart into everything they gave me. Within 6 months, I was tech support/jr. Sysadmin. I then worked my arse off at this position, and let my experience and seniority accumlate.
:)
After 5 years and a couple of companies later, I was a Solaris Admin for a fairly large solaris farm/live site. I did that for about a year, burned out, told the corporate world to F*** themselves and took a job at a medium sized non-profit as their network administrator. I make half of what I made at my last job, but I get it in at 9, and leave at 5, and no one calls me at 3 in the morning to tell me the site is down. My woman is much happier with me because she actually gets to see me, and layoffs? What are those? There hasn't been a layoff due to the economy here in 150 years. I'll take half the pay for 100 times the job security any day. And really, I was making an obscene amount of money to begin with, so it's not like half of that is poverty or anything.
Of all the admin's I know none really started out to be sys admin's. It just kind of happened. Out of our shop the degree base consists of Masters degrees in Biology, Teaching, and Engineering, and several Bachelor degrees in electrical, general, and or computer science. Several pieces of advice. Universities are great to work at and are a lot of fun, but pay very little. Corp. companies pay more but are more rigid in culture and thus more main stream. I think the best piece of advice about being a sys admin comes from the O'Reilly Essential System Administration Book Sys Admins need to be thick skinned. There is a reason there is an armadillo on the front cover
alt.sysadmin.recovery
Read enough of that, and you'll change your mind in a heartbeat...
--Chemguru
I started in college (got a Computer systems engineering degree). Eng dept had Sun workstations we did circuit design simulations on and such. I obviously couldn't have root on those machines so I started playing with linux ( .8? kernel ). After college I got a job as a network admin at a small university else where. Mostly NT but I squeezed in a couple of Sun boxes and Linux boxes to do the real work. From there I wiggled my way into a junior unix admin position at a large telcom and worked my way to senior lead admin within a year. Now I do consulting for big Sun shops doing lots of HA (veritas clustering), disaster recovery planning and security. My certifications include Sun Certified Systems Admin and I'm also Vertias Cluster certified (only for resellers) and I'm working on my Oracle DBA certificaion and EMC architect cert. Experience is the key to getting to play with the big toys and latest stuff. What honestly has help me the most is my educational back ground. Without that base to work from I would have had much harder time learning as quickly. Understanding how the hardware and OS interact is very helpful. Take some good hardcore classes from a local tech college or something. Linux is great and I use it on all my servers at home (except my sparc box) but it doesn't really help you get a job as much as experience with a commercial unix will. Whether it's solaris, HPUX, TRU64, AIX or whatever. I'd say put Solaris X86 on a box at home and go from there (aka slowaris).
Good luck!
J
I've got three friends who all studied Philo at the same school and now we're doing the same thing in three different cities.
I'm an admin now, soon to get the coveted Senior prefix on my title, and I still don't even have a degree. Hell, I only have a GED, I got where I did on tenacity, skill and perseverence, in that order.
A good skills inventory to try and achieve can be found in the job descriptions made available by S.A.G.E. which is the System Administrators Guild. Knowing your shit is far more valuable than having certifications claiming you know it. If you want to go for Solaris careers, Sun certs are semi-worthwhile but expensive to get the training for, as opposed to learning on the job and then just passing a test.
There are many routes in, however trying to start at a junior admin level is probably the easiest. That or find a company with a NOC and try and get in there. The position usually means a fair degree of visibility in terms of technical skills without having the pressure of your future immediately riding on unpolished skills. That's how I ended up as an admin in fact. I was hired into the NOC, learned Perl and did some administrative scripting that people found valuable, then won a few technical debates to prove I knew what I was talking about.
While I was finishing off my Undergrad Computer science degree, I was working as well doing ASP and ColdFusion work. Then I took a course here - ( Computer Science 550 )
Which blew my mind. I ended up doing well enough to be offered a job with the Comp. Sci Department - and have been here for a year now.
Working here is incredible - So many OS's, so much freedom to experiment and learn - and the beauty is that if you screw up, for the most part, the company will not lose money. To boot, It's a great laid-back atmosphere.
We hire a lot of summer students to help with all the major work over the summer ( new OS roll-outs for instance ) - take a look at all the departments at your school.
Enjoy!
After a drink and dancing party of academic proportions, I fell asleep drunk in the computer
room of the physics department.
The prof. who found me next day was quite ok about
it and asked me if I knew anything about it. I said, yes, I built some linux networks and do programming.
I'm the paid system administrator for two years now.
I don't regret it.
-------------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
I grew up with DOS, and so the transition to Unix was quite easy. I just had to alias dir to ls, and never had any problems
i have a degree in political science.
i worked as an administrative assistant (AdAss!) for a year after graduation, talked my way onto the help desk b/c i had been doing all the software support for other adasses, lasted there for eight months before the stupid people drove me away screaming and talked my way into the unix group by offering to be their slave. (the fact that i had taken over most of the unix support on the help desk didn't hurt either). four years later i'm a senior admin in aix and tru64 unix working for a really huge company that doesn't pay as well as it should but allows me to wear my dr. seuss cat-in-the-hat hat and hurl rubber frogs at co-admins.
life is good.
idaho
Welcome to Idaho - Buckle Your Seatbelt!
You are not to old. Don't let anyone tell you that! I worked with a guy who decided to become an admin at 43
:-)
I knew a guy who, although he was already an MD doctor, went back to medical school at age 62 and became a psychiatrist. He was a good Catholic and as such, had 9 children... His area of specialization in psychiatry became adolescent substance abuse... geez, I wonder why?
BTW, he conceived his last child at age 66 and finally passed away from a heart attack at age 88 one morning while at work at a hospital. The old guy kept living life to the fullest and working hard every day up to his last day.
offers from ISP's. A Week later I was Sysadmin.
Of course, I had experience with various systems beforehand,
had worked in (MS) PC-support, helped to administer Netware and had used Linux at home exclusively for two years.
Now I'm a little different because I was over 40 when I started.
Did the midlife career change thing & took a Hell Desk job as a foot into the IT field.
Learned enough shell & PERL on my own to be able to script enough to improve the way things were done.
Showed the Powers That Be that the *NIX way just worked better.
Got put into a put up or shut up situation (migrating web servers to Apache) as a test.
Now I sit in a room full of blinky lights with a sign over the door that says "I'm root. You're not. Go away"
In my case the mere fact of my percieved maturity was a big boost because I didn't come across as a snot. That goes a long way in the business world
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
I posted this in relation to a similar discussion on Kuro5hin. There are a few things in here that apply to that poster, but in general it applies here too, so I figured I'd cross post it.
:-)
/etc! This is part of the UNIX experience that is different for nearly everyone. In the same way that you have your own style of spoken speech, this is where you develop your own style of UNIX. Try running everything. Try changing config files that look interesting. Hey, if it kills your box you'll just have to reinstall. And you should know all about that by now! Oh, and remember "man". It is your friend.
:-P Of course Google is always around when you run into trouble. If you don't have Windows, you could probably skip this step, although there's something fun about storing Windows stuff on a UNIX box over a network. Or maybe its just me...
:-). You'll know that being a true UNIX master has little to do with book learning and everything to do with knowing how to search on Google. And that's when you'll know you are true sysadmin material. How do you know when you are a master? When your website or newsgroup postings or maillist messages become answers instead of questions and there's lots of Google referers in the logs. :-)
--------------
Step 1: Become a sysadmin.
Step 2: See step 1.
That's about it, really. UNIX is not really something you can master by reading up on it or by doing preparation in advance. It is a bit like english (or any spoken language), really. You just have to start using it.
By some standards, I'm a pretty advanced sysadmin. I've played with/configured about 75-80% of the items in the above list. According to other benchmarks, however, I have not even scratched the surface. It all depends on what sort of sysadmining you do. Sort of like how in spoken language you might be really good with, say, sporting words but know nothing of cooking terminology.
As far as I'm concerned, the best way to get good at being a sysadmin is to dive right in blind. Unfortunately that can be a really hard position to get into if you don't have a job related to sysadmining already. So, get yourself a nice box you can dedicate to a *nix and start hacking. I would suggest, however, that you not start with a crappy old 486. Even though there are lots of them around and they can be had for a dollar or two, the headaches of waiting for stuff to load and run might just drive you crazy. If you can, a high-end pentium would be best (and still very cheap). A PII would be better, of course.
Now that you have a box (with lots of disk space and its own monitor) that you can dedicate to the task of sysadmin training, you can begin the process of becoming an expert. Here's a list of things I would suggest trying out (in a sort-of order, but not strictly):
- Install Slackware cold. What I mean is, don't read all the docs on Slackware before you try to make it work. Instead, just read enough to know how to get the install started. Then when you run into problems, try to figure them out yourself. After a couple of failed tries, launch Google on your main machine and start searching.
- Learn how to read and edit files. Learn about more, less, cat, grep, vi, vim, pico, nano, lpe, etc. No, you don't need to know them all right away. But find out what ways you like best to read raw text files and config files. Don't have any text files? Poke around in
- Configure from scratch. Setup your network in Slackware (maybe using those reserved IPs if you don't have a real one). Get the box configured so it can ping your main box and vice versa. This might require a lot more quality time with Google if you're new at it and don't know where to start. But once you have a general idea, start searching man pages first since that can lead to other man pages which might ultimately lead to the solution (rememeber to check those "see also" sections!). Reading man pages is where tons and tons of general UNIX knowledge comes from and is very important. Oh, and you shoulnd't have to reboot for any of this (in theory).
- Setup a cron job that automatically syncs your computer's clock with an atomic clock. Don't know where to start? Google! But remember to break the problem down into its components. One component is to sync your computer with an atomic clock. The other part is making it do it automatically every so often. Usually, a UNIX tool will do just one part of the total solution. Keep this is mind.
- Setup Apache (since that's always fun to see working). But for maximum learning, compile Apache from source first. Google might be handy here, although explore the INSTALL or README files and such first.
- Setup SMB (samba) and make a network drive on your Linux box that can be mounted from Windows. Always a good time to be had here.
- Setup MySQL or Postgre or whatever one you think is better. Learn how to make some tables and some simple SQL (if you don't know this stuff already). But focus your time on the sysadmin-side. Learn how to properly back up the database (good chance for scripting here). Learn how to optimize a database. Setup mod_php for Apache and try to build a simple database-driven page (maybe pulls a list of names from a database table and displays them). Don't know where to start? Remember, UNIX is a collection of parts. It is the job of a sysadmin to put them together (in the form of scripts). Google? Is that you?
- Don't install X Windows. At least not right off. Focus on the sysadmin-ing bits of things. You can do nearly everything in UNIX without a GUI. You must learn these methods first or you will always be dependant on GUIs. In the UNIX world, being dependant on a GUI is the same thing as not being a sysadmin.
- By now you should know all about telnet and ftp. What about ssh? Did you know telnet is clear text and your password can be pulled right off the network? Don't like that idea? You shouldn't! Get paranoid. Secure your box from script kiddies and DOS attacks.
- You must have a reason to sysadmin. You can't just do it for the sake of doing it. If you don't have any reasons, make some up and stick to them. Give yourself deadlines to figure something out. Pretend that there's an office full of angry non-sysadmins just outside the door.
- Try setting up a mail list using majordomo. Once you get totaly frustered with that mess, set one up using mailman.
- Start playing with Perl. Don't worry about making it clean or pretty. Just get the job done. Perl isn't too picky. Don't use strict mode. Just make it work. Worry about getting your code clean and proper later. Perl won't care. Do things like build Perl or shell scripts that "automate" a backup process or perhaps reads some of your Apache log files and generates some stats. Yeah, there are stats programs, but you need the practise with Perl. Do it yourself once. Google is always there when you need it.
- Make some other user accounts on your box. Login with them and try to break the system (messing up configs, reading logs you shouldn't, reading other user's mail, etc). If you can, there's a problem. Learn how to fix it. Then fix it. Google knows these things.
- Buy some X10 stuff. Hook it up to the UNIX box. Build some Perl scripts that turn lights on and off with some event (such as a web hit--mod_php, anyone? Or hey, mod_perl if you're really into Perl) or at certain times of the day. Add in silly things like playing a sound on certain events (say, when you send an e-mail to the machine at a certain address it executes a command which plays sound). Or, make it so that if you telnet to a certain port (you do know about ports, right?), you can issue some special commands which affect the lights in the room and the music currently playing. Build a web interface for your room/house. If you can do this stuff, you'll know you're getting close to being a sysadmin. It might even involve Perl if you wanted it to. Or C. Or Python. Or whatever you want to learn right then. You see, you can do just about anything in just about any language in UNIX. I'm sure you think different than the person down the street. In UNIX, writting code in different languages is similar to how people think different. The end result might be the same (such as saying the same thing as someone else, but knowing that you likely arrived at that word with totaly unique thinking methods). In UNIX, language is not nearly as important as the result.
- When you think you've become a master, try to automate. Find yourself doing some things nearly the same all the time (say, when you build backups)? Build a script. Whatever language you want. Doesn't matter. Don't like the way the scripting languages work with your particular problem? Write your own meta-language and have another scripting language "execute" it.
- Now you're probably getting cocky. Format the drive on your linux box and install FreeBSD. Start over.
If you get this far, and are very comfortable in both Linux and *BSD, then you're probably about ready for an intro job in sysadmining. And by this point, you will no longer care about getting a certification (unless it might mean a higher wage
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I have a B.S. in applied mathemtics . I know of sysadmins that are downright yodas with just a high school diploma though. I got to be a Unix admin by first mastering a Unix app that needed maintaining(apache web server in my case). There is an, arguable, truism that it is the apps that drive the hardware/OS choice. Same is true for Windows. If not for MS Office then Windows would not have been as big as fast as it has. So, the point is that if you are well versed in a bigtime Unix app such as web server software, SAS, sendmail, and so forth then you can get a job maintaining that app and then transition into more general sysadminning. This is, in my opinion, he most common route.
My degree was in Aerospace Engineering.
I fell into Unix Admin by taking a part-time job as one, which eventually became full-time. I think this is the usual route. The way it really works, is you learn from other admins by doing it as a junior admin. It's an informal apprentice system. Any decent operation I've ever been in, the important person who evaluates you is the working admin who is going to ask some pointed questions to see if you have the thought process to be a diagnostician and fixer. This field is decidedly not about CS degrees, certifications, and book learning. The only people who think that are the suits who don't really matter as much. The culture is very much a meritocracy. As you take small jobs and do well with them, your reputation will spread and you will get bigger jobs and more responsibility.
I did a CS degree after being in the job a while, but only because Georgia Tech paid for it, it's not at all required in my day to day work. As to degrees and certifications? Forget about it. I usually shit-can the first-round candidates with these questions:
Me: "So I see you're a CS major. What OS are you running on your own machine?"
Them: "Windows 98"
Me: "Ever load any other OS to compare?"
Them: "Nope"
Me: "What projects have you jumped into because you thought it needed doing? What OS have you played with?"
Them: "Well I did all the programs required in my courses."
Me: "Thanks. NEXT!"
Most people don't enjoy their jobs, they have to remind me to take vacations!
For some of these questions, "I would read the manpage, or the manual, or the (gasp) dead trees on the bookshelf" is an acceptable answer.
But for example, I'd expect someone to know basic stuff like what's the nsswitch.conf, /etc/netmasks, how to configure NIS.
Troubleshooting/real world scenarios are the best interview questions. And I agree that quickly learning things you don't immediately know is the most key ability.
In my book, very very very important: communicate with your clients, particularly if they are technical-- scientists, engineers. Tell them when the server is going down & why, tell them what the right network settings are, and why he/she can't have a switch with 20 boxes in the cube.
I am not a snr admin by any sense of the word. I am, however, the main (well - only) techie geek in my office.
So I got my foot crushed by the door by saying "We can save a few bucks if we run our own email service for our staff by using free/gpl software". It also helps to have a rare boss that actually listens to your ideas, instead of shoving her own down your throat. She said "Sure, what have we got to loose" and off I was installing red hat on an old old old pentium server to set up email services. I haven't looked back since. It also helps if your organization has finite budgets to play with.
Alternatively, grab some old hardware (a 486 with two network cards will do) and run/share your internet/highspeed connection with your home network. Pick your OS of choice - xBSD or linux. I'll plug OpenBSD, because they have the best man pages. The community is whacked, but they still have the best man pages.
"BSD is about people pissing each other.." (Moid Vallat)
<SARCASM>
As punishment for several misdemeanors, I was sentenced to perform community service in the
form of UNIX system administration... a fate far more terrifying than any prison sentence.
</SARCASM>
In all seriousness, I went to a small private school (about 1,200 students) and they had several Solaris boxes that they needed to administrate. Unfortunately (or rather fortunately for me) the IT department had no one on their staff with solid UNIX experience. I volunteered to be an apprentice under the current student sysadmin and after reading many books, man pages, etc., I settled into the role of sysadmin. I realize this is an ideal situation and that I was very fortunate since most college IT depts. do not allow students to have that much responsibility for their production-level servers. However, the point I'd like to make is that most sysadmins are willing to share their craft with anyone willing to learn. If you show up to a college/university IT dept and express interest, someone is likely to take you under their wing even if it an informal, unpaid-type situation. At least then you would be acquiring sysadmin skills that you could use in the future.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra
I took a unix programming class, one of the first commands we learned was "uptime" the server we were on was at around 3 months uptime, I'd never heard of no such thing!
.83alpha? .81? .87? good god I can't remember, finally got booted, thought it was neat, downloaded Slackware .97Beta (.99beta? maybe both it was a long time ago) all.. 33? 35? floppies and installed it, actually got X windows running, got it to use my modem to dial into the university computer. NO MORE LAB FOR ME, I could do it at home.
/dev/modem" while on my terminal I had "vi source" opened.
Downloaded Linux boot/root disks version uhm,
I gained extra credit when my teacher asked how'd I upload my source and I said "cat source >
I was hooked.
--- www.f-theocean.com
I was a farm kid in college (1985) becoming an Electical Engineer, and I got busted for "Attempting to Access" the IBM CMS mainframe computer.... The instructor in my Pascal class said that after three password attempts, the terminal would be disconnected. It didn't happen, so I thought that more attempts might be necessary.... Nothing....
Within a few days I found myself in front of a judge and was given a boatload of community service hours for the University computer center. Idaho (U.S) is rather strict. I cleaned every doggone terminal on the campus, then helped string coax.... must have done OK work since they hired me after my service hours were up. I ended up as the operator for the IBM CMS mainframe... Yeah.. yuch. But is wasn't as bad as the old IBM JCL card machine.... Remember, it's Idaho. Most anything was high-tech compared to my old Surge milker...
After college got hired as a Electrical Engineer in the Quality Assurance dept. They were using Xenix. I liked it way better than DOS... So I took home manuals and learned it. Then we started getting Sun equipment. Unix rocked. Soon I got approached to be an admin for a much larger dept. Am still in that position and love it.
Advice..... Avoid crime. Get out of QA. Don't use gui's for sysadmin. It rots your brain (and they enter stuff incorrectly or out of order). Learn vi and sh. All Unix I know of comes with those. Better know how to use ed in a pinch. You WILL have to use it sooner or later.
But you will miss the farm...
Get a job in a University where the boss has unix computers. Convince him that he'd be better off spending time writting grants and teaching and stuff like that. Offer to help with the computers and do well. He'll give you root access.
I worked there doing phone support, became acquainted with some smart folks, and was hanging with them during Linux's early days, 95-96. We used Sunos as an os, so I got user experience that way.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
1. Go back to college/University. Preferrably where they have the biggest, baddest UNIX-type systems available. Even if you don't finish any degree program there.
2. Hack the boxes. Hack them all. Crack passwords. Read up every litle tiny scrap of hacker lore you can on the subject of the machine in question. Learn to use and live by your personal encryption tools. Have emergency backup plans in case someone spots you (srm -ll -rf * & saved my ass countless times). Break into the registrar's system and learn how to change your grade. Bonus marks for getting away with it (pun pun.)
3. Get to know the people who hack the lab machines and play Quake a lot. They can sometimes (if you get in with the right crowd) teach you more than any security book out there. Try to find some who can hack smartcards. You can get access to the labs in the wee hours in this case.
4. Join your local 2600 chapter. Attend meetings religiously and go trashing with them after every one. Smile for the inevitable camera men who show up at each meeting.
5. Learn to program. Take the hardest, most grinding assembly course you can find and learn x86 assembly code by heart. Then find an active mirror of Fravia's old pages of reverse engineering and read them. Yes, all of them.
6. Once you know the machines themselves and how to exploit them (and the people who use them--that's what the 2600 meetings are for) you can start with the networking aspects.
7. Set up a home network with as many old computers as you can find. Learn how to use lpd. Get two network connections at home and learn how to set up a BSD to be a load balancer for you. FreeBSD works well. Bonus points for doing it with NetBSD.
8. If you haven't been kicked out of school for your hacking activities, finish your degree. Party with your new 2600 friends. Try not to get into the drug scene. It gets nasty.
9. Start at as small an ISP as you can who looks like they know what they're doing (ie: you can't hack their network) and present your degree and ask for the lowliest tech support job you can find. Outshine everyone and get to be friends with the system admin. This is the hardest social engineering you will ever face, because remember? You chose a small ISP with a good system admin. The good system admin won't like you. He'll probably not want to bother with you. Remember those Quake lessons you took in college? Whip them out and kick his lame ass. Then show him exploit code you developed yourself. Your thorough knowledge of assembly is what will carry the day here. Help the System Admin plug a few security holes exposed by your exploit code. Build an Open Source product you think everyone will use, and promote it on Slashdot.
10. Accept the job they offer you and work alongside the system admin for as long as you can stand to hang onto the pager. THIS IS WHERE YOU WILL LEARN THE MOST. Get access to their cisco routers, and extreme networks switches. Learn to configure them. Learn about BGP peering. Learn about ARIN and how to convince them to give you more IP addresses. Repel outside hacker attacks. Build virtual hosting machines that can handle 1000 domains. Build quad-xeon systems with bulletin boards that can handle millions of hits a day. Learn how to administer HSRP with the Ciscos.
Congratulations! You're well on your way to becoming a system admin. Once you're done with the smaller ISP, apply for senior system admin at a larger one. Then, a larger one. Insinuate yourself into an extremely large virtualhosting company, or an extremely large networking company.
Finally: GOOD LUCK. We need more people like what you will become.
I would say that in the current job market getting an entry level opsition is going to be a lot tougher than it was 18-24 months ago. But if you are patient, there is no doubt that things will get better.
As far as being to old at 33, that is nonsense. I made the switch to IT at age 50, although I had many years of experience working with computing equipment, and a very solid math background as a chemical engineer.
The biggest thing that I find is that there are a large percentage of techies that are much younger than I am, and this does create a bit of a gap in terms of communications and culture. But if you are like me and never really grew up, it's not hard to relate with your coworkers.
The other part of the process that I find challenging is growing my expertise rapidly enough to get where I want to be in terms of my second career - unlike those younger folks, I don't have 10-15 years to spend gaining experience.
What I would be concerned most about at age 33 is whether or not IT is where you want to be long term. IT will be a great career with lots of growth potential so long as Moore's conjecture holds true. However once the growth curve peaks out I think IT will become mature, and thus much less desireable. When that will occur is anyones guess, unfortunately. But I think we have at least 10-15 years left - which should take me into retirement nicely.
I have a BSEE. I was doing network monitoring and troubleshooting and started writing shell/sed/awk scripts (prior to learning perl - wish I had that time back) on SunOs 4.something to make sense out of our Timeplex t3/t1 mux network. Then I went to my next job, where HR had kludged together a frankenstein's computer running SCO Unix to run Oracle and PeopleSoft. My boss said "You know Unix, right?". I said "A little". (That boss had the opinion that when I said "I know a little about that", I meant that that my knowledge was limited by the fact that I hadn't actually written the code in question. Flattering, but occasionally inconvenient.) So I was was made sysadmin on that box, which I continued to be after the system in question moved to Solaris 2.5.1. (I was also one our main router admins at this point, so I was very busy, but the combination was really good for learning stuff.)
I had a good rep, in spite of not being the most organized person in the world, mainly because I'm very conservative - if I change something, it's with lots of off-time ahead to recover and full, verified backups in hand. Not everyone believes in that, amazingly enough. Also, if users had problems or questions, I would do my best to get them an answer, or send them to the person that should have the answer.
These days I 've been instructed to concentrate on router/network issues, but I still keep a Linux box up for MRTG (for serial link statisitics via SNMP) and to run perl scripts to monitor various network functions.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Doing firmware in 1991. Our manager also had some guys / project(s) working on Suns [I was working on a DOS box, doing firmware].
As a contractor, my (perm) friend said the key to longjevity(sp?) was, when I got down to 40 hrs a week of work, goto the manager and ask if there was anything else I could help out with.
Aparently we shared a unix admin with another group (the admins real group) and the unix admin quit. Two weeks later, my manager found out, paniced, then asked if I wanted to be the new unix admin. I had never even touched a unix box. I said, "sure".
I should have stayed with programming, as all the programers shifted to C++/Smalltalk and went thru 1-2 months of company paid for training, while I was struggling with taring shit off to tape.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
My story starts in 1986. This is an anecdotal account of how I got where I am today.
:-)
:-)
I started in an entry level operators job, on mainframes. I guess the only applicable education at that point was my college work on IBM mini's, but even that is questionable. When I started at the company, every desk had a 3279 terminal on it and the conduits were bulging with serial cables.
When the company I worked for went to a PC network environment (based on Netware), nobody knew how to maintain them. I had just purchased a PC, and had spent several days learning DOS at home, so I was the expert. Soon, I was the "PC Technician", as well as the Netware admin. I learned Netware from books.
Later, our company adopted a somewhat distributed platform, after having learned what I told them years earlier... Netware is not an application server platform. So they started buying IBM RS/6000 hardware and AIX. They did hire a hot-shot AIX admin to take care of things, but when he moved on to the next job-du-jour, I inherited his spot. One programmer there was a Unix sage, and I credit him with giving me advice and help that began my on-the-job learning process. He introduced me to concepts such as "less is more", "no response is good", and mainly, shell scripting.
Mind you, we're up to 1994 now.
I moved on from that company soon after, and became the NT/Sun/Netware admin/technician/CIO for a small software and trading and trader training upstart. You name it, I did it. One of their key applications was based on NeXTStep, so I became the expert. I was also getting well heeled in SunOS and later Solaris. All my training was on the job. I didn't much like the NT work, but that was mostly for office automation stuff. The "real" applications ran on Unix.
In 1997, long before the real dot-bomb, the software part of the company took a big hit and most technical support staff were layed off. I did a brief stint as a senior HP-UX admin, more or less a stepping stone into my current position.
My current employer hired me mainly because I know NeXTStep, although that constitutes little of my real work at this point. Now I'm a Unix Engineer. It's all Solaris, although we're looking at other platforms as well, including Linux. Now, I help produce the specs for the platforms we use; I develop testing procedures and reporting, and I evaluate new products for strategic advantage.
Along the way, I've taken countless classes and have been in and out of college several times. Although I would say that no particular class or course really put me where I am today, I must say that I got into the business way before anybody thought about what the qualifications for a SysAdmin should be.
It doesn't sound so much like you're asking "how do I get a job" as "how do I do *this* job", so I won't give my advice that in a bad economy, go back to school. Oops, sorry.
My advice is: learn Unix. Linux is easy to work at home, but Solaris is available too. Get books from O'Reilly. Shell scripting, Perl, Python, Apache, sendmail, Bind, etc. etc. Concentrate on learning networking, TCP/IP, and all that goes into keeping that running. Read the books cover to cover. Try them out on your system. Break things. Fix them. Get experience.
Most employers I've worked for have some sort of technical "grilling" session for their SysAdmin postitions. If you know your stuff, it'll show and your lack of formal experience will take a back seat to your demonstrated skills.
Finally, don't try to start at the top. Go to smaller companies at first, or do end user support in a bigger company. Then, work your way up.
Finally, consider therapy.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Then I was a "liberal arts" major, then I was a horse farmer. (No, I didn't grom horses, I plowed with them!)
The I decided I needed a career - I was 30 already! I enrolled in a CS program, and spent 4 years learning about computers. I wondered what a "systems analyst" was, and nobody could really tell me.
Now, after 15 years in the field, I am one, and I still can't define it. I got my first IT job when I was 35...I still find it fascinating.
I've programmed, analyzed, designed, data modeled, led projects, managed teams, etc. It is all FUN! Well, not all, the PHBs get to me, even tho I'm sort of a boss myself now....I'm too bald to be a PHB, I think.
Never ever let anyone define what you can do by your age, or any other stereotypeable characteristic!
The only thing you need to read is the BOFH.
:)
Make sure you put that on your resume
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
133, 1903, 10561, 38015, ...?
:-)
106461
1) Love to solve problems. /.
2) Read, then read some more.
3) *Use* un*x everyday
4) Enjoy your work. If you hate it, don't do it.
5) Fish Slapping Dance.
6) take a side- BSD vs. Sys V =)
7) Jeez, learn vi
8) Know how to make cables?
9) Number 2, but include the RFC's
10) Code
11) Write silly lists for
12) Don't bitch. It is possible to be a nice SA
13) If you can, get a SPARC for your house. l33t!
14) Get used to being on call and carrying a
pager
15) Taste all the flavors. SCO,Irix, SunOS. Yummy.
16) Intermapper is your friend.
17) Remember your SPARC? Learn to compile and tweak Sendmail.
18) Bugtraq.
19) Backups! Learn it, love it.
20) Read one or two BOFH. Vent.
Yep, you heard me. After going through a BA in Creative Writing and MS in Library Science, I got hired straight out of college as a Junior Unix admin. My employer is a Fortune 500 company based in a rather large city, and they pay me OK. At the time, I was also offered a webmaster job, but this gig is better. Now, exactly how this ties into my education is unclear...
#o#
O Moo.
All you need to know to become a successful and respected UNIX administrator can be found at THIS WEBSITE
I started out on PCs, moved to network support (DEC Pathworks), moved to NT and LAN Manager, moved to Novell, moved to Unix. In each case I still used what I learned before, be it methods or still needed to support it. What helped me move from position to position was the desire and the proven ability to pick things up and do something with them. All of the interviews I have been on and all of the ones I have given were more focused on experience and track record of continuing education/training. Sell yourself into the postion - even if you don't know 100% of the stuff they are asking for.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
I built the networks that I administer.
I agree with the folks here that say you "don't" want to be an adminstrator. I am a programmer, and that is my first love. The trouble is that system administration takes away from programming time, and it's a thankless job to boot.
Systems admin is one step above telephone tech support in being a satisfying job. Sure you get the power of the systems, but you have to put up with whiners. That's what makes sys admins grumpy.
Sys Admin sounds like a lofty position, but it's really just living in utility.
try & get an intern/co-op position.. ...
i just turned 18 - still finishing high skool & am working at a very large company on the "LAN Team" as a co-op -- even though i get shit work a lot of the time ((yesterday i was there till 9:30 straightening out an access router - cables & config!)) i get really great experience just watching - i work with a lot really good people - they're always willing to answer any questions i have - even if i don't ask
i've taken cisco courses & hopefully will soon be getting a CCNA to start out with - i want to major in CS @ a local engineering skool w/ a nice reputation & eventually i'd like to get a CCIE. i also want to get in some scripting languages - perl - visual c++ - stuff like that.
i think certification helps - a lot of people i'm working with are currently scheduled to take their hands on lab exam for the CCIE in the next few months - having a certified worker is like an asset to the company. i don't know about many other places but where i work they won't hire you unless you have at least a 4 year degree.
i don't know if i gave advice or just talked about myself.
*sighs*
[long story]
I have degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. I spent my last semester as in intern at EDS/Saturn Finance group. Then a year with GM as a temp IS worker. So far no Unix. Then I went into public health for 5.5 years and had to maintain Novell and SCO unix systems. During this I had my first trials with Linux. Then into healthcare (now for 5+ years). I now manage an AS/400, a pair of SCO Unix systems, and a Linux intranet server (among other things). My official title is IS Manager, but my real job is administrating all the hosts (and running the Dept). Someone else handles the PCs. I use Linux for all kinds of stuff and have it as my main workstation.
[short story]
I would go for it. If it's a job you think you will like it's never too late. Why spend the rest of you days doing something you KNOW you don't like. With your prior experience I would find a job as an IS manager in a field you know (finance, etc). You will have an easier time stepping in as a manager than a tech position. That doesn't mean you won't do tech work. It's your dept, do as much tech work as your comfortable. I never want to get to the point where I don't have my hands in the nuts-and-bolts of a problem. I still get excited when installing a switch or a new server and seeing how much better things run afterwords.
Good luck,
Jeff
And it has nothing to do with the fact that we'd be applying for the same jobs.... :-)
I receive messages like this once or twice a month. The questions are very similar, which leads me to believe they copied the sample email or letter from some career guidance book (e.g., What Color is Your Parachute or similar). What I'd like to know is why they are doing it and what book the canned message is from.
It started when I was 12 and flipped through a computer shopper helping my dad (who also knew little about computers) purchase our first, a 386. I taught myself some BASIC on our older Compaq 8088 and a little more on the Commadore 64, but mostly I played games.
In middle school I came in contact with other "computer nerds" and discovered a thriving network of Warez bbs's. I spent the next few years absorbing all sorts of information on those bbs's forums and doing whatever I could to get various games to operate on my 486. The MS DOS 5.0 manual was my friend (why don't they make manuals like that anymore? now you have to buy them from Microsoft press).
I played a bit more doom, found a nice multiplayer bbs and learned how to make my own doom levels. Then I did the same with doom 2 and hexen. Sometime a little before that I was on AOL for a while, but gave it up for the first one-rate ISP with real internet: Pipeline-USA.
By this time I was in high-school and recalled a bit of that BASIC to program by TI-85. I met one teacher very interested in computers, and allong with another computer whiz friend of mine we founded a computer club.
I learned a bit of C, enough to do a little graphic demo for the credits on my high-school video project. Finally I found it time to decide where to go to school. I picked a school in the northwest which at the time had a top 25 computer science department.
When I got there I applied for a departmental computer assistant job. They had a low budget and I helped them upgrade half a dozen 486's to P200's allong with fixing just about every little PC problem that occurred. I was a Microsoft monkey.
I met a senior in Computer Science in my dorm. He told me all about the evils of Microsoft, demonstrated windows insecurity by tier-droping my box, and showed me how he could still play doom on his linux box (a big deal in 1996).
I attended a few meetings of the Linux Users Group at my college, but mostly kept with my games and comp sci education. I continued to troubleshoot PC problems and fool around with some security exploits I could inflict on other windows boxes running mIRC.
The summer of my sophomore year I installed redhat on a spare box and began my linux education. I took a unix administration course and a year later I was using debian. (Wow, it's so much faster than redhat 6.1 - comparing xboing and xgalaga, hey there's man pages!).
My departmental job ended with a wimper when the budget was cut and I applied to be a teaching assistant. My wife (who's story is also interesting) was working at the student labs on campus. A semester later I applied to be the unix administrator at a graduate research lab. I solved a few of their problems, but one rude doctor and an anarchical system where every grad who had been there 3 or 4 years had root. My most valuable experience there was installing debian on an HP netserver and getting a nice NIS/NFS system going.
I was recruited by the professor I TA'd for to install redhat on a few boxes for a new business he was starting. My wife and I spent hours hacking away at getting a lousy i810 video card to run properly on two redhat 6.2 boxes with no network. A few months after that we were approached to become full time sysadmins at his new computer security company.
Since then I've moved into research & development as my wife is a more dilligent sysadmin, but I still help out a bit. We both worked to setup a Win2k/debian environment taking the best of both worlds (active directory and video games of windows, and cvs/bugzilla/bonsai/tinderbox, tape backups, and reliability served from debian linux).
As soon as the VC's turn around we'll have the oportunity to get our linux certifications, and we're thinking of getting our mcse's from the college just to inflate our resume's a bit and impress our customers who care about that junk.
That's my story.
I got lucky and was in the right place at the right time in the military. The Sysadmins at the military base were all Gov't civilians, but they needed someone at the time I got there, so they gave me a trial offer. I had never used Unix, never programmed in anything stronger than BASIC or Fortran, but for some reason they let me take a stab at it. I loved it from the start, and knew it was my station in life.
After the military I worked at NASA Ames Research Center in Silly-con valley and I saw that two of the local Jr. Colleges had internship deals with NASA in our building alone. The college kids interviewed for internships and worked at Ames for $8/hr. Crap pay, but they got the opportunity to work with insane systems. (3 Crays, 2 giant clusters, an SGI O2000 w/ 128 nodes, etc...) Everything was on a HUGE scale there. I can't think of a better place to intern. Some of them were hired on as full time admins, some just used the experience to get admin jobs.
Read the O'Reilly books, take some Sys Admin classes, network your computers together at home. Set up DNS servers, NIS servers, backup servers, CVS, IMAP, Sendmail, NFS, and learn how to program with the bourne shell. Not so much so that you can get a job doing it, but so that you can troubleshoot other shell scripts when they're not behaving. All of the startup scripts are poorly written shell scripts, especially for Linux. The more you learn about how they're supposed to work, the quicker you can spot the problem that's keeping that big server from booting properly.
Learn the boot process of a system as well. That'll come in handy once a week at least.
best of luck.
Keine eier
Start out with a technical entry level position in a company that has more work then people. (i.e. HelDesk or Tech Support for ISPs)
To start out avoid with any chance major corporation.
Don't run home every day at 5 and don't give up on anything. Get used to not having too much time left for your personal life, most people can't do that.
Show you can use the available technology to make your work easier and more profitable (Build scripts,...) in addition to your day to day tasks.
If you have good technical knowledge and are able to code most stuff in Perl and shell scripts avoid getting expensive and mostly useless certifications.
If you will stick out you will STICK OUT and eventualy became a system administrator and maybe more.
Hope this helps!
The Admin before me lost 30 days worth of business data because he wasn't checking backups. He also lost all of the usr accounts six months earlier because he didn't check the NT server backup. All of the business files had to be re-entered before statements were sent out later in the week.
I started out as a "Tape Monkey" doing overnight concurrent backups, so I knew that backups were job 1.
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
I wasn't trained. I was in a scientific group. I was a geek. I liked learning how Linux worked (and by extention Unix). Nobody else was running the computers. Next thing I knew it, even though I was supposed to be a physicist, I was probably spending 10-20% of my time keeping up to 20 workstations and cluster nodes going. I think I did a halfway decent job of it.
-Rob
I can only conclude I did something horribly evil in a former life to deserve this. Given my current job, I may have been Hitler.
How did this get modded a TROLL? Only on /. can you get moderated down as a troll for not prefering linux I guess...
Karma whorin' since 1999
...to become a /sys/admin:
http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~george/start.html
What is not documented there is that I also had 5 Ultrix 4.3 machines and the complete DEC printed manuals. Maybe the best administration books I've read so far.
I don't think that this is the appropriate forum for these type of postings. Hurting other peoples' sensibilities can cause them to no longer enjoy posting to the forum, and thus, a breakdown in communication will ensue.
Please read the Posting FAQ.
thank god this is where all the real workers are.
I became a system admin after all of the other sysadmins quit due to poor management. 4 years later and a alot more knowlage about unix
I now know why all of the previous sysadmins left.
I am so glad there is unix.
When I was young like 14 and up.... I was a complete loser waste for society at large. I was in and out of various institutions for "bad" kids from the ti9me I was 14 ubtil I was legally an adult. I spent the protion of my free time going to evdry grateful dead show I could manage to get my butt to. I spent ALOT of time traveling around the USA living in bizarre places eating interesting food and meeting exciting exotic people ..."HEH"
It was a just a tiny bit of a rough life.
Around 1992 I was starting to get a bit tired of this I had been at it for 11 years or so at this point.
I was living in a bus in Poenix Arizona selling tye dyes on the street corners there as a street vendor making "decent" money ... I had no bills so if I made 100 dollars half of it went back into the biz and i pocketed the rest. It was good life I was making nice money I had a kickass spot to park my bus .... running water electricity phone cable tv etc... under a really nice salt cedar right downtown really neat life ... derelict heaven I wasa PRO. :)
I had this friend opf mine he was veteran that had these bizarre arterial sclerosis troubles he was in the haspital all the time. rode a litte electric cart around. VERY odd guy we got along somehow though...
He came by the bus and the tye dye stands allthe time and we would chat all day...
He was a geek he knew how to buiold intel puters had a soldering iron etc...
I had never been exposed to this at that point this was sometime in 1994 i think...
He gave me a bunch of old spare parts as I was fascinated with what he could do with his machine bookeeping printing sign making etc etc... all really cool for a little street vendor guy...
We took the spare parts out and bought some ram and a 345 meg hard disk
we built a 386 sx with 4 megs of ram a 345 meg hard disk and a weirdass oak xga vga card horror story.
It managed to run windows 3.1 somehow...
I was in freaking heaven I had a little mono monitor and i would putter away in my bus at night on this thing mucking with it..
then i got a modem!
UTOH i was on irc withing 2 weeks and i was completely gone GAGA .....
I basically stopped working on tye dyes and anything else and spent all my time learning about this new wonderful world.
I got lost and let my biz dye my wife had a job and took care of us for sometime I was married to her for 9 years...
i was learning amazing stuff... rented a small house accross from where the bus was parked as my puter wanted more space :) linux machine doing ip forwarding etc a winders machine for her and a linux box for my desktop... and went nutty for awhile ..........
BOOM
She is pregnant!
my wolrd changes completely i get a haircut a better paying job doing desktop support.....
this is 1997
I am christened the "unix guy" at my new job i get to do all the stuff everyone else just is basically afraid of.....
It is vey fun and stimulating working with mechanical and electrical engineers as users...
we have a child...
i change postitions fast in this company up up up
i am interviewing for jobs as a unix admin now...
I have been on irc living in #linux on this bizarre remote irc network noone goes on....
Working on little projecty stuff with this guy...
He offers me a job as a unix admin in......... SWITZERLAND.
this takes about 6 months to pan out .. we get married move to florida to be with my wifes family and I am a cash register repairman for a few months out there....
Finally the job pans out and I get carted off to switzerland to work for a financial forcating research firm in a ALL solaris environment
1998.......
well and here I am I am still in switzerland and enjoying my job immensly learning things everyday I am a "senior" system administrator now at a small global company and life is generally amazing... I have another daughter and thing sjust get more and more interesting...
Jeff Courtade
Those who can, are admins.
Those who can't admin, are programmers.
Those who can't program, are supervisors.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Well, I started out as a software tester. That means the programmers would write whatever, and I'd try to find bugs.
From there, I learned some C and (more importantly) structured logic and how to write a flowchart, and moved across the hall as a junior programmer.
After doing that for a year, I started learning Unix, first on some anchient DEC kit (this was pre-'99) and later on some SCO boxes.
When I was "offered" a job (take it or take the door) writing VB for Windows NT 3.51, I quit and landed a new gig as an admin/programmer.
After a couple years there I moved to my current admin-only gig.
I still write code, just now it's to do what I want on my irix box at home.
Of course, I'm a cat. Your mileage may vary.
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
There was a VAXstation 3000 running Ultix at my school where I did my undergrad work. Nobody would use it. It was a sweet piece of hardware at the time (Even though it ran Ultrix...) I started to code C programs on it (The school used pascal as the main teaching language) It was neat, and kinda fun.
Later in life, after two jobs, and one layoff, I was standing next to the network guy when they got their new SCO box in for the programmers (a smokin' 486!). He asked If I knew anything about Unix and I said "Yeah, sure". I was hooked into taking care of the server, and got to enjoy it.
After the next layoff, I got a job as an actual administrator on HP-UX machines, and some programming on the side. I did that for a few years... until the next layoff.
At about the same time I took up Linux for a graduate class I was taking. Yaggdrasil, kernel version 0.99.x. (I still have the orginal distribution CD and book)
I have just about always worked on Unix is some form or another. I love it. I can't believe I get paid to use it on a daily basis!
It has been an interesting ride.
~Sean
I'm not wearing any underwear.
From my experience over the years (too many to think about most of the time), CS degrees and certifications are vastly overrated. They provide a method for HR personnel to separate resume stacks, but that's it. The best system administrators I've ever known spent years in the trenchs doing the admin work because no one else was able to. When they made the formal transition to a sys admin position it was on merit and knowledge rather than a degree or cert. The typical CS degree does very little to aide you in system administration.
Also, get a lot of experience with networking. Understand the protocols, how to configure the services, security, etc. A sys admin who only knows how to think about one box at a time rather that the network as a whole, has no future.
As long as you understand the technology and can think your way through any problems, the rest is easy.
And now I'm a burnout. Go figure.
Proteus' Child
Proteus' Child
Doko ni datte; hito wa, tsunagette iru.
Ok.
Got a job as a computer lab assistant in the CS department while working toward my CS degrees (BS then Masters). Was never able to get a TA position as those seemed to be reserved for students doing research for profs, which I wasn't.
Did a great job as lab assistant, dispite not even having root, becoming more or less the lead one. When they needed another student sys admin for the department's Unix systems, I got the position, soon switching over to that.
Then, as I got close to graduation, it was tough finding a job as a software engineer (which I had the education for) because I had no experience. But I did have experience (almost a year) as a Unix sysadmin. That got me my first job and the rest is history. I worked my way up at my jobs from being a 'junior' sys admin to being a senior sys admin.
Michael Brown
Here is some insight into how I hire SysAdmins:
Whenever I am hiring a new admin I look at three things primarily:
1) How much of a geek is he/she. ie, does this person use and love computers at home as well as work. Has the person at least installed 2 or 3 different OSs at home for the shear joy of installing OSs. I find that people who love their work rather than just being there for the $$ make MUCH better employees.
2) Experience. Has this person at least had a year or two working for a technology company. I have found that people without corporate experience take too long to fit in.
3) Intelligence. Can this person learn quickly, and will they learn stuff on their own time. No sysadmin will be 100% knowledgeable on all the systems we use, so I need people who can get up to speed quickly.
People will say that my hiring is unfair because some people have families to go to etc. The sad fact is that there are many people out there looking for work who have no commitments outside the office. And I don't care whatsoever if the person has any formal education. I have hired high-school drop-outs that have become fantastic Systems Engineers.
Well, lets see..
1992-Graduated H.S....barely. Had been into computers since the age of 4, and knew pretty much what I wanted to do with my life at that point.
1993-Got a job doing mindless help-desk work. $5.25/hr.
1994-Got a job working in a certification company as a student aide, barely better than mindless help-desk work. $5.25/hr.. Got a lucky break--The Senior Lab Coordinator vanished, and I got promoted into his position. $8.00/hr.
1995-Borrowed $50 from my Dad and bought UNIX Unleashed. Treated it like a Bible, and went off to a 4-year school.
1996-Soaked up some Assembly, C, and Java.
1997-Got a student job at the U as a Unix Admin. $12.50/hr, 35 hours a week ontop of school, no benefits. Took naps on the floor of my office when things got rough. Kept a jacket around for a blanket, and use something like a rolled up windsheild reflector as a pillow. (!) The reason I describe it that way is because when you land a job like that, you can consider it your first "real job". You need to soak up everything you can, and be ultra-committed to the position. As a UNIX admin, sometimes that means you sleep on the floor of your office. You don't go home until its fixed. Whenever you want to go home, just ask yourself, WWJD? Johaan, the Diesel Engineer in the movie "Das Boot"...Would Johaan go home? Hell no. Sure, Johaan flips out and has a mental breakdown halfway thru the film, but he pulls it together eventually.
1998-Started racking up accolades. Wrote some white papers, got published a few times, had my work cited. Literally, try to find or get involved in things which equate with adding a line in your resume'.
1999-Left the $12.50/hr job to concentrate on school. Started doing remote *nix administration for VA, namely themes.org. Stayed sharp in the skills department. Avoided signing onto any dot-coms..A good move, considering how most employers consider "worked for a dot-com" to be a negative attribute on a resume' these days.
2000- Got a job at IBM. $23.50/hr, $33/hr overtime, and plenty of it. Sure, you'll go to work before sunrise and leave work after sunset, but you'll love it. I loved it.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Crushed my predecessor and devoured his young.
don't say :
"I am an English teacher now but am a techie at heart"
instead say:
"I am an English teacher AND a techie at heart"
build on your teaching credentials to get a job teaching Linux/Unix classes. Then you can administer your own computer lab the way you want to do it. Computers are more fun in an education environment than in a business environment.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
If I had it to go over with, I woulda held out for software development, and not grabbed the low hanging fruit. As it turned out, I went into software development anyway, but only after becoming bitter and cursing the day I ever had a root password. Or had deep knowledge of unix. I've probably forgotten more about unix than most have ever learned. But in this stupid age, that's not saying much.
Now, ignorance is bliss, and on-call is an alien concept to me. I sleep contiguously. I never get paged during a movie. It's someone else's problem.
I have no college degree, I didnt even finish high school. I was in a school working on getting my A+ Certification, adn then looking at the MCSE Track (I didnt know any better back then, I was looking for work). With my A+ Cert and a friend in the right spot I scored a job doing tech support. We did support for Point to Point, Frame Circuits, and some DSL. The vast majority of our services were Unix (SunOS 4.x) based. After 3 months they decided I would make a good admin, and dragged me over.
Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to sit there looking at the cursor and going "What do I do now?".. Anywho, I think the best way to become an admin is to do it. I have found that I have received the best training on the job, with a of customers screaming that the is broken. You either learn how to be a good admin, with solid troubleshooting skills, get fired, or decide you cant deal with it and do something else...
A side benefit of becomming a admin is that it has branched out into scripting/programming which is what I will be doing in a few years. You need to automate this, fix that, tweak this or that. When you look back your like hey I could work with C or Perl or
my 2 cents
**-- Now Entering Deep Hack Mode --**
I know it's a dirt job. But... I was the only one avaiable :o/
What else could I do?
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Realistically, you'll have an extremely hard time getting a SA job without a degree in something science related. A BA in philosophy is roughly the equivalent of high school, in the eyes of most employers. That said, you've got a better chance in computing than almost any other technical field of getting a job without a relevant degree, so don't say 'no' yet. Learn as much Unix admin as possible--read usenet (still!) to find out about what constitutes 'real' admin rather than mere configuration. There are a lot of people out there who can read and tweak the system files on a box, and (wrongly) consider themselves admins.
Practically speaking, I know of almost no Unix admins who came from a computing background. I was once a chemist, my manager was a forestry something. We both were told at some point in our careers to 'make sure that machine keeps running' when the machine in question had a Unix controller. That's a very common scenario for admins.
Good luck!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Making good contacts is the key. College is the most obvious place. Getting a job at a small organization like an ISP or a non-profit would also do the job.
I like the college route. Two important aspects of Unix administration are the programming and logic skills. That is the biggest difference between Unix and NT is the need and application of these skills in Unix.
College is the best place to learn this skills, especially logic. Even a few classes will cover most algorithms. There might not be an immediate need for good programming skills, but this skills help you to think logically.
The only commitment you need at any age is time.
Step 1) Get A lobotomy.
When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
thought i'd get paid more, i'm a sucker.
It was my destiny.
I started out on CP/M S100 systems at home in Jr. H.S., Apple ][, and later Amiga. I was never that intersted in hardware, but always digging into how the OS worked and how it talked to the hardware. I programmed various old and now mostly useless languages (FORTRAN, Pascal, 6502/Z80/8086 assembler) and also different types of BASIC of course.
I went into college with almost a semester of CS credit hours, learned C and more advanced assembler on AT&T 3B2.
After a Liberal Arts degree, I bootstrapped myself into small-scale relational database (Paradox for DOS). Then got a job as the all-purpose tech guy at a local gov't organization that ran Sequent DYNIX/ptx (weird System V) and Informix. I was digging into that as deeply as I could -- porting software to DYNIX/ptx, and had to learn various skills trial-by-fire. Then they migrated to Solaris 2.5 and I expanded my knowledge into that.
With the Internet moving into the picture, and other factors, things became more complex, always something new to learn, and as I say I was sort of the all-purpose tech.
After a few years, I felt like programming. It helps a lot as an admin to know what it is like to be a programmer. So I did ASP web pages and more RDBMS (MS SQL Server) for a year. During that time I doubled as a sysadmin and general-purpose tech guru. For a while we ran a Sun E450 again, Solaris 7 this time, and a more advanced configuration that I built out-of-the-box.
Then changed jobs again to work as an admin for 4 Sun E450s with IBM WebSphere and Oracle 8i. I leveraged my experience playing with Tomcat (and I suppose IIS), and learned WebSphere inside and out.
Now I have to carry a Blackberry and cell phone, and do 24-hour production support for sites that get millions of hits a week.
Welcome to the world of UNIX. I manage the process and controls relating to logial security for a tech company that outsources to one of the big banks. I totally fell into this job. Yes, I went to University, and yes, it was in CS. However, what I learned in school and what I apply on the job day to day are two completely different things.
Regarding if you should attend a University depends on how you learn, and if you need a structured learning environment or if you prefer to do things hands on yourself.
Personally, I got into UNIX by accident. In the early 90s ('93 I think) I downloaded something called "Slackware" because I heard it would let me do my programming homework _at home_ instead of having to drive into school.
What I didn't know was that by running Linux, I was preparing myself for a future in UNIX. It was really quite innocent, and entirely by accident.
I'm not going to say that I didn't learn anything at school- however- what I use at work today is learned from experience- my own, and the experiences of others.
The world of IT changes so rapidly that in order to be truly successful, you'll need to be able to keep up. This means you'll always be learning.
Here, we refer to UNICES (AIX, Solaris and HP) as "Open Systems", and I have found them to truly be open- Rarely do I meet another admin who is unwilling to share information. The internet is a great reasouce as well. The fact that there exists Free/Open/NetBSD and (pick your distro) Linux has helped a lot. I suggest you start with that to gain experience, and see if it really interests you. The IT market is not as hot as it used to be, and twice as competitive, so jobs will be a little harder to come by (sorry).
So, on behalf of other admins, I welcome you to the world of raw power. Get yourself a copy
Whoever said 33 is too old is out to lunch, by the way.
Enjoy! Have Fun!
The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your Unix admin!
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
A friend's dad needed someone to change tapes for his seniors. I did that really well, so they sent me to training at Sun Educational Services who taught me the basics of Solaris administration (Sun has great training BTW- my instructors were both admins with over five years of experience and CS degrees.). After that I picked up the details of Linux, and just kept moving along.
;). Just keep practicing, and if you can get the Sun certifications, which some people regard highly (Although most people don't realize Sun offers certs, so some won't care.). it might be worth the effort.
If you want to get into admin stuff, learn Linux. Stick with Red Hat or Mandrake, because those are reasonably close to System V that most Sun/HP shops run. Play with OpenBSD on the side, and if you can, learn Solaris. Solaris is great because it is common in telcos, ISPs, and government work, and companies that can afford tend to pay well
As for the age thing, don't worry about it. I know a ton of people in their late twenties and early thirties just moving into IT. They all do just fine, just be careful to not get taken advantage of by technical schools looking to rip off with shady tuition loans and such for people changing careers.
I have to agree with a majority of the comments here. To break into the field requires persistence, a way to get in (either by a college-level job or volunteering), and some nominal skills that are not solely obtainable by certifications. I do need to point out other aspects of the job, having almost been a career admin myself until I got lucky. (It is true: once you mention admin experience on your vitae, you are branded for life.)
Generally, a UNIX admin job is not as desirable as other jobs within a typical organization. Truth is, not many people want to do it for the long-haul. Why? It's looked on as drudge work. Professionals pride themselves more on innovation, less on execution - and an admin job is typically executing day-to-day problem resolutions, not creating intricate designs (there are excpetions). It's not a glossy job - you are seldom put in front of a customer, few opportunities to be a "hero" on a project, or receive other recognition; instead, you face day in, day out in the machine room. Another point, the hours can be flaky: any *good* admin knows not to pull the file server down for an upgrade during the typical work-day, instead preferring to come in at night or on weekends for these kinds of jobs.
Last but not least, the admins don't control their schedules: most wear pagers. If anything goes wrong, you are pulled in to fix it. I don't care that you logged 45 hours this week and it's only Wednesday. On the contrary, a job in software development means you decide when you are going to show up and when you are going to leave (mostly).
Admins generally don't have a rich career path (jr. admin, admin, sr. admin, group manager) compared with other tracks, such as development: jr developer, sr developer, system engineer, project manager, senior scientist, presales tech, and on and on.
Because of these truths, an admin job is typically a transient role, with three cases being the norm:
(a) a fresh-out college graduate that doesn't have enough experience to be a developer will fall into an admin role for 6-12 months; (b) a mid-career non-computer engineer will do "time in the trenches" to join a high-profile project; (c) an end-of-career person will take admin because they know how to do it and/or are looking to hold on until retirement, and admining is usually the job that's always open.
Are admins important? You bet! Are they given recognition proportional to their import? Hardly! Is it a fun job? Yes. Is it a rewarding job? Well, the answer to that question ultimately defines whether you are a *good* admin or not. Folks who find their jobs rewarding are always better at it than those who don't. Unfortunately, most of the admin jobs are peppered with transients looking to move on, instead of tradesmen looking to hone their art.
That's been my experience.
If you actually WANT to be a Unix sysadmin, then you're probably not smart enough.
Seriously, though, you're never too old, if you're good. I started in IT when I was almost 40. I definitely started at the bottom, made maybe $15K the first year working part-time. But results get noticed, and once you have a track record to show, age ceases to matter. In fact, I've done very well by billing myself as "an adult," which often hits a nerve with suits who have been burned by too many 20-somethings who weren't reliable or trustworthy.
You do encounter that mentality of people who think young people are technically smarter, and in many ways, it's true. For example, I can't do math in my head as fast as I used to. But there's much more to being a good sysadmin than just technical smarts.
Oh, BTW, I started out doing Novell/DOS/Windows, and the transition to Unix wasn't easy. I definitely ran into a lot of resistance from Solaris snobs, who saw Windows experience and figured that I was some sort of gates-butt-licking lowlife. Over the years, I managed to get more and more involved in the Unix stuff, and now I have a cage full of Solaris servers to call my own.
And you know something? It turns out Solaris sucks just as bad as Windows.
It all started in school when I was taking a Basic programming class and we were doing our work off of a networked DEC VAX. The instructor noticed that I was getting around pretty well on it and was helping classmates when they had trouble with the command line. The admin for that box was going to a new job, so my instructor asked if I would be interested in the position, and that was my first networking job.
From then on, I worked mostly in development but did some Unix networking things, but not really full-time Adminning. A couple things would happen (suicidal daemons, file shares going out, etc.) and I'd sometimes get called to fix it. Somehow, because of my RTFM-ing and fixing problems, I would get transferred to Networking or just have Networking added to my tasks.
(Not counting contracts) In a collective decade, I have only taken 2 full-time jobs where the job description was Systems Administration. I have taken 6 development jobs and 5 of them ended up with me going into networking.
This is usually what happens: One of those development jobs started with me being hired to create a licensing program/database that played nicely with their WinNT & PH-UX servers. The PH-UX box got sick one day. The IT manager had come up to me and said, "We've noticed that you've got some Unix Admin experience on your CV. The PH-UX box is buggered up and $person doesn't know how to get it going again." So I help sort out the problem. This happens a few more times, then next thing you know, I am moved over to Networking. From the quiet solitude of development, into the depths of babysitting lusers.
Don't get me wrong, I like doing Unix Systems Administration (even with all the headaches). But with the above happening far too many times, I have a feeling that I am forever trapped into SysAdminning and will never be a full-time developer. 8^)
\(^_^)/ --Arggh! Trapped again!
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I'm localed in sioux falls south dakota, so there arn't a whole lot of entry level unix admin positions. So this is what I did:
1. Got an MCSE cert (I know... but I couldn't get a position without it)
2. broguht it my own linux box from home and hosted only my site on it
3. eveyone saw how well it worked...
4. now we have debian on 3/4 of our machines.
good luck
Please read Adminspotting and decide if you are ready to be sysadmin.
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
I started my career in computing when I was 27 learning Microsoft Multiplan (I don't know how many /.ers know what it was). After that was COBOL and FORTRAN. I became a real sys admin (HP-UX) at around 33 too. Before the admin job, we were tasked to develop a plan to convert our company's computing platform from mainframes into Unix boxes and PCs.
When we installed our first application that does material tracking in a manufacturing operation, I was the natural choice to be the admin due to my technical background on the project. The concept there was that as part of the project, members of the team were trained in various components of HP-UX and Oracle admin. to enable us to manage the system without expensive external support.
I would suggest therefore that you develop something useful for your school (I presume since you said you were an english teacher) that can employ Unix/Linux/*BSD systems and use this as a springboard for a career in sysadmin. Maybe a web interface for displaying/calculating grades (for teachers only) and assignments (for students and parents) or just even a mailing list. Last year when my daughter was in middle school, their principal would have a weekly newsletter sent to parents who subscribed. Maybe you can do something similar running on a system you administer in addition to the web page mentioned above.
In other words, create something useful that runs on Linux, *BSD or whatever Unix variant and you can use this as a springboard for a sys admin job.
Good luck.
Return the bells of Balangiga.
In the begining...
.com booms). Eventually we were purchased by Earthlink.
I was a freshman in college and still fairly clueless. A little better then others and my fancy at the time was hacking on novelle. This started back in highschool and it was really really fun to see what trouble I could cause.
Win95 had just came out, but most of our systems were still Win3.11 and really didn't have the power for that bulky OS. Off the bat I was already jaded with windows. I had to open 3 mosaic sessions on 3 different systems. I would just hop to another box when the current one crashed.
So during a session of complaing about the finer points of my dislike of Windows, I was mentioned of an OS that was all command line. I was immediately asking more questions. This was completely amazing to me. With a little memorization a system could be managed with just a few commands and no sluggish point and click bs.
Eventually I hooked up with a group and we founded a computer society on campus. We were all a group driven to explore Linux. So I spent more time learning things about the nix world. This was really at a loss to my class time, but was well worth it.
Then fast forward a few years...
Bills were slowly piling up, which happens when you don't have a job. This led to me seeking a posistion in tech support with the local ISP. ZoomNet was really an interesting place and there was alot to be gained there. Eventually I left tech support and kinda fell into a posistion with our engineering department. After a short while our primary SA left during the OneMain buy out.
I was really scared at this point. No one knew what would happen and no one trusted what was told to them. We all knew consolidation would come at some point and then we would be out of work. I accepted the posistion as the primary SA and wasn't really happy about it. I didn't enjoy the idea of all my friends leaving and with the market really booming I had considered a couple dozen offers of leaving.
I did stay and I learned a great deal in that time. Eventually OneMain ran out of money (lavish spending like most other
It has really been a great experience. I've gotten to go to some great places, meet some interesting people and continue to grow.
During this time my job eventually became my career and as such I really didn't have the time to attend school anymore.
Now it looks as if I might finally return to school and I will now carry with me a great deal more wisdom.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I don't want to lie on my resume, but I don't want them to make me do stuff I don't really want to do, even if I could do it.
So when people first start thinking about me as a sysadmin, I say that it's been a few years since I've done any serious admin work, and I've forgotten a lot of things (which is partially true, and a lot of sysadmin is just knowing a lot of quirks about config files and the behavior of various software pieces.) If they're still persistent, I'll reluctantly do it, but do it in a way that's boneheaded and braindead, and takes me the quickest amount of time. Then, after experiencing sufficient amounts of pain from my "solutions" to their "problems", they usually give up, and take the easier path of finding someone else, who is more "competent". That leaves me free to pursue my career objectives, which I guarantee, will never ever give you any pain from any "incompetence".
And after a while, technology marches on to the point where they won't even bother anymore.
And don't give me that crap about how, if you don't do it, the company might not make it. That's what your front line manager wants you to believe. I've seen profitable companies run on some of the most boneheadedly-built systems. Good admin, bad admin, to a company it just doesn't matter than much. I mean, they'll take you if you're good, and run with you, but they really don't need you.
I started off in a Mom and Pop computer store fixing Apples and IBM's. Played with DOS, then Windows 3.11.
After two years of that I moved from Bremerton, WA to Redmond, WA and got a job at a consulting company (Excel Data). I worked there as the internal SA. I couldn't believe I got the job (of course I got in because a friend of mine worked there:)).
I was working on Windows NT 3.51, Linux (Redhat 4.2), and Exchange.
Did that for about a year. Excel was a contracting company and I made some friends with the senior consultants. Eventually I got to work on some small jobs, then bigger, and so on.
Well my Exchange skills were pretty good and I landed a contract job at AT&T Wireless to help out the postmaster
They had a SMTP backbone and I got to play with Solaris 2.5.1. I had some Linux experience so it wasn't totally foreign to me. I loved it. I even asked one of the Managers why were using Exchange? Why not a POP/IMAP server?
For one reason or another I made an impression on that guy, I won't mention his name but I am sure he knows who I am
My contract with AT&T Wireless was up and I bounced around at a few other jobs. In the meantime I was running OpenBSD and Linux at home and learning all I could.
I left Excel Data and went to Redtech. There I got a consulting job at Western Wireless. It was fun, more of the same: NT, Exchange, etc. I wanted more UNIX. Well my wish was to some true
One day I get an e-mail from the manager I made an impression on. He was putting together a team of UNIX. Admins and knew that's what I wanted to do and offered me a chance to interview for it!
Well I was excited to say the least. I went in for the interview and did really well. I got the job offer.
I was now a Junior Solaris Admin working on production systems with NO FORMAL TRAINING or EXPERIENCE on Solaris. I can't relay how lucky I was to get that Job. The guy took a chance, let me learn on the job, and was a great mentor.
Three years later, I am still at AT&T Wireless, and a senior admin. (I did take a 4 month break at a dot com but came to my senses).
The coolest thing is - now I am helping junior admins. I even hired one of my friends from Redtech. He too wanted to switch to UNIX.
I got a degree in English and am now doing OS Support/admin at a medium sized company. I got my first look at unix in the mining industry and wound up maintaining 8 sparc machines. For me, it was just an opportunity and an intrest that led to where I'm at now. I was also 35 when I started out, so don't let the "age" thing influence you. There are opportunities out there.
The best advice I could give is to eat, sleep and sh*t UNIX. When I finished up school, I spent several weeks playing around on a home network, configuring things like NFS, Samba and ssh, all the while gaining a more thorough understanding of both specific applications and the ways in which they integrate with the underlying OS. Tell your boss that you want a UNIX workstation, or if that falls by the wayside, load Linux/*BSD on a PC. I find it much easier to admin UNIX by using a UNIX box rather than running SecureCRT or PuTTy off Windows. Besides which, you'll have more opportunity to use the OS on a regular basis. You'll also become accustomed to patching your system.
Don't expect to become an uber-admin overnight. Starting green (like I did), you might not be trusted to admin everything UNIX, as the large, mission-critical Solaris/Oracle servers surely aren't proving grounds for a newbie. Prove yourself first, and as you mature into a professional admin, your skills will be noticed and put to good use accordingly. I'm more established (and trusted) now, but in my earlier days, the systems I supported weren't terribly important (mostly dev), and as such I could work without beads of sweat on my forehead.
WATCH EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE! I cannot impart this enough. Don't allow yourself to become lazy and careless, for as a result you might end up typing `kill' in place of `ps -ef' and quickly cut-n-paste a PID without thinking. Yup, I killed an appserver this way. Don't do things as root that can be done just as easily as an unprivileged user. Drill that into yourself from the get-go. You cannot be careful enough.
Working for a Uni is incredible. The pay is good; although it's not as good as the private sector, the working conditions more than make up for it. I've got my own office (at 21 yrs old, no less!) down the hall from several admins who have proven to be awesome sources of knowledge for a young sysadmin with far too many questions. Large, heterogeneous computing environment, flex hours up the wazoo, two hour lunches, etc, etc.
You're guaranteed to learn a ton, but do maintain a sense of humility. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you truly know in the grand scheme of things.
First, let me say that I made my career to systems admin change at the age of 42, so whoever told you that you were too old at >33 was wrong. It CAN be done if you're willing to put in some time and pay your dues.
I got here from an unrelated field by taking some CS courses at the local college and by trying to learn HANDS ON everything I could. You can't just read a book or two and expect to get it. I'd suggest getting some hardware for home and building a network. Buy used hardware on Ebay if you have to. Don't limit yourself to learning Unix, even if that's your main interest. Knowing more than one network OS WELL can give you an edge in finding your dream job down the line. Realistically, it would not hurt you to learn NT and Citrix as well as Unix. Be sure to get a handle on Linux also and how to make them all play nice together. Whatever your personaly feelings about NT or any other OS, you have to deal with some business realities if you're going to make a career in IT. My last round of job hunting, I found that about 50% ofthe potential employers I talked to were looking for people who can integrate two or more OS's.
I mentioned paying your dues: Get used to the idea that you're probably going to start at the bottom and will spend a year or more working the help desk somewhere before you get a shot at an asst. admin spot. You'll have to work as a lower level admin or for a smaller company before you get to the top. In my case, this meant taking a big pay cut for 5-6 years while I started a career over again.
I LOVE my job. I'm now a Unix LAN manager for a major company and am completely happy. But this is not a job for everyone. Be aware of the negatives - It's not all playing around with the hardware and drinking coffee:
1) You're likely to end up on call 24/7 and carry a pager. People WILL page you at 3AM, so get used to the idea.
2) When it's good, its VERY good; when it's bad, it can be awful! If you're running a mission critical system and it breaks, you're going to stay until it's fixed. I've worked 24 hour shifts a few time. And there's nothing like trying to find a problem that has basically idled your whole company while your boss is standing over you tapping his foot and you have no CLUE what happened.
3) Users. You're going to be dealing with peple who don't understand computers, do dumb things and then get upset and are less than pleasant. And to do it prefessionally and pleasantly.
4) In most businesses, you're an expense item on the books. When times get tough, you can be among the first to go. I've been downsized twice along the way. Don't go into this field expecting that it can't ever happen to you.
5) Patch patch patch. Read. Study. Keep up on what's going on. You're going to have to deal with security/viruses/crackers/bugs and the fixing and patching thereof. If you're too lazy to keep at it, then do the world a favor and do something else for a living. Applying the latest patches may not be sexy and exciting, but you gotta!
6) Finally, things change constantly and rapidly. If you aren't prepared to spend your career constantly relearning your job, then this is the wrong field.
7) You also have to accept some lifestyle issues, like being on call and probably being on salary and not getting PAID for getting up at 3AM to fix the web server again.
All that said, this can be an incredibly rewarding field if you like challenge, learning and helping your users. I have no regrets at all about the change and hope to be doing this for the next 20 years!
I started less than a month before i turned 33.
Biology major, chemistry minor, 1990, no jobs.
Got a job at Radio Shack, got fired, got married (wife came with her own 486), got a job in a factory, got into Linux, switched to pizza delivery, wife got a job, we moved, I B.S.ed my way into a programmer's job, jumped ship in 1.5 year to a programmer/sysadmin job, 1 year to a sysadmin/consultant job, fired there at 1.5 years, back to the same as a contractor company at twice the salary in a pure sysadmin role, got dropped there at 6 months, came here to a stable, regular employee sysadmin position, with lots of other interesting, related tasks. I'm almost to the year mark on this job, and i turned 38 yesterday.
Too old my elbow!
Of course I'm mad. I've always been mad. Why do you keep asking me if I'm mad when you know that I'm mad?
Simple I started with my own machine, then I moved to an coloc box in texas which is where I am working today (remotly using ssh)
Point:
1) It just happened (hehe, "mee too")
2) I/We were trying
3) Where did this bastard come from? Let's put him to work.
point one is overwealming, to say the least.
Speaking for myself, Unix Admins aren't born...ok technically, they are, but a prerequisite seems to be "being dropped on one's head after birth" or a "masochistic tendancies coupled with penguin, CPU and GPU fetishes."
That which does not kill me only pisses me off even more... muahahaha.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
Faster than a speeding packet,
More powerful than a triple lattee,
Able to leap Full Towers in a single bound.
It's a Nerd!
It's a Pain!
NO!
It's Super Admin!
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
# man man
# man sh
Continue from there, should keep you busy for a few years.
Do they have any *nix boxen?
Do they have any computer classes? If so, do any of them involve *nix?
If the answer to any of these is no, talk to your administration. Knowing *nix can be a definite advantage to you're students when they get thrust into the real world, and teaching them will be much more rewarding than actually being an admin, and if you work it right you'll end up being an admin too. Create the program if it isn't there, and try to get into it if it is. Let them know that you really want to do this. Volunteer for stuff. Is there a computer club? Go to their meetings.
Here's what I did: I got a job doing mechanical assembly at a small company that does custom industrial automation. I had some CAD experience, so I got into the design team, and I ended up doing all the IT stuff too, since I knew more about it than anyone else. As the company grew from 5 employees to 15, it became obvious that the bosses desktop machine should not be doing double-duty as the fileserver. We looked at our options, and they were basically Novell Small Business (about $1500 + $70 per new employee (at least 10 in the next 2 years) + Hardware to run it on) or Linux (free, since I had just got my copy of SuSE 7.1 Pro and it would run fine on the recently retired P-75 we lovingly refered to as The Tower of Power + a 20GB HDD, which brought the cost up to a whopping $120). Win2k was mentioned, but the General Manager was against it, and the cost wasn't that much less than Novell. Given that we're a pretty small company without much extra cash, the choice was simple. I made it even simpler by offering to do the setup as a consultant on my own time for $100, which worked out to about $5 an hour, but it served my ulterior motive to become a *nix admin quite nicely. Sometimes you have to give to get... ;)
Don't let your degree or current job get in your way. The best CS instructor I ever had, and my personal *nix guru, got his degree in history.
And as for the age thing, the only advantages younger folks have is enthusiasm and the time to play with stuff. It seems like you've got plenty of the former, and have put in plenty of the later.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I went back to university to get a CS degree. In CS I had a number of projects that I worked on in Linux. After I graduated I had a lot of Linux experience and found an employer who was in desperate need of anyone who knew anything about Unix. Those were better times though, companies were growing like crazy and needed to find people who could do the work.
At that time it was relatively easy to get a job as a junior admin with little experience. Now I am in the position of hiring admins and I see a lot of resumes from people who have many years of experience and that is generally preferable to someone with little or no experience. Having said that, I also know that 10 years of experience does not necessarily make you a good administrator and having no work experience does not automatically disqualify you from a position.
Certifications are generally good because they demonstrate at least a minimal level of competence. If you have some great but don't get caught up in getting certs, there are other ways to demonstrate competence. Send the people some examples of your work, I always ask people to bring in something that they wrote such as a shell script, something in perl, python or whatever. A degree in CS is going to be a requirement in most places, otherwise you just have to show them something to prove your ability.
I lied on my resume to get my first UNIX admin job. Every night when I went home I would read a hundred or more pages in the UNIX books I had, trying desperately to stay one small step ahead of impending disaster.
Twenty years later, I still go home every night and read a hundred or more pages in my UNIX books trying desperately to stay one small step ahead of impending disaster.
While I can't speak for others, this is what worked for me. I started with messing around in college where I was supposedly working on a CS degree and instead was spending time playing games all day and eventually getting kicked out. With this kind of start I must have done something right later. One of the guys that I spent my college years playing MUDs with eventually got a job at the school and set up a UNIX box to host his own MUD. He invited me to help maintain the mud and gave me root access. This was my first experience as an 'administrator' and I did nothing. I just watched what he did when something had to be fixed. Eventually he dragged me to a Linux user group meeting and after the meeting (where I didn't say anything, just sat there and nodded my head every so often) I had a long list of things I didn't understand. I spent the next month looking up what they were talking about on the Internet. For each monthly meeting I did the same until I got to the point where I could actually join the conversation. That took about a year, it probably would take less if I had asked one of them for help, but in those days that LUG wasn't newbie friendly. During that year I had also taken one of the linux cd's that were being passed around (Caldera 1.1 IIRC) and installed it on a computer at home (A 386 that a friend was planning to throw away) and started playing with it. By this time the LUG I was in had a change of administration, the guy in charge of the LUG moved to another state. The new LUG was re-inventing itself as a group accessible to newbies. Since I was already comfortable with Linux systems I starting helping all the new members whenever I could and pretty soon my name kept appearing on the groups mailing list with answers and little shell scripts. A year later I went back to school, this time a community college and started working on an AS in CS (which at the 2 year level is a joke) and this time actually tried to learn. After 2 years of unemployed loafing around, I knew I had to turn my life around. I managed to get a job at the community collge as a student assistant in the computer center and spent 3 semseters there mostly fixing broken computers (replacing parts usually). During my 3rd semster I took a class on computer repairs, and thanks to my (at that point) 1 year of doing just about nothing but repairs, I aced that class. The teacher was impressed and asked if I would like to do an intership with his company (He was teaching as a side job). I said yes, and when my application was being processed, I found out that the senior adminstrator was subscribed to the LUG's mailing list and recognized my name from it. He forced my name through the HR dept. and I when I went to the interview for the internship posistion, the HR person said the interview was just a formality since the senior admin would only take me from all the applicants. I then spent about a year and a half as a part time intern (yes I took almost 3 years to finish a 2 year program. At this time was trying to juggle 2 part time jobs, school, a 'non paid admin' on a MUD server, learn as much as I could about being a system admin, and have a social life). When I finally had graduated with honors (Amazing what you can do when your determined) and got promoted to a full time administrator for about 2 dozen UNIX boxen.
To sum everything up, the most important thing I did was join a local technical group and become a visible, active member. In addition to my current job, my LUG membership has gotten me a few other good offers including an out of state deal that I would have jumped at if the timing was better (offered to pay my way through a full 4 year degree and give my paychecks as a part time intern untill I made the degree requirements for the actual position). If you don't have any 'real' job experience, alot of visiblity in the technical fields can work just as well. If I can do it then just about anyone can, you just have to be willing to work harder for it.
You should check out the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery. They have a FAQ
Studying computer science while doing systems programming/systems admin work really gives you a much better understanding of both the theory and practice. It also gives you accounts on lots of computers so you can get your classwork done quicker :-)
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Get some hardware, install either *BSD or Linux, set up different services on it, change the configs etc. Slowly you'll get the hang of it.
I got hired by Bell Labs upon graduating from a local college with a 2 year Associates Degree in Computer Technology. I then spent the next ten years trying to become a bona fide Software Engineer.
Of course there was a Sys Admin there who *only* held a BA in liberal arts. It was looked upon with some derison. A number of other folks simply moved up through the ranks without having a degree of any kind.
Most folks with degrees who were Sys Admin's wanted to be something more so there was plenty of opportunity for those that didn't. This was durring the late 80's and early 90's. Everything is different now.
I am a sr unix systems administrator for a department at the University of Arizona. I was an incoming freshman when i was hired, with only a high school education (no certs). I beat out a couple of coumputer engineering grad students for the position. What I did was I started out with linux at a young age around 7th grade. I worked on a couple of open source projects, and developed a couple of my own to get more experience. I also got involved in my local lug (tfug.org) to make some connections with other unix people. I also got involved with a nonprofit org that used linux in schools (osef.org) where i got more experience and letters of recomendation. The summer of my sr. year of highschool i started to email all the unix people i knew that worked at the university and started to pass out my resume to whoever was interested. It is hard to find kids that have a strong background/intrest in unix coming into the universities so within about a week of giving my resume to a sysadmin for the engineering college i had two job offers. one for jr unix sys admin and a sr position.
Sort of wandered into being an admin, in fact I wasn't up until this year really. doing mostly ms support up until this point. No certifications really. I picked up linux due to the fact that I was so broke ass poor it was the only interesting thing I could run on a 386. Running DOS only so I could download the slackware bits over a 14.4kbps modem, with a 45 minute freenet connection that would time out. Thankfully I could transfer 1.44 MB in 45 minutes during the wee hours of the morning, or it may never have happened. Using linux was simply the best education out there for the money, in fact it's better to do it for free than to waste the money on certifications. 5 Years of Linux for me!
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
I got in by accident when the administrator for the "linux segment" at the (small)college suddently quit. Since I had been playing with linux at home for 2 months or so, I volunteered for the "temporary task" while they looked for a senior admin to take over, but they were too cheap to hire some full time person.
More than one year passed, I tranfered schools, now my little brother has the job and I have another sysadmin position in a different place.
Ah! A man after my own heart! I'm a former English major - turned Unix systems administrator. Honestly, it wasn't easy. After college, I decided that I didn't want to go into teaching, but would rather get into the computer industry (I was a closet techie as well). MUDing go me into Minix, which got me involved in Linux, which opened up the rest of the world to me. However, I could not get a job in IT as I had no prior experience or the education that was being looked for.
So, I worked in clerical accounting, making nothing. I did not sleep, instead I studied and coded. I started to code my job responsibilities, I went to night school taking IS classes, I had no life! And it paid off. I begged, pleaded, and worked my way into an entry level help desk position. From there I worked day and night. I worked on my off days! I pleaded with our Unix department to take on projects and taught myself administration at home. Again, I had no life, and again, it paid off.
Within 2 years I went from an entry level Help Desk associate with an English Major to a Unix sys. admin. It is wonderful. But... it was not easy; it never is.
I'm 26 now, and have been doing Unix admin, for about 1 year. In that time, I've completed half a post bac. in IS, HP-UX certification, SAIR Linux certification, and have attended courses in HP-UX admin. and clustering. I am now studying for an LPI cert, starting to get more involved in Java and CGI scripting, and have no intention of stopping!
The formula is simple:
1) Do whatever you need to, to get into IS. Try a help desk position, or a position in computer operations. If that means a pay cut, take a pay cut. Just get in the door. Take classes at night, study for certifications during your lunch break.
2) Once in... work! Work harder than you ever have in your life. Prove to your company that you are dedicated and slowly focus on Unix administration.
3) Follow your heart.
There are no shortcuts. No magic certifications will get you an admin. job. Just climb the steps quicker than everyone else, make sure that others know of your dedication and you will get there in no time. Oh... 33 is not too old to start a career in IS!
Regards,
Seldan
Becoming a miserable person was very quick and easy.
... you know what to do... Give it a good think... And if you're lucky, you'll live happily just thinking about it instead of dying young and miserable in front of 45 servers... :-)
I finished high school
Got a job as tech support in an ISP
Told them I knew a bit about unix because I just knew about Linux and installed it to see what this was
Got promoted to Senior Sys Admin and there I was sitting, all alone in front of 45 servers including Irix, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, NT/2000 and Novell and I was also doing network, vpn, firewall and pretty much everything that was new and that no one was able to handle. Learned by myself for 4 years and now, I can say that I'm pretty good at it.
But then, I'm also not having a life at all, doing 24/7 support for the servers, having to travel all around the province, the states and even country to do networks connections, set up servers, and all that.
Believe me, it's nowhere near a life... But then again, I was doing 65K/year + bonus for 24/7 support, all expenses paid by the employer, and I only finished high school....
Good luck, but give it a good think. And if you still want to do it, give it a good think. And if you still want to do it,
The correct response would be WHY would you ever want to be one? (You are probably confusing Unix Admin with "Really cool l33t h4X04" Unix guru.)
./teardrop 10.1.1.116 10.1.1.116 -n 666
I have been a Solaris/Linux/OpenBSD admin for 4 years now. It is the best and worst job all rolled up into one. (At the same blinding millisecond.)
I shouldn't reveal this in such a public place but what the hey....
There is only one TRUE way to become a Unix Admin....
Load a Linux/BSD box.
Compile teardrop/synflooder/other nasty tools.
Scan the network for Windows boxes....
Now imagine smashing their TCP/IP stacks....
Imagine hearing their screams of agony....
Re-live your anger at your own BSOD...
"You want this, don't you?
The hate is swelling in you now.
Take your UNIX weapon.
Use it.
They are unarmed.
Strike them down with it.
Give in to your anger.
With each passing moment, you make yourself more a Unix Admin.
Good.
I can feel your anger.
They defenseless.
Take your UNIX weapon!
Strike them down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete".
[root@deathstar]#
teardrop route|daemon9
Death on flaxen wings:
From: 10.1.1.116.24074
To: 10.1.1.116.56563
Amt: 666
[ b00m b00m b00m b00m b00m ]
You forgot to mention the ponytail... even if you're mostly bald you still have to have a ponytail. Oh, and you must also buy a Harley-Davidson and soon thereafter also grow a beer-gut.
She sure wasn't what I was expecting. It was late on a Friday night at the Burger Hole, and I was closing up. We were just about to shut off the grill, and I was sweeping up out front when this red Corvette pulled up to the entrance. She didn't bother to park it in a real parking place. She just pulled up to the door and put it where on a busy lunch hour she would have been in everybody's way. In spite of the cool night, the top was down, and out of that car stepped the most gorgeous woman I have ever seen in my life. She offered me a little smile as she came through the door, teasing me, I know. And then she went on to the counter were Mitchie was still taking orders. What happened next was beyond unfair. She bent over the service counter, resting her elbows right next to the register so that I'm sure Mitchie got the most beautiful look down her blouse that any man had ever seen. Mitchie's eyes went as big as hoops. I, of course, was left gaping at her butt, thrust toward me in a clingy mini-skirt that left just enough to my imagination. A Coke she ordered. One Coke. Mitchie got it, spilling the first one, but he got it. She pulled a dollar or two out of her bra and threw it down on the counter like a clip from Nine and a Half Weeks, and then she turned on me as if she knew I had been watching. I sure wasn't sweeping. She walked slowly toward me, tracing a finger around the top of her cup, and then she took that straw into her mouth with a smile that I will never forget. My mouth felt as dry as hers looked wet. "Come with me," she said after a cool drink, and with only a moment's hesitation, I let my broom fall to the floor with a clatter. We got into that Corvette and she slipped it into gear and left burning rubber on the concrete of the Burger Hole parking lot. We hit the freeway a few minutes later, and finally when she had reached a comfortable cruising speed of 110 MPH, her hand found a resting space on the inside of my thigh. I certainly wasn't complaining. A couple of times she pulled her hand away to shift gears, but everytime she worked the clutch her short skirt climbed higher and higher up her legs until I could no longer stand the choice between wanting her hand on my thigh and watching her pump the clutch just one more time. Twenty minutes later, our ride was over. She pulled up to a small apartment building and parked. "Would you like to come up for a drink?" she asked me, and I could only nod. We went into her apartment, she leading me along like a dog on some kind of invisible leash. She got that drink for me as I milled about trying to look so much more sophisticated than the fast food worker in a brown polyester suit that I was. As she brought my drink over I suddenly noticed that she had slipped a few buttons of her shirt, and I could plainly see her fullness straining at the lace of her black brassiere. She put a hand to my chest and with an easy shove, dropped me into a leather chair, where she immediately straddled me, her legs against mine and my heavy breath on her chest. She stirred my drink with her finger and then put her finger to my lips that I might drink a few drops. What happened next is a blurry memory for me, but I know that in my nervousness I glanced for a moment at her desk where a computer monitor provided most of the light illuminating her extravant body. "What's that?" I asked, her finger still playing on my lips. "Sshh," she answered softly, her lips suddenly against my ear. "It's Linux," she answered. "Uh?" I murmered, my body tingling with anticipation as her hands began to gently explore me. "Linux," she repeated, and as if to show me, she tapped out ls -l at a command prompt, and the files went by. I was captivated and taken away, all in one. "Can you show me something else?" I asked, and she did, her body still pressing against mine in a myriad of ways. She typed cd and pwd and su and find and she piped it to grep. "Can I try it?" I asked, and as if to reply, she took my hands and put them on the keyboard, where I began to type myself. We spent the night that way, my hands on that keyboard, typing Unix commands, our bodies locked together in a passion that would never, ever be resolved. It didn't matter. The computer mattered, and when I left the next morning, I took my virginity with me, but I also took a freshly burned copy of Linux, her phone number written in permanent marker on the disk, you know, in case I needed any help with the install.
I know around here (big corparation) it is evolutionary process. Usally you start off in a junior role like operator or PC repair techian. From there you move into a programer/application support role. Depending on where you do you application/programing support will determine how you move into the admin role. Work on NT you become a NT admin. Work on Unix become an Unix admin. However a lot NT admin have ambitions to become Unix admins. So the Unix admin is at the top of the techie food chain in this place. I have only ever seen one Unix admin be hired from outside the company. He was hire because he was truely an Unix wizard and he had experience with some specific software that we were running on one of our system. Otherwise all the other Unix admins I have worked with have come from within the company and have been with the company 5+ years. Glad to see that being a Unix admin is a loooong term goal.
I used to work for a company in the Seattle area a few years ago and word got around that I knew about computers. Well, things being what they are there, rather than promote me to the computer department I had to quit, work for A Large Aerospace Firm for two years doing System Analyst Stuff, and then talk with the IS Manager at my old company.
They hired me and I did the job well for about two years. I was laid off six months ago and haven't found a job since.
I guess that my first mistake was documenting how to do the job. My second mistake was telling them the truth (your vendor sucks and brought the system down for 6 hours). My third mistake telling them the truth (oh, I mentioned that one already).
If you look forward to getting called at 1:30am from people on the graveyard shift complaining that they can't use the system because it crashed and 50 people are sitting around with their thumbs in their butts, if you dream of solving computer problems related to OPEN accounts, not being allowed to shut them down, and people not knowing how to LOG OUT without locking crap up, then become a SysAdmin.
I have no formal education, but at the prompting years ago by the IS manager I taught myself Linux using Slackware 96 in about a week. I knew that it was time for me to leave when their current SysAdmin at the time didn't know how to shutdown the system in order to move it upstairs. I typed in one line, hit enter, and walked away before anything happened on the screen to the howl of "You mean you have to type in 'NOW'!!!"
If anyone in the Seattle area needs a SysAdmin, I wish you good luck. If you REALLY need one, contact me at navilor@hotmail.com and I will start tomorrow.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Lumping slackware, along with a few other select linux distros, in with redhat, et all, is quite a slap in the face.
People complain about it not being easy enough because it forces you to learn how to really administer a system and here you act like you've never even heard of it.
It's what got me started...and one of the reasons I got a part-time job doing PC support and being a junior Sun admin while I was still in school.
Well, i was 18 at the time, there was this cute manager at work she worked as manager of the network operations center. She was working late one night and dropped a report by accident under my desk, I was fixing to log into my linux X session, and noticed she had crawled under my desk trying to pick up the report. I asked what are you doing under my desk, and she said she is picking up the papers for her report, and i said okay. Well so i start back to logging into my x-session then i hear my zipper unzipping and feel hands on my crotch, the next thing i know she is doing something that feels really good. So after that, i went home that night with a cigarette in hand and a big smile on my face. I get called into 1st shift the next day for some reason, only to find out, without even being interviewed, I am the new Jr. System Administrator for the company!
It's used pretty well everywhere - it's just that there isn't always a default file there for every OS, but if you create one, it's used.
Systems that I know it's used for sure in
are IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, NetBSD and Linux.
Of course, if you knew your stuff cold, you
wouldn't have made your incorrect guess.
So I've gotta ask, why do you keep getting fired???
I was on the long road when I started futzing with computers as a kid.. just kept playing. I started college in CS, graduated with a history degree. all my internships were tech support jobs.. then when I got out of college, all my jobs were computer related.. the third job since I left school I became an admin.. although I still have quite a bit to learn.
the lesson here is simple..get good enough, and it really doesn't matter what degree you graduate with.
Too old? Bah! What a load! Tell that to my friend's mom, who drove a school bus all of her adult life. She had to be at least 50 years old when she got her *NIX certification -- and let me just state for the record that Mrs. F gets as excited as a teenager with root access when she tells folks about her new skills.
Even superheroes once were losers
You do understand that software raid is lame crap, right? And of course, samba is only slightly lamer than nfs..
I first spent 2 years as a student worker in the MIS department of a community college I was attending. I assisted the computer operator running the mainframe by doing backups, answering phones, etc. He got promoted and I got his job. I held that job for 5 years and took an entry level job as a UNIX Systems Administrator. I got paid peanuts for two years until I read a SAGE salary survey that pointed out this fact. After gently hinting about other job opportunities in the real world I got a HUGE raise (to where I should have been) and stayed another three years. After that I moved on to several dot coms that soon failed. Now I'm unemployed (via a layoff) in a bear job market. All this without a college degree (1/2 way to a B.S. in Physics) or any certifications (MSCE, Solaris Certified Administrator, CNE, etc.).
People who go into Systems Administration (especially UNIX) are of a certain breed. While most everyone else runs away from technology, we eat it for breakfast. Rather than get political we have a tendancy to want to jump in, get our hands dirty and solve the problem now. Unfortunately, companies have learned to unfairly take advantage of this and set up traps that we all too often walk into.
As for myself, all along the way I constantly shot myself in the foot because I fell into the trap of thinking logically about business. Realise this: ALL BUSINESS IS FUNDAMENTALLY EVIL. Not evil by intent. Just so self-serving such that it's actions have far reaching bad consequences for us all. Unless we move to a desert island and learn to be content with the life we can find there, we have to fit in and serve the beast somehow, eh?
So, the best thing you or anyone can do for themselves is to know what you're walking into! Have some standards and force yourself to check the company out periodically. If they aren't up to snuff you need to quietly stay in your job while desperately looking for a better company.
How will you know you've found a better company? To answer this question I sat down with a former Systems Administrator co-worker (also out of work) and came up with a questionnaire. Each question comes from a situation where we took the fall where the company was at fault due to their own cluelessness as to how to properly implement IT. You assign a point value to each question thus declaring the relative importance of each issue to you personally. Then you honestly respond to each question in a comment field. From the response you assign a percent score showing how well the company "got it".
All this is automatically tallied (since the questionnaire is in spreadsheet form) into a percentage score that you can use to compare the prospective company against all of the companies you've worked for. I even put the questions that were likely to be answered before you start working for the company in bold. This way you can get a "heads up" on the company before you leave your old job. In fact, on my questionnaire by how I weighted the questions, about 50% of the "dirt" on a company can be found before even accepting the job offer! If I only had this before I started working for any of the companies I've worked for!
My questionnaire is broken down into these categories and subcategories:
Fiscal status/Corporate profitability outlook
Market
Funding
Maturity
Facilities
Common facilities
Personal facilities
Remote facilities
Miscellaneous
Existing IT implementation
Redundancy/reliability/quality
Facilities
Due diligence
In-house authored documentation
Standardization
Support
Resources to support IT
Budget
Politics
Managerial philosophy/expectations
Technological bias
Fiscal realism
User management
Techies as "super glue"
Managerial style
Mid-level/Senior Techie management
User management
Proactive management
Micromanagement
Miscellaneous
Human Resources
Benefits
Legal
Policies
Miscellaneous
This "Systems Administration Survival Guide" questionnaire is currently at version 2.0 as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I will email a copy FOR FREE to anyone who wants it. Send your requests here. Don't forget to remove the "removethispart" from the email address. It's an anti-spam measure.
UNIX admins are a rare breed of people, I hope you have what it takes. First of all stop using linux, linux is a disease and is breeding dipshits that think because they can now double click in a unix like environment that they are now unix gurus (linuxisforbitches.com) I have been working in a 24/7 fast passed data center for quite some time now and the only customers that get hacked or go out of business are those that are running linux......get it out of your system. A sysadmin knows Solaris and sun hardware if you don't know sun you will never be more than a linux bitch that is made fun of when your back is turned. Go to suns site and get a few admin and Solaris classes under your belt. Grab a sun box, build it out and get down. If you don't have a sun box i may be able to set you up with one fairly cheep. (50.00) Keep on writing the code C and C ++ is great but it rarely does a sysadmin a shit bit of good know PERL, SED AWK, and vi and a few shell inside and out (ksh, csh, sh, bash) Know about backups tar, legato, veritas, read the DNS and bind book, might wanna read the bat book to for sendmail, core internet protocols is top shelf read for any sysadmin, get the essential system administration book. These i believe are all oriely books and are fairly cheep. Know BSD like a mother fucker (its where you really should earn your wings)makes you look like you have been around for a while. Get down with apache, NFS, SSH use the command line for everything, oh and stop using linux! I personally have a degree in computer science and one in liberal studies. In this climate there are a lot of really experienced people out of work so the competition is tough! You need to have about a dozen systems in your pad to start setting up stuff on. You need to know about routing, sub-netting, switching and how to trouble shoot oh and keep in mind that these are all skills of a junior level sysadmin. Oh, did i mention you should stop using linux you may wanna pick up a firewall book to. SUN because the rest is for pinheads and wannabes. www.sun.com no i don't work for sun. beav3r
I did tech support for two years at a small ISP, and after I burned out at that job and found out that programming was really kind of neat, I took up a degree in CS. I spent two years getting my first year done (I didn't take physics or math 12 in high school and I needed both for prereq's, which totally screwed me up) before I found out that while I'm pretty good at Algebra, your algebra needs to be perfect to do Calculus. (ie, I flunked out of Calculus 102) I also found out in the course of this that I would really rather be tinkering with computers than doing mathematics. Unfortunately, mathematics is about half of a CS degree these days (they changed the requirement for physics during the time I was in college. Thank you.)
:)
So after I dropped out of college, I went larval with FreeBSD and an ADSL connection for about a month or two. It was probably the best education I ever had. After spending three months desperately trying to look for work, a programmer friend of mine went to his boss and said "since we're going to need a new sysadmin Real Soon Now, please hire Ernie. Oh, and if you don't, I'm going to quit."
By this time, I had actually gained enough knowledge to pass as a sysadmin, and after being in the job for about 9 months (dot com, and this all happened about a year and a half ago) I had learned enough about learning to be able to adapt to anything that was to come my way.
Now I'm working in another tiny ISP where everyone is doing everything. I get to answer phones, sysadmin, do tech support, and data entry. So does the boss, so we're all working hard to make it happen. It's not a perfect sysadmin job, but it certainly will be as the company grows.
Oh and by the way, I love this job. It's the closest thing to playing with computers that I've experienced.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
This takes us up to about '94 when the 'net was breaking into regular speech. By now I BBS'ed a little, had gone back to school and switched majors to strictly English-CW (I could see the JPC degree was unnecessary) and was in charge of all the computers around, except the old Novell server. That old PC of trash....
Out pops Windows 95 with easy peer-to-peer, and pretty soon that novel server was only authenticating users and information was stored in pockets on certain pc's depending on their function. That was a bear to back-up... but it was working really well.
Then old Nick Petreley writes some little article in InfoWorld about using a PC with something called Linux to share his ISP dial-up with other computers in his home office.
And-- well darn-- there went a year of time hacking with linux to make it replace that novell server, share internet, and run Apache.
Somehow, somewhere in here it becomes '98 (just the year, not the Windows)
About that time a friend of my wife's quit his State job where he administered Solaris servers and started an ISP. He had little capital, big dreams, and he offered me a job to handle all tech support and develop web solutions and all those things I yearned for. I left my nice job at broadcasting and went for the uncertainty of doing what I wanted for someone who didn't have a whole lot of capital and dreams too big for that capital.
nine months later I'm out of a job, lost a month of pay even, but I am a certifiable PERL hacker, know Solaris pretty darn good; as well as Macs, NT, (just from association), and of course, my Linux...
The only job I could get that payed something worth looking at promised to be more Windows NT than unix, but it did promise some HP-YUX, and promised to be very educational as we designed and built a new network for a new company from the ground up.
Did I mention that I always sold myself short and worked for far less than I was worth? Yes it's true, but I got the experience and education that I wanted out of it.
I think that is the crucial point. Your resume has to stress your current knowledge and show your learning ability and desire. If you don't have the past employment experience you have to have a combination of the hobbies in the field, a STRONG desire for learning, and certification. And willing and able to work for far less than your worth. Now that I'm older and have have all this baggage, I'm not willing to work for beans. Oh, no, I have my car habit to support (check the nick), and life just gets more expensive and weighed down.
If you are going to have to make some sacrifices.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
(ex) Radio Shack brethren UNTIE!!!!
No more names & addresses!!! No more putting out force feed!!! No more late-night inventories and (bad) pizza!!! No more battery club cards!!!
Y A Y !!!
Three cheers for (being) a Technology Professional after 30!!!
(party-poopers out there: YES, I spelled UNITE as UNTIE...it's commonly associated with my own (tm) brand of communication called HUMOUR!!!)
-PONA-
King of the who?.sig
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
I started my first full-time sysadmin job at age 30, and was not a born-and-bred computer geek. (I was also a philosophy major in college.) Although I lacked much of the encylopedic knowledge of computers that some of the younger "Hax0r" crop had, but the fact that I had sound communication skills and some maturity gave me a distinct advantage as an sysadmin.
Detailed knowledge is important, but the details are forever changing. Your (inter-)personal skills, your ability and self-motivation to learn, and your patience - things that are not necessarily developed by nightly 20+ hour marathons with your computer through adolesence - are vital as a sysadmin.
I would agree that Higher Eduacation facilitites are a great place for an initial IT job. The pay is usually modest, but the opportunity to gain a wide variety of sysadmin experience is usually worth it. (Plus, most schools have relaxed requirements for both work attire and schedules.)
Another advantage is that many higher educational institutions will allow you to take classes there for free, and during work hours (since you're on campus anyway), allowing you to fill in other areas of knowledge such as programming on the job.
Skip certification. Nobody cares about it, and it's expensive and incomplete. Instead, build your own PC at least once, and get a copy of "Unix System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth, et al. The book doesn't cover everything, but does a great job of detailing and defining what Unix admins do. (Especially important: the chapter on "Policy and Politics", to get a clearer idea of what you're getting into.)
As far as aegist employers go, you should stay away from them (obviously). Chances are, if they are looking for only younger employees, it's because they want cheap slave labor rather than to grow talent.
I started out as a datacenter operator for a VAX/OpenVMS and UNIX shop doing the graveyeard shift. After several years of laaate night reading , hackin around, and fixing broken crap it was discovered that I was worth my salt. Made Junior Admin for UNIX.. Then moved on to Senior UNIX Admin. The rest history...
That's pretty interesting... I'm probably a couple steps ahead of you in terms of becoming a Unix admin, and I was also a Philosophy major.
In a nut shell it took about 5 years and I'm only at the door. When from Dos Application Support, to NT Admin w/ all the Ms Certs, MCSE+I/MCT. At the time I was finishing my certs I realized that it was just the beginning then started playing w/ linux/bsds etc.. Bounced around doing NT/Win2k jobs until I was the only guy in an Win2k shop who had any unix experience( playing with the linux's/bsd's) at a time when they realized they needed to go with some carrier grade Unix systems. I was fortunate enough to have my first real Solaris experience on a Sunfire 4800 with 8x900mhz Ultra Sparc III attached to a Hitachi storage array and from there I've been the Unix guy as well. Now I've implemented and am running the beginnings of a Carrier grade Unix system. But at least I still have my NT/2000 skills to fall back on, while my unix skills continue to increase.
I started using Mac OS X.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Drugs are for loooosers.
It's almost depressing how much /.ers seem to buy into the pre-conceptions of sysadmins... Not every sysadmin is a smelly hippie wearing suspenders with a beard and a bad attitude.
The main thing you need to be a sysadmin is curiousity and a passion for technology. Part tech geek, "Oooohhh new processors are out tomorrow", and part "Hey that's busted, how do I fix it?"
I actually have an East Asian Studies degree and two CS minors (wierd story). I found for my first job search that it was a pain to get around the degree and lack of experience. What most people have been saying is correct. Find a small shop, government agency, law office, or someplace where you can start small. The experience flows from use and checking things out. I remember the finding ssh for the first time and really realizing how insecure telnet, rsh, and most protocols were. I think I changed all my passwords that day.
Anyways honesty helps to. If you don't know an answer, admit it. But get back to them with something ASAP. Knowing where to look for answers helps a lot. Google is amazingly useful, especially if you can copy and paste snippets of error messages. I've been amazed at how many solutions to bizarre and obscure problems have been easily found through Google (or your favorite search service).
Being a sysadmin takes a certain mindset. If you like technology and are excited by setting up infrastructure and maintaining, you're good. Expect periods of boredom (depends on if you run out of tech news to keep up on), offset by problems that have to absolutely positively be solved tonight. It's a job I love, but wouldn't recommend it to everyone.
Do what ever it take to get an interview. There are usually two parts, the business cheese and the tech interview. The firs guy just makes sure you don't just drool on yourself. The tech interview is the key, if you impress the second guy who is usually already an admin, your probably a lock. That has been my experience.
BOFH, My model for being a sysadmin :)
Small college, lab assist, grunt PHP coder, start own business!
I went to a relatively small college and started my freshman year as a lab assistant. I learned some things about Novell (uugh) and networking DOS and Win3.1 computers (double uugh).
But after a couple years of that, plus my CS major, they got interested in me for more stuff. When the college finally got a Net connection and boughtt a nice Sun box to power it, I was the first student they taught UNIX to and became the assistent admin. Lots of fun!
After college I had a couple jobs at consulting companies, the later working with PHP and Perl and databases.
Then I decided what the heck, regular office jobs suck, lots more fun if I run the show myself. So that's what I'm doing. Bought a nice Linux box, put it up at a good colo place, started a Slash hosting and Web development business, and went from there.
I'm getting some customers and they seem to be happy. So if I ever do need to find a regular job for some PHB again (hopefully not) I'll have some references that know that I know something about Linux admin. And keeping a Linux box with several sites on the Net running smoothly is much better experience than installing Linux on a spare partition at home.
A (the) graduate assistance over us handled a rather large cluster of IBM RT115s/RT120s running AIX 1.x/2.x. One day he goes bonkers - literally. Dropped out of school and just....left. *poof* The dean of engineering comes to me and says "Ok, even though you are an undergrad you are now responsible for the Unix boxes as well...we will let you hire OTHERPERSON to handle the day to day Novell 3.x stuff...". No sweat - things were great!
I had no clue. Crash course in reading and much help from a friend in the university's computer center got me thru that episode. I then started learning about unix commands, scripts, variables, (etc) and after about two years (with _much_ help from a much older, more experienced unix admin at the school's computer center) I was managing the boxes just fine (5 servers, 300 client machines, NFS/yellow pages from hell. etc). Was hired full time when I graduated in 1988.
Fast forward to 1990. The computer center finally realizes "Oh shit! Perhaps SNA is not the 'end-all--be-all' we think it is. What is Novell? We need to know!" and now wants a Novell person. I apply. Since I had unix experience at the COEnginnering, I was able to play with this new OS called AIX370 (AIX running as a guest OS under an IBM4090 running VM/CMS). The computer center also got a brand new, pre-production IBM RS6000 running this new OS called AIX v3.x and also needed someone to help with cisco routers (Cisco TRouters, AGS routers, etc). I volunteered. From there to Solaris/X86/Enterprise 6000 and Cisco 4700s, 2500s, 7600s, etc. Finally (recently) to linux and back to Netware v4.x/5.x and 6.x
Each step along the way saw me learn various new skills. The fact that I started out on a non-linux OS seemed to have helped me alot. Bottom line - you got to 1) want to do it and 2) be willing to re-install after issuing stupid commands like "rm -rf `find / -print`". It will happen to you.
Get a job in a large company (IBM,SGI,Sun). Most of the times, they will even train you and whenever you don't know the anwser, you can ask your co-worker :). When you'll feel confortable (1 or 2 years) then you can look for something more interesting and you'll have something interesting in your resume. Sysadmin CAN be hard and painful. It can also be fun and rewarding. It all depends where you are working. I do support and wouldn't leave my job for anything. No pagers, no yelling boss/users. I've got great co-workers if I need help. Fixed hours(when it's 5, I go home!) I'm sure some people would agree to get a $10K salary pay cut just for that! etc etc. Plus, I get to learn so much more because I deal with all the weird stuff all you sysadmins can't fix!:)
You're not alone. I started out as a history major and picked up my unix experience in a (non-history) graduate program. As a result, I've always appreciated this article on The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
Xylix,
Such an honest and eloquently stated question I feel I must respond in kind.
First, what I do. I am a 32 year old N.American manager of datacenters ( w/ many years as a UNIX SE and Unix manager ). I lead a team of a couple dozen gloriously competent SA's and SE's of diverse ages and backgrounds. As my co. is a financial/energy one, the team is on the high end of the compensation scale ( with skillsets to match ) I can't speak for IT managers in general, but I can share my views and experiences.
I have a history degree and half a dozen minors, none of them technical. The greater portion of my staff have non-technical degrees ranging from psyche to economics. The tech-background folks range from IEEE (electrical engineer) to ex-military technical specialists w/o college.
I started in the IT biz after college pulling cable and fibre at a temp job for a contractor at Motorola ( it was '93, a recession, and I refused to leave Austin ). Other folks in my team started at, of all places, a mega-electronics retailer doing PC upgrades, college tech departments ( unpaid ), entry-level desktop support ( mac/NT ) etc etc. Several were hired after interning during Summer breaks their junior/senior years, and of course the ex-mils. Many started as I did, doing temp work from the part-number answer guy at Compaq ( now the sr network architect ) to temp callcenters at IBM or Dell.
I know and have worked with nearly a hundred Unix SA/SEs on two coasts and I must say, sadly, that I can't think of more than two that started IT directly as UNIX SAs ( they graduated with CS' from a top-5 on the planet CS college ). All of us took low-level or even brute level IT jobs to start and worked our way up.
Not that doing so takes all that much time. From PC upgrader at a mega-retailer to financial systems UNIX admin in two years ( at 19 y/o I might add ). Quadruple the pay in two years? That doesn't suck.
Some switched careers from finance, construction ( I know a great PERL programmer/SA who was a sub-sea welder ), teaching, retail sales dude etc, etc. Age is not a factor ( nor country of origin etc ), knowledge and experience most certainly is. My team ranges from 21-63 and is a cross section of humanity.
As for certs, they can help get past the HR goons and perhaps help land an interview. Windows certs are literally worthless and not worth the time nor money ( and no, this isn't a religious OS belief ). In other words, they can help open doors but aren't guarenteed to help as much as, say, Cisco certs help networking folks.
The reasons for this are simple. OS level certs have no relation to trouble-shooting skills. All they prove is that you can build a box, big whup.
YOUR CASE:
Since you're an educator now, your best bet is to leverage your experience and seriously consider combining the two.
Leverage: One quick way in that would also buy you a pay raise immediately is to get a job designing tech training coursework. This allows you to use your course development skills AND learn the technical side ( my wife took this route ). From there you could quickly gain tech certs and begin teaching apps or OSs ( BIG BUCKS BTW, esp when combined with tech experience, $80K-300K ).
A very good alternative is to take advantage of the Summer/Winter breaks to to entry-level temp work. The money would be irrelevent b/c you'd still have your teaching salary, and you could quickly amass skills and experience. This goes for college folks out there too. Temp work isn't attractive, I know, but temp-to-hire is VERY common. It lets us IT manglers see if you're any good without the risks and troubles associated with perm-hire. Temp-to-hire is even common on the high-end tech side ( although these folks prefer the term "consultant" ).
BTW, your coding and fooling around on home machines is a BIG plus in an interview. If they don't ask, DEFINITELY mention it. The best IT folks are rarely the best formally educated. This is why I always question prospective employees about their home computing environment. The best of all UNIX, NT, Network, DBAs and coders are all self-taught. It's the passion that makes you great at any job. If you love it, you'll rock!
The recession may make it take longer to break in, but don't let that dissuade you. Budget cutting gives the advantage to the less experienced. There's time to train them and they don't cost a pile of money ( yet! )
So, to sum up:
1) You're DEFINITELY not to old. Great IT folks and age have no correlation. It's never too late.
2) You can absolutely leverage your teaching experience to transition into IT without taking a pay cut.
3) You can take advantage of the semester breaks to gain experience and resume material doing temp work.
4) Certs can help on the UNIX and DBA side, and they open doors on the Cisco side. They're great for technical educators.
- Schmedley
And it has an added bonus, too: it forces you to stay healthy so you can keep wearing it.
And you also get babes to look at you...
What Certifications do you have ?
it just happens and you spend the rest of your life trying to get out. ;)
You either go to college or learn the stuff by yourself.
A technical school can also be a choise.
Do shitty jobs. What, that company around the corner needs someone to give technical support and config stuff on their network and windows nt server? You need the money? Go ahead. Do it.
Once on the inside, you can allways talk with other technical ppl about how much your network would be if the server used linux / unix, how much money you would spare in licenses, that you can hack the code and personalise it as you want, security fixes everytime, and stuff like that.
Maybe you get your boss or whoever is above you to get interested in linux / unix / open source software. If they do, fine. Offer to install linux on a machine and make it a test machine. Your boss and people can get in touch in the OS, do stuff, blah blah blah, and they can see you can fix it. But, DO FIX IT. Apply patches, show interest.
Every now and them say something like "hey, that test box is really tuned up now, maybe we could start thinking about changing the NT server to Linux" and say good things about Linux / Unix / Whatever.
But, you also need to be prepared for their lack of interest. If that exists... well, your not fucked. Yet.
Apply presure in that known nerve, called "MONEY".
Say stuff like, "well, linux is completly free, we dont need no licenses, there's also tons of free support and docs on the web". When they start feeling that maybe, just maybe, Linux would spare them some small dough, they'll get interested. This is where most of them DO GET INTERESTED.
You can allways try to find a job somewhere else as Linux admin.
I would say it's good to have a job running a Network that has clients running some OS, servers running some other, because that gives you multi-OS experience, as well as experience with mixing the multiple OS used in the network.
Anyways, that experience you got in that company around the corner can be valuable to try to get future jobs.
Bye, am I'm just an asshole.
I went to college electronic Engineering and got
my degree way back in 1984. My first job was with M.I.T. Lincoln Lab. I worked and a Jr. Engineer, mostly wirewrapping prototypes from schematics that I drew on CAD/CAM (Futurenet). The original schematics were drawn in freehand from some PHD. Dude. Anyhow later on I designed Access Control Systems for a company and wrote Firmware and software, left there and I went freelance and worked for myself, I wrote software for Odysey Software (Games), and eventually I got sick of windows non scalability and taught myself Unix. I tossed the old Sun Sparc 2 that I learned on and built up a slick Linux box. I got offered a job at a consulting firm that payed me to take classes and get certified on Sun Solaris. I consulted for
a while and took courses and exams on Veritas and Oracle. I left there to work at a University for a while to be the DCE/DFS admin. I also wrote perl scripts, maintaned the EMAIL, and custom applications along with several other Unix Sysadmins on campus. I later left there to take a job that payed yet more cashola and utilized my Oracle/C/Networking knowledge. I am still there today working a Sr. Unix Admin. Usually the day iinvolves writing code to monitor systems, designing Oracle backends and application servers,
volume group and logical volume management.
Trends Analysis. This is also why I love opensource. The knowledge I aquired writing scripts in Linux and reading all the Unix books at
the library helped get me where I am today.
Unix Platforms from the most part are pretty similar. The Volume management and Device management is different but it doesent' take long to master them.
I use AIX, HPUX, Linux, SCO, and Solaris on my job
so I'm having fun!
Good Luck.
SysAdmins more than generally evolve into a position. That's how I did it. I was a programmer for 4 years and got lumped with the job of looking after 'just a few' systems.
I'm now one of the Senior Admins in a team of 8 people, looking after 100 UNIX systems, (Sun, HP).
I have no qualifications.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
Well, there's now a bazillion replies with anecdotes and strategies for getting the job. Let me add a piece of encouragement for when you have the job. I hold an English degree, and could finish a Classics degree with a year's courses.
Once I got in the door I discovered I had a huge advantage: I can write, and I can deal with people (or fake it well enough). Once you get that job, from then on your future success is split between your technical skills and your people and communication skills. Competence is required. So is hard work. Given that, you may be brilliant, but even in the geeky techno-competitive world of Unix admins, getting along with people matters more than brillance. I've gotten contracts based on my resume, but I've been renewed and renewed based on my ability to work with others.
Your non-CS background may be just what makes you really successful.
Hmmm... Maybe working hard in school can pay off.
For me, taking classes at the university has given me a chance to try and prove myself to people. These people can sometimes be important in opening opportunities later in a career.
You're new here, aren't you?
Down, not across.
And the brethren went away edified.
I started playing with UNIX while in the marketing dept. at AT&T. Found I liked it better than the political dance that was marketing. I left AT&T during the bloodbath that followed divestiture and went to work for a startup formed by other ex-AT&T employees. It was there that I started working with UNIX on a more or less full-time basis, sharing minor admin duties with one of the partners. Moved on to DBMS application development on AT&T SysV and then AIX. Got a consulting gig that was supposed to last 3 months (went to 9 mos.) was hired as a DBMS programmer and was asked to move to sysadmin when it was discovered that I had expertise where the existing sysadmin had gaps and vice versa.... Now, here I am! The whole journey started in 1983 to official status as sysadmin early this year.
I started this message 5 hours ago and just got back to finishing it! Now, what does "internet time" mean again?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
System administration is a horrible dead-end job, that unambitious people get stuck in because they're power hungry and want to lord over the "users", who they hate.
It's similar to the career in drug rehabilitation than many ex-junkies take up because they get busted. Then they work at drug rehab centers testing other junkie's urine and bossing them around because they lust for power, and no better jobs are available to them.
They're powerless little wannabe Adolph Hitlers who will never hold a worthwhile place in society, because they put all their energy into controling other peoples lives, instead of improving their own.
Learn to program (no I don't mean just write Perl scripts to drudge through system adminstration tasks), or do something else creative and productive, instead of ending up as a system administrator.
System administration is like wiping other peoples butt holes for a living. You will always hate your "users", because they've got decent non-system-administration careers, and actually use the computer for interesting purposes, instead of merely janitorial automation.
There's nothing challenging or interesting about wiping other peoples butt holes day after day. You should know how to wipe your own, but to choose a career wiping other peoples butt holes is stupid.
don't bother. no one has ever asked me for one. a degree is nice but it is also optional.
if you are the shit, the right people can tell. your resume of experience is enough. and that's all that matters.
As lame as this sounds, I wanted to be a "hacker", and I knew I'd never be a hacker if I didnt learn this thing I had heard talk of called "Unix". So, determined to become a hacker, I started buying books on Unix, sendmail, programming, etc. I had no formal schooling, in fact, a high school dropout, and was lucky enough that a rather large company saw promise in me, and hired me. And that's where I sit today.
You're not too old. I'm 23 and work for a community college and I'll be getting laid off for budget reasons and.....oh wait, you wanted to START a career.
Seriously though, how well the economy is doing has a direct effect of how many beginning unix people are hired.
The problem there is that you can't get experience so how are you supposed to get a job that requires experience. It is a vicious cycle!
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I started, as so many others, at a Uni. Heh, supporting, of all things, a bank of Macs :)
Installled MacOS X Server, saw it was BSD, had a field semester. Following semester dropped out to pursue a career as a Solaris admin with some IT consultants who ended up laying off the majority of their staff over the course of this past year. I got the axe 6 months ago and have been out of work ever since.
Hmm... anyone know how best to get back IN to adminning? I loved it, but opporotunities for getting back in right now seem pretty bleak. At least in the Sillicon Valley/San Francisco area.
--
The Xiphos
Xiphos
is to learn what you're doing. Especially good is learning Solaris administration on a Sun box; if you can make Solaris sing, you can do pretty much everything required of you as an admin. I'm still not 18, but my experience with administering my personal Linux server (BIND, sendmail, etc.) was enough to get me a part-time job as a Solaris admin--on the spot and with no prior experience. Thirty-three may be a tad old, but it's hardly a disqualification for someone who can learn quickly.
After the O'Rielly books, when you feel comfortable with UNIX, try working though Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum. He is probably the best author in all of computer science. This will give you an understanding of what goes on behind the scenes.
Anyway, I asked myself the very same question 3 years ago when I got into IT and came across this article in Sys Admin Magazine by Russ Hill. See link below...
9 80 7f.htm
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1189/sam9807f/
Like many other Unix sysadmins, it's been a long, improbable road. 10 years ago, I never would have believed I'd end up in a professional career.
In 1993, I was a military reservist killing time at university until I could get a tour with UNPROFOR in the former Jugoslavia. Unfortunately, over time, repeated re-injuries of a previous steroid-related injury left me almost a cripple, and unable to pursue this goal.
Unable to pursue the athletics, martial arts, or my peacekeeping aspirations, I became depressed, and segregated myself from people.
Eventually I found a deserted hallway on campus populated by some VT100's to keep me company. I got a unix book from the library, and started to read up on my "email account".
Soon, I learned how to print to the line printer... then I learned how to to "pipe", but the best command to help me learn was "man -k". In a stroke of (What I thought was) genius, I sent all of the man pages to the line printer with "man -k a |lpr". The operator was not at all happy when I arrived at the print office to pick up my 6" thick printout of man pages. I spent the weekend reading them all, despite the fact that not all of it made sense to me at the time.
In time, computers became an obsession, and I started to realized that I knew tons of things that others around me didn't. One day I casually joked to a local sysadmin I had gotten to know: "If this keeps up, I'll end up working here!".... he then told me to start the next day. That's how I got my first job as a lab monitor, which in itself was great for learning, and great for resume padding.
The whole time, I read lots and played lots and tried lots, with curiosity being the greatest driving force.
During this period, I realized that I had no working knowledge of hardware... so I put out a usenet ad: "Student wants old dead hardware for learning". I was deluged with tons of legacy PC/non-pc crap which I used to teach myself networking and hardware. Thankfully I had a large place and no girlfriend at the time. To this day, I cannot help but feel a bit of contempt when I hear someone insist they need the "latest and greatest" in order to learn.
Eventually I got this roomate who introduced me to Linux. Although I loved unix, I never thought I'd actually get to try my hand at being a (gasp) sysadmin, but Linux made it possible for me to explore the many corners of unix that had previous been unavailable to me! So I dove into Linux, and learned all of the aspects of administration. Having him around to pick his brain was also invaluable.
I graduated University (With a degree in military history) just before Y2K, and was hired on to a Y2K team who needed a junior sysadmin to write backup scripts, and free up a senior, better paid, admin from what they saw as "grunt work".
It was a perfect match... I was thrown in with a bunch of old-school unix sysadmins, and downloaded their knowledge as fast as they could endure. Not only that, I had root access to all the servers, including development servers.
There were only a few "mishaps"
That contract was my first foot in the unix door... once you cross that initial hurdle, many more doors open.
So, that's my tale. If I can give advice:
-There's a lot you can teach yourself, but there's also a lot to be learned from others. If you're bright, and a eager learner, you'll never have trouble finding people happy to mentor you.
-Practice self sufficiency. Don't waste a gurus time asking them for info that can be found in a man page, save them for that which ISN'T in the man page.
-Don't let lack of a linear, tangible plan daunt you. Love Unix, learn Unix, and the rest will eventually fall into place. As shakespeare said: "No profit grows where there's no pleasure taken".
Hope that helps.
Here's what you do:
-Become about 30 pounds overweight
-Grow a long scraggly beard
-Stop bathing regularly
-Learn some disparaging jokes about those "other" operating systems
-Start using Unix command, like fsck and chmod, in everyday conversation
-Have a large collection of Star Wars action figures that you can decorate your cubicle with (and a light saber, too!)
There are many ways to do this, without going directly into system admin.
1. consider going the test engineer route. possibly as a black box test engineer, qa/test is a great career path as there is a real shortage of sr. people.
2. consider tech writing, leveraging from your teaching background
3. consider technical teaching, as this also leverages your background. large compaines will spin you up technically.
4. consider developing technical courses, again large companies have opportunities in these areas.
5. consider release engineering/configuration management
6. consider help desk positions
Just get your foot in the door, one way or the other and continue to work towards what interest you.
I started out on the MIS side and moved into system administration in 84' and in 85 into lab administration, and did that for 9 months. The experience paid of greatly in future positions. There are many types of system administration jobs, in larger companies: unix mail administrators, unix network administrations, database, develop lab, qa/test lab, end-user administrators, technical marketing, there are folks that go on the road to setup systems for trade-shows... quite a bit to choose from
Best of luck!
qbalus
...but i just read BOFH
(Sysadmin handbook)
get xited
I really don't remember why, but someone told me that UNIX was *the thing* and back in 1981 when I started college, the only UNIX system was in the CS grad lab.
I applied (read: begged the manager of the labs) for an admin position there, slaved for a year without pay so I could use the system, and eventually became a paid admin.
I remember my first login session sat for 3 days on the old adm3a terminal because nobody had told me about logout or ^D.
I think most of what I have to say has already been posted, but I will say it anyway.
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@0,0 and 0/2/0/0.8.0.18.0.0.0 mean, plus all sorts of other things that you never knew existed when you applied.
You need to be sure you want to do it. It means lots of late nights and weekends spent working on systems. Basically, you can't do anything while your users are on, so that hurts the social life. There's lots of crawling underneath computer room floors, testing cables, replacing disks etc etc.
Get some experience with something other than Linux. BSD and Solaris are the easiest to get into as you can run them on x86, but I can't think of a single system where I work that runs Unix on x86, so the experience there is limiting. To be good at this job, you need to know what things like
Adding users and making filesystems is one thing, tracing the root cause of a failed backup to a loop initialisation on a FC-AL hub is something completely different.
Learn C and shell scripting and Perl. I spend a lot of time writing shell scripts, and very little time writing C, but if you understand how C works, you understand what Unix was built on, and things like "errno=6 no such device or address" won't seem scary.
Best way I can think of to get into it is get a job on a helpdesk that supports unix systems. This will teach you the basics, which you can then extend upon in your own time. It will also teach you about how the users percieve the system, and how the admins look after it. The best admins where I work have all done a "tour of duty" on a helpdesk at some point. Excel at the helpdesk, then move up to admin in time.
There is a lot of bad admins around, but you don't need to be a genius to be good at this job. A photographic memory would definitely help though.
I ended up in System Administration because I've lived the classic "jack of all trades" life that prepares you for pretty much all that the job eventually throws at you.
In secondary school, I excelled at math, science (particularly physics), electronics, computers, and did reasonably well at trade classes (woodshop, metalwork). Realised at the end of secondary school that I could skip a year and go straight into external training in Electronics, and jumped at the chance. Also kept up honing my computer skills, which I saw as a possible "backup job" if the Electronics field fell through for me - interesting note was that as part of electronics, we had to deal with low-level logic, and even assembly language, so my computer knowledge helped immensely.
Started playing with computers in 1982 (ok, so I was 12). By 1985 I was into comms using modems. In 1988, I was running a 5 line BBS using propritory software that had a lot of ASM code in it, and that cost a bit. When I closed it down in 1996, it had 7 lines, and way too many users. I closed it down for personal reasons, and because I thought that it was "the right time" to move on.
From 1988 to the end of 1991, I worked in various jobs: Electronics Tech and Storeman on Fire Alarm systems, Electronics Tech repairing data collection equipment (Barcoding and PABX Monitoring), Electronics Tech in a local modem company, and working on a Disabled Bus helping the kids on and off (while the electronics industry was in a lull).
Started at my current workplace at the end of 1991, as an Electronics Tech/Engineer. Repair and custom hardware design. The company was small, working with Point Of Sale software and hardware, which made moving to new positions reasonably easy. I'm just coming up on my 10th year at this place, which is a little milestone to be somewhat proud of I guess.
Moving from one job to another within a company is probably the best way to get into the job. It also gives you time to work out "can I work with these people as a Systems Administrator?", which is always a thorny question.
I did a little bit of sales groundwork, found it not to my taste. Tried a bit of programming, and while I could do the work, I wasn't grabbed by the job. By 1994, we had a central server (using Windows) for files, regular backups, and it was installed by the boss. In 1995, they were looking at connecting to the net for e-mail, and of course, that central server was dialled up to the net, and in 6 months we'd expanded to the point we needed a dedicated e-mail system and Systems Administrator, and so being versed in running a BBS, I had a fair bit of knowledge under my belt and accepted the job.
Evaluated a few options, and settled on a Linux box running our mail and routing needs. Since then, we've gotten a lot of Linux boxes, but it's not all we use. AIX, Solaris, Windows, and others all play a part in my job - it's just a matter of selecting the right horse for the job. Linux works well for most of what I do, because of it's "swiss army knife" nature, which fits well with someone who is a "jack of all trades" like me.
If there is anything I think my above experiences have taught me, is that you need to have diverse abilities, and that any sort of experience helps, no matter how irrevelant it may seem. Having such experience in many cases allows you to laterally think around a problem and come up with the best solution. It can also allow you to better understand other people's reasoning behind what they do, which if you ever have to maintain any system, you really need.
Sorry about the life story, but I wanted to show you how diverse a background I've had, so there it is. Good luck with it all.
I make a ridiculous salary & work with a bunch of whiney elitist assholes.
( fellow sys admins ).
This is the world of the UNIX Admin.
With a "useless" degree in journalism, I got a crummy job doing inbound sales at a large call center. While reciting my mindless sales scripts, I read every computer book I could get my hands on and "explored" the internal network. When I finally got fired (couldn't take it anymore), I made a resume that consisted of a list of the books I had read, and that got me a job as a computer operator. Two years of that and then I got my current job, administering badass IRIX systems at a satelite ground station.
Too old?
Well how long are you going to live? Most people have to work after age 65. Many retirees end up going back to work out of bordeom, etc. Considering the amount of years you will have to work, wouldn't you rather spend the time doing what you love?
I could give you numerous examples of people who came to their calling later in life. People who became doctors, composers, etc., but listing them would bloat this response. I think when people are too old, that means they don't feel like starting over, accepting lower pay or subordinant status, etc., they want to play it safe.
Value of degree
A degree in CS is good to have, but I have been appalled by how many CS grads I meet who know almost nothing about Unix, not even a historical overview. Still, I think a degree is largely what you make of it, so a person who loves the subject will probably be better than someone who coasts through just because CS is a degree that will get them a job. My boss has a history degree, my predecessor has a chemistry degree, most of the other computer operators from my first tech job had no degree at all and many have become Unix or NT admins.
Passion for what you do
This is, I think, my edge over many of my peers. I have what is to me almost a dream job, but many of my peers got into computers because it was a good job, others just aren't working in the right area of the field, they don't love what they do. Look how many of these comments express that sentiment. Passion for what you do is hard to put on a resume, but it definitely counts as far as real world results are concerned.
Value of certification
Some here have downplayed the value of certification, saying that what really counts is being able to work in the real world. That's technically true, but for someone with no CS degree and little professional experience, a certification can lend credibility to the skills you claim.
There are tons of MCSE's out there, and you can find training courses for the program all over the place, but there is a real lack of good training for Unix, so a Unix certification may be worth more than some other certitifcations. Comptia now has a Linux+ certification, and there are a few other certs out there, all of which should be atainable for someone willing to work with a few study guides. I wouldn't suggest getting more than a one or two, though.
Adapt existing skills
Figure out how to use your non-tech skills. With a journalism degree, I am able to write and communicate better than most of my peers. These types of skills are helpful in getting your job and succeeding in it(people often think admins don't do anything because they don't see most of the work, and don't understand what they do see. I made the mistake of concentrating ONLY on technical competence for the first years of my career: management failed to recognize my capabilities because I didn't communicate them.
Get some experience
You could start with a lower pay, junior level position. There are also some creative ways to get experience. Become a computer consultant (this might become profitable, but certainly you can get some experience, especially if you are cheap). Teach some beginner classes in Linux (parhaps for free at a local library). Maybe even contact a local training center about teaching some courses(especially if you have a certification). Write an article or book. And finally, host your own Unix based website, effectively making yourself a Unix Admin (on a small scale). Add as many administrative needs to the site as you can (database, user accounts, etc.) so as to get more types of admin experience. Or do the ulimate and create (or help create) something that lots of people will use, like a useful utility.
Finally, make friends with other Unix lovers.
Yup - apparently he was also so absentminded that he once called is wife and asked her "Where am I and where am I meant to be?"
One person I can understand, but two? C'mon. So I mispelled Hear, Hear. And I thought _I_ had nothing better to do with my time.
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Pretty Simple. I knew unix. I screwed around with it. Our previous admin at work left, the junior guy got bumped up, so I got to be junior guy. Then that guy left, so I get to be the senior guy. No speacial education. No special training.
Probably not what you wanted to hear, but oh well
"We need a new webmail system"
Is this for just messing around on or for actual use?
"For actual use."
[leave, return 20 minutes later]
I've done up a budget of what this will take. We'll need a 500Mhz box with fast SCSI. It'll be an additional server, so that means that we should keep an eye on support....
You want this under 24 hour support, or is fixing it in the AM ok?
Okay, 24hr, that means an additional 1/3 FTE and that gets us into the hole for 2 FTE's since you have me put up those other ego boxes of yours.
Here, just sign off on this and I'll get the PO out for the new boxes.
Oh, our mail is still on a monolithic file, we might want to get a good IMAP server that stores message/file as we move ahead. Much faster, better support, etc. I've got some time free early next week; I'll have the webmail up a couple days after the machine arrives.
See, I've done that react only job enough. I'm a grown up AND a system admin. Up from system admin is managing others and designing systems that work.
I was working for a small company who wanted a nice, reliable Internet connection, e-mail and (later) a web presence. I had written software on UNIX and hacked on MINIX, and was comfortable with TCP/IP, so I volunteered to get everything up and running. I demonstrated that I could do that and keep the system ticking over reliably, so I became the sysadmin.
I'm not a sysadmin any more. I probably wouldn't do well going back into that line of work, because I have fairly fixed and somewhat controversial opinions about how to run a system. Such as: (1) No sendmail on any box I run. (2) No NFS on any box I run. (3) Quotas for everybody, even me. (4) vi as default editor, tcsh as default shell.
(No, I am not interested in discussing those opinions.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I make a ridiculous 6 figger salary & work with a bunch of elitist A-Holes. If this appeals to you, you annoy me.
I went to school to be an English Teacher. I ultimately came out of college with a History Degree, a Communications (Journalism) Degree, a Music Degree and a Linguistics Minor.
:o
Teaching didn't pay more than I was making at the Price Club! I took a Novell Cert course because after looking at the two Sever OSes (MS & Novell) it was clear to me that Novell was obviously the better of the two and certainly Novell Admins would be in demand.
The first gig I got was converting Novell 3.12 to NT 4.0. I never went back. I am an NT/Notes Admin and I dig my job 80% of the time. I am slowly (but surely) switching my company to Linux (RH) and having a great time doing it.
So while I am not a "real" Sys Admin, but sort of a "Sys Admin Lite" I will be a real one as soon as I convert the last server to Linux!
PS -- You are way NOT too old!
This
I started off as a untrained (dont even have high school) IRC freak on galaxynet and after 9 months joined a local IRC/ISP, started off as a helpdesk operator and was exposed to redhat5.0 (all boxes was running either SCO or linux) and beginner WAN, with time and initiative, i progressed to larger WAN/LAN and later went for CCNA, RHCE & CCNP, i was promoted to manager level but instead choosed to leave in pursuit of my degree ...
... you would get bogged down by work but you would learn, of course there's the pay cut you've to take. Of course the other method is to join a major ISP, but the major pitfalls is in such environments what you learnt is limited and you get quickly bored of it.
...
Well all these years i found out everything is up to your initiative and the best place to learn is start from a small shop or ISP where linux is prevalent
I've known friends from that environment whom approached me to teach them about boxes and such and major push factors are like rigid work scope, non-departmental transferability which means low scope of internetworking on LAN/WAN.
Now I only wonder if big companies out there would accept your experiences and professional certificates instead of only pure degrees and such, while i'm stuck down under for 2 years to gain this crappy paper which doesn't teach me anything at all
http://www.binaryfreedom.com/~systool/article.p
Are there no diabetics anywhere else in the world? That's not a Diet Coke, it's a Sugar-Free Coke.
I graduated from college with a degree in English, and took a job at a small school as a classroom aide while beginning work on my teaching credential.
Before the school year ended, our "tech coordinator" (who has since become a friend and mentor) left for a start-up. It was leaked that I knew where the power buttons were on the computers, so I became the de-facto admin for the last part of the school year.
Having tinkered with computers in high school and taking a few CS courses in college added to my, heh, "mystique." The principal offered me the tech job for the following year, so I jumped at it. The school's network consisted of Macs, and an NT file server.
Love at first sight hit when the outgoing tech showed me the Linux mail server he set up for the school. Linux looked just like the Sun OS I played on in college, so I dove in head first.
I've since played on various Linux distros and *BSDs, with Slackware and FreeBSD being my favorites.
Unfortunately, I had to leave the admin job this year in order to finish my credential--I begin student teaching in February.
I love literature and it's great working with my freshmen, but I had so much fun switching all the Mac and NT servers to Linux and BSD.
The point of all this blather?
Like many other posters, I started out in a small place and was able to get my feet wet. Maybe after I finish my credential, I can jump back into the Unix world.
I'd recommend that you learn vi. I can now completely configure a Solaris machine using nothing but vi at a text console, among other things. It was definately the most useful program I learned.
As you get further, learn things like the various shell tools (cut, grep, awk, etc) as well as shell script. I never found a use for awk until recently, but when I did, it really simplified a "grep|cut|grep|grep|cut|grep|cut..." shell script. You also can't go wrong learning syslog, dns, apache, and nfs, although some companies use other tools (I tend to avoid bind and sendmail, for example). YP/NIS, dhcpd, Samba and Cap/Netatalk are also used in some companies. Ultimately, the more you know, the more it will help.
As well, keep in mind that companies tend to use unix machines for specific software packages, and chances are that users will come to you for help. Try to at least be aware of these programs and the various resources available.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
My guess: the Windows Master Browser election is pretty fragile and you occasionally get Win95 boxes thinking they've "won" the election and fucking up everyone's network neighborhood. IPX basically gives the real MB 2 chances at winning.
There's a util in the reskit which lets you view the browser election process. Or just use policies and disable everyone's ability to participate in browser elections except the domain and wins boxes.
But since you didn't mention what the problems were specifically, that's all out of my ass.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I got started in Unix by playing on the Internet in the days before the web was the cool thing, the days when telnet, ftp, fsp, archie and gopher were the tools of choice. I always thought it was cool.
Well, I got a job with a Large Car Rental Company (TM) as a satellite network controller, and the control system ran on a Stratus. The VSAT vendor then came out with a *gasp* GUI that ran on Sun workstations. I helped set up the machines when they first came in, and the sysadmin took me under his wing (old crotchety bearded guy who pounded lessons like "Use vi. It'll always be there" into my head). At the same time, I started playing with Linux...And the rest, as they say, is history. Now I'm that old crotchety bearded (goatee'd) guy.
As time progressed, I started getting into the security side of the house. I found that I enjoyed it because it had the same two criteria as sysadminning: 1) it was fun, and 2) it was lucrative. Worked for a company which I thought was going to put me into a professional coma of ecstasy. They let me do Beowulf clustering, Linux (distro of my choice) as well as doing security. They even let me get my CISSP. Unfortunately, their staff has dropped from 6000 to 800...
However, if you can deal with it, I would highly recommend doing system admin...
--Storm
We were having an alone mail/www Solaris server hosting a horrible page, then somebody make us the favor and deface it.
All was preinstalled, no cd recovery, no pop3 server no security, no updates, just a nude server, and then a guy gives us a *nix cd and it was a plug and play mail/www server.
Now, is secure, licensed, updated frequently, and thanks God, is not a MS server.
1) Go to college to get a BSCS - even though I don't really need the courses because I know all this crap already...
2) Bored - wander into computer lab... log into UNIX based PDP 11/77 and discover it's not working just how I like...
3) Learn C... Learn PDP assembler... System works better, but root user is upset that he's now sharing root w/me...
4) Meet root user... nice guy... have some beers... agree that I'm a white-sided hacker, will assist in fixing list of things on backlog in exchange for root privs...
5) Become good C programmer... explore other flavors of Unix (BSD, SYS V, Ultrix, AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, SCO, Linux...)... Manage some boxes...
6) Graduate after... ummm, we won't go there... and get a job as a network guy who has to handle "some unix boxes"...
7) Of course unix boxes are fubar, so I get to fix them... Learn more about UNIX... These are hospital-lab systems, so lots of late nights... friends? what are those?
8) Lots of broken stuff at hospitals, everything's an emergency - job's far from home... New job, closer to home, bigger company with some $$$ and about 1000 (no kidding) UNIX boxes wants a Jr. Sys admin...
9) Have a really great boss who knows lots of shit about UNIX and management... Hit some training courses...
10) Boss quits, I become Sys admin... Tweek systems for a call center with 10k+ calls daily and a $50M business relying on my systems... sleep? what's that? Hip Tumor? No, pager... just had it implanted - it's easier that way...
11) More systems, more data, more stuff, more people, I get to train them... I go to training classes... Become Sr. System Admin...
12) Programming in C is a dim memory... sleeping on computer room floor during system restore that HAS to happen before 6AM is a vivid memory... especially those metal dividers on the raised floors - they're really cold... maybe there's some nice warm wire in that pile in the corner...
13) Performance monitoring and tuning of systems - every day, all day. Automated scripts helping keep the pager company in business... Keeping me away from sleep...
14) A few training classes...
15) Certifications? Yes, I am certifiable. Completely and utterly insane. Unable to discuss anything with a "USER" - they just wouldn't understand... need fix system now... backup drive is insane - sometimes works, usually not... Damn DLT's...
--------
My actual advice what it's like to be a UNIX sys Admin is that you need to be able to work 60-80 hour weeks - CONSISTENTLY. Don't bitch about it - that's the job. Occasionally you'll get some comp time and can disappear for a few days - but you still have to wear the pager.
YOU WILL BE AWAKENED FROM PEACEFUL SLUMBER! Repeat this 100 times. If you still want the job, continue reading...
YOU WILL BE PAGED DURING SEX. Yeah, I know, geeks don't have sex, but hey - during that once or twice a year when we actually get a 1 wk vacation that's forced by our bosses on us, we still get paged... remember that pagers are radio devices and occasionally (like when you get sex) they don't receive the page... Ignore it...
YOU will be paged during dinner - sometimes you have to pay right away or walk from it and go to work - remember an entire business (which prints your paycheck) depends on you. No one else knows this, and it's a lot of responsibility, but you have to suck it up and deal with it. Like all the time...
Monitoring scripts are your friend. You can't watch it all yourself. Get some help. Forget those pay packages like Patrol and other useless shit. Write something in PERL, tie it in to EtherPage (great commercial package), and learn to commune with your pager...
Your pager is your friend. Have those monitoring scripts page you BEFORE it's a disaster. No one will know you fixed it, so you won't be as god like, but hey - you still get paid. Keep those systems humming...
Graphs are your boss's language. Keep data, translate to colorful graphs with titles. Give to boss to explain uptime, disk usage trends, bandwidth utilization, etc. Say it with pictures and you'll get the upgrades.
Training is only there if you beg for it. Give your boss a good return on her investment. Offer to share learnings (they love it when you say this and you'll never actually do it). Say it will make you more productive (use a graph) - just don't say any actual numbers - use percentages like 10% more productive. Who the hell knows what that is... Make it one of your goals, and if your boss signs off on it, you're virtually guaranteed to get training then... otherwise forget it, it's not in the budget... Go to classes where you'll actually learn something to make you more valuable to future employers - you're not staying in one place forever...
Document everything - keeps you from getting called after you quit and move on to the next job...
Offer to help after quitting... makes you look like the good guy... They'll never call. If they do, charge $120/hr - it's a good consulting rate and you already know the systems so there's no learning curve...
Remain friendly to people you worked with - as you move up the ranks, you'll need a network of people that you know...
Don't install crappy systems - let consultants do that. They can take the blame for trash...
Read UNIX magazines, subscribe to newsletters (email or otherwise) regarding security flaws, fixes, patches, etc. Keep up on things. Actually install relevant patches (work with change management on this). Stay ahead of the curve - know what's going to be used in 3 years and start trying to implement test systems so you already know it when it's needed. Your boss won't believe it's needed, so you'll need to do some skunkworks projects sometimes...
Keep spare equipment squirelled away for skunkworks projects and other immediate needs. Label it as something important... leave it off the system maps. No one will know or care. Tell the auditors that it's a critical piece of bandwidth monitoring and management equipment. They'll write it down and go away.
Train your help desk to answer questions - you remain as level 2 or level 3 support only. Only answer a user's question 2 times if it's the same question. On the 3rd time, require the question to come from their boss - that will cause them to write it down. Tell their boss you've answered it twice already.
Befriend your sales executive - they take you out to lunch and try to get you to pitch useless shit you don't need to your boss. Play along, sometimes something is worthwhile and you can get a new toy... At any event, hit the lobster places every once in a while...
Expect to dial in from home - a lot. Get good at it, or expect to be sleeping under your desk or on the computer room floor - a lot.
--------- If you can't deal with all of the above happening EVERY WEEK of your career, then DON'T BECOME A SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR. It's a hellish job for those who don't love what they do. And you MUST love this job or you will become a mass murderer...
Good luck...
damn straight I say.
about time somebody recognized that the crap that is diet is the only viable beverage for the diabetic population...
I started out doing tech support at a cute little mom and pop ISP in Palo Alto. We were Solaris based and the owners did tech support and admin at Sun in the early days so they knew Unix (at least SunOS) really well. They taught me everything I needed to know to be a good sys admin:
1) I learned that customers are the most important part. Even if they don't know what they want, its your job to figure it out.
2) I learned to program in Perl and the shells and some C.
3) I talked to people like Celeste Stokely
4) I gained a passion for fixing and building and maintaining and automating and being the hero.
5) Yoga and a good hard-core bike ride or a trip up the hill for some boarding helps as well.
6) I learned about other Unices and GNU/Linux in my spare time and learned to recognize the differences.
I don't have a CS degree or any certifications. I have a wealth of real-world experience. I think that is what really counts. Don't get me wrong; I am going back to school to get a CS degree but only after I learned my passion. Working at a small but busy ISP has given me a great perspective on being a sysadmin. There are other ways to learn, but if you don't want to go back to school, I'd say get a tech support job at a little ISP (if there are any left).
One more thing; plan to keep in shape and not grow a grey beard and fat. No matter what they say, those two are not a requirement.
OK..... two more things; learn how to crunch numbers and how to justify cost so your boss will have an idea about what your work will mean.
I work for a plasma studies group at the University of Colorado. I had been working for some time on a fantastic web site called Physics 2000, a site which aims to make advanced physics concepts easier to understand for the common-man (end shameless plug... but do check it out, you can even learn about the Bose-Einstein Condensate which won this year's Nobel Prize -- two of the University of Colorado's physicists won it, so we know our shit, lol), but at that point had not done any UNIX work at all for them.
Anyhow, when the resident sys-admin went to take an internship for the summer, the head of the group stepped into my office and said:
"What do you know about Linux?"
"Jack," I replied.
"I see. Want to be a sys-admin?"
"Er... sure!"
So, over the course of the summer, I went from a Linux newbie (I ran a small FTP server from home, that's about it) to being able to quickly debug and repair the Linux systems on our network as needed, in addition to breeze through various installs/configs, basically whatever I was called upon to do. Those skills extended into our Solaris machines, and indeed, by the end of the summer, I really knew my UNIX. Amazing what the Internet and root access on a few machines can teach you! I should take this time to thank some of the fantastic people on #LinuxHelp who always stepped out of the shadows to help me out. You saved my ass numerous times. ;)
So, in conclusion, if someone tells you you're too old or too set in your ways to become a good sysadmin, don't listen to them! Just be prepared to work HARD, learn HARD, and don't stop trying until you solve the problems that are presented to you. That's the only way to learn. You will fuck up a few times, but no boss can expect his sysadmins to be perfect.
Good luck!
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
FYI: "Ossama Ben Laden should be condemmed to have a sex change and sent back to the talibans"
His name is "Osama Bin Laden"; it's spelled "condemned"; it's "Taliban"; and I agree with you in part. However, I feel that every supporter and official of the Taliban should be "given" a sex-change operation and deported back to Afghanistan as females.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
In a blessed day of 1988 I got my hands on a VHS Tape with the movie War Games. I said "Wow, Cool, but that can't be done - it's only a movie". Years later, in high-school i borrowed an 2400 modem and plugged-it into my state-of the art (then) 286. 2 Months later a friend gave me a phone number, an username and a pass. I tought it was an BBS. But no. It was an VAX/VMS. I could give commands on a remote server. Then my friend told me about that magical thing "the internet" (that sever vas one of the few ones to thare the first internet connection in Romania - i think it was 9.6k) and it showed me the magical command named ftp. After a year i discovered Linux ... the rest is history ...
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Over the years however, I taught myself FreeBSD by installing it and reading every article I could find on the subject.
The newsgroups help a lot too... You can ask lots of questions, and describe problems you are having, and chances are there are others who are having or have had similar problems, and they will respond in kind with the solutions.
After 4 years of blood, sweat and tears, I'm now the companies System Administrator (seeing over 6 FreeBSD boxes and 1 Windows box).
The rest of the office runs some kind of Windows OS on their workstations, I run FreeBSD X-Windows with a KDE desktop.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
Like you, I am a dinosaur, too. I have, sitting here by me, a Redhat box configured as a server that I am very slowly learning to use. Note the words "very slowly". As with you, I studied English and Philosophy but not for a degree. My major course of study was Physics/Chemistry. When I was in school it was automatic failure if we even thought about taking a calculator to class and we were lynched if we used one. We were forced to learn how to do our work manually. Today, it is automatic failure if one dose NOT use one. Today, one must be computer literate, too. The major problem, espeially for us old dinosaurs is that somehow, the computer youth (like most teens) speak a coded language called geek so they may show thier superiority over the us old geezers. So, we who can speak only dinosaur have to learn a totally new language called geek to be computer literate OR use a special expensive translator called Micro$oft just so we can do our work. Learning a totally new language in our last few years is beyond the call of duty. But because I am retired and simply seaking to know for the sake of knowing. Thus, this old dog of a dinosaur is learning a few new tricks. It is just that much harder because the newly hatched geeks are afraid of the old ways and hide the secrets behind their geekese.
Retired dinosaur, simple user, volunteer, guinea pig
First of all, you have to decide what you're looking for:
I have worked been a member of a 900+ IT staff, and quickly realized it wasn't for me...too little slice of the pie, work-wise, and so I went back to a small company, and am once again very happy.
As far as certifications go, I'm not a big believer in them. When there was a massive crunch for IT folks a couple of years ago, it may have been a good thing, as it would help one get one's foot in the door. Now, I believe that it might be a waste of your time/money.
The best way to learn Unix Sys Admin'ing is to do it...set up a machine (or 3) at home, and start using them on a daily (or evening
Lastly, the best jobs I've ever had were found by word of mouth. Don't discount asking around (user groups meetings, etc.). Maybe you'll even end up at a tech company, not in a Sys Admin roll, but in some other capacity, at which time you'll be able to make friendships with the Sys Admins and possibly move in to that department in the near future.
HTH-good luck!
I don't know, I am with the other guy a couple of posts up, who wants to be someone's on-call 24/7 lackey. I saw the sysadmin referred to once on Slashdot as "the janitor of the internet" and that is essentially what the position is. The best day of my career was the day I moved from an admin position to a software development one.
I will say that I have seen a great many admins who couldn't cut it as programmers. I have also seen many programmers who could barely log onto a linux box. I do, however, suspect that any competent programmer could easily pick up the "skills" necesssary to admin whereas the converse is far from true.
maru
I did Astrophysics at university as it was something i was interested in .... when I left I decided that I would quite like to work in IT, so I did the normal graduate things of applying to graduate programs, going for interviews etc ... but not have a degree in a computer related subject hindered me, (saying well I've been using Linux/Unix boxes for several years didnt realy cut it) ... then one day I noticed a small ad in a local freebee newspaper for a junior sysadmin position at what turned out to be a large international IT services company ... four years later I am still working for them (but now as a unix technical specialist) ... dont just restrict your job searching to the normal computing press, the jobs in there tend to assume you have lots of experience, also look in your local papers to see if any companies around near you have positions vacant as they might very well advertise entry level positions in that sort of newspaper.
Tim
if you have the passion, it means that you're spending time to learn things. So basically, you're ready to learn anything new. This is your power. And as you learn more and more new things, you're faster at learning thoses.
here is for the passion.
Now you need to network your self. finding a programer job is not very hard, and in the enterprise you'll go you'll bright with your sysadmin skills. a good job is "webmaster" because usually you have to take care of the machine, apache and the content, which is eventually dynamic. As your skills get reconnized by others, you might be moved to a more "sysadmin" job.
Let's get the ball rolling !
bye.
Well, I was hired by a small-ish dot-com a year or so back, as an HTML coder. That lasted mabe a month before the Unix admin took off, and the job sorta defaulted to me! (Boring story, eh?)
Evidently disproving the claim in the grandparent post that he never remembered phone numbers. :-)
There were no ISPs in my home town, not even Compuserve or AOL. I'd used Unix in college, so I figured if I had to dial long-distance anyway, I'd find one that would give me a shell cheap.
That was Seattle's Cyberspace.com, even though I was in Oklahoma, because one long distance call is as good as another.
For years I did all my Internet that way, from a Unix shell, while also running Fidonet bulletin boards (eventually starting my own Net as NC, and serving as NEC most of the time as well). My own home was always wired, starting with three-wire serial networks and working up to Ethernet as it became available, so I eventually combined my knowledge of networking and home system administration into a small consulting business, mostly doing small office peer-to-peer networks.
One of my customers, an Indian tribe, decided to start an ISP. Since I had come in and cleaned up their wiring when two other local companies had screwed it up (one was trying to put 10base2 connectors on speaker wire), and had been the first person to suggest to them that switching from NetBEUI to TCP/IP might make their network easier to manage, they hired me to serve as the technical lead for building that ISP.
This meant a crash course in Unix administration. A later successful hack forced me to become a security "expert" too.
After a couple of years there, I got fired for refusing to break the law and refusing to defraud customers, so I immediately went to work for another company that also sucked, but paid me a lot more and had a Solaris box to administrate (in addition to the vast quantity of NT servers and workstations, the AS/400, and the two OS/2 servers.)
After a while there, I determined that I'd rather be boiled alive in vegetable oil than work on NT for a living, so I went off on my own for a while again, servicing orphaned Unix servers put in place by companies that had gone out of business, and turning down unrealistically-funded offers to start other ISPs. Eventually I got sick of the continued Windows work I had to do to make ends meet at this, and took a job that is 99% pure Solaris administration, with a little HP/UX thrown in just to prove Solaris is the worst commercial Unix in the world, except for all the other commercial Unixes.
Now I live in sunny Orlando, Florida, I only have to use Windows on one workstation for a couple of applications, I do all my work from a Linux workstation on Solaris servers, and I'm happier than a pig eating shit, as my dad back in rural Oklahoma would say.
And I'm making well over twice what that assplug who fired me was making, and over three times what he was paying me. But only twice what each of the three people he had to hire to replace me made...
Sysadmin Scenario 1:
/. that you just "fell into it" and totally ruin my fucking day.
/.
1) Start out in a University comp sci lab hacking at Sun/Hp-UX boxen 10 tears ago.
2) Completely luck out in a pre-WWW/"e-commerce" economy by hooking up with a mom and pop ISP doing helldesk, circa 1994.
3) Learn everything you know as you go along, after the previous admin gets sacked for coming in drunk too often.
4) Learn to use every variant of *nix that you have the hardware to spare for. You have the money for it now.
5)Get a swank job with a well-funded company as the Keeper of the Bandwidth. Drive a nice car, take home Good Pay. Get the Girl.
6) Post on
OR
Sysadmin Scenario 2:
1)Buy your first PC, break it repeatedly until you understand how it works.
2) Break your OS repeatedly, until you understand how it works.
3) Learn Linux, learn a few different distros, note the elitism surrounding the flavours, get bored, and learn BSD.
4) Learn Perl, shell scripts, HTML and build some dynamic sites. Work yourself hard and spend all your time in front of that box until your eyes bleed.
5) Get a domain or two, read DNS and BIND, set up some sites, learn to use Apache, Sendmail, SSH, Samba, etc, learn about protocols, ports, services, and firewalls.
6) Read up on different carrier methods and data transport mechanisms. What's a T1? What's a DS3?
How does ADSL work? ISDN? If you can't touch it, read about it.
7) Get fucking ignored at your job, just keep answering questions on how to configure Outlook Express, make shit money, work the graveyard shift, and rot away.
8) Realise that your company's sysadmin lives at home with Mommy sharing a bedroom with his little brother. Savour the indignity.
9) Post on
However, after graduating college with a B.S. in Computer Science, I had only the odd dabble with SunOS 4 and compiling things. I had shell accounts, but I didn't do anything on the admin end of the spectrum. I went out into the "real world" and started off at the lowest common deniminator: Helpdesk. I got sucked into the screwed up world of Windows 3.xx/95 and NT 3.51. I even took Microsoft classes on SMS, Exchange, and Server.
It was 2 years before I got entirely fed up with the Microsoft world. Then, I was a Microsoft Exchange administrator (woe is me!). I took the plunge and joined the UNIX mail support at the place I was at and was working for a complete arsehole.
I lost my job after a month and a half there not from lack of experience, but because one of the guys there was intimidated by my UNIX knowledge. (I apparently had "corrected" him on how to do a symlink properly, even though he had supposedly been working with UNIX for more than 8 years at the time. Yeah right!)
After that stint, I was pressed for cash and ended up landing a contracting desktop support job working primarily with Windoze, but I set up a Linux box at work that acted as a knowledge base for all of us techs. It worked really well. (I really wanted to replace that ailing 486 running NT 4 as the file/print server but they wouldn't let me!)
After that ended, I landed a job at an educational institution as a Solaris admin. Though I do some desktop support as well, that is starting to fall away as the company just signed a 10 year contract with an outsourcing company to handle their helldesk/mainframe/desktop support. (Thankfully, I was spared!)
My advice to you is.. never stop learning. Never stop asking questions. Set up boxen at home with various flavours of *IX and play away.
-Fialar
Read the BOFH files at The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/ then re-evaluate your desire. :-)
Age doesn't matter. Confidence, determination, persistance, and learning from your mistakes are all you need to do basically anything you want to do. Set the goal, and "be that". Of course, if you aren't single now, you soon will be. If you don't really have much experience in Unix and you are employed full-time and choose to devote most of the rest of your waking life to getting up to speed, it is gonna take you about 6 months to a year to get enough chops to be saleable.
My specific advice is to build some boxen, (that's the Unix plural for boxes--inside humor will help with being buzzword compliant). You can build Athlon XP1600 boxen for about $500 each. Get a 4 port router and a KVM switch like the 4 port Belkin SOHO, and make sure you have broadband at your house (to download all the stuff for free that you need). Put different distros on each one, get several different databases (e.g., postgres, mySQL, db2, Oracle) however you can. The biggest reason for having unix networks is because of data exchange, so you are gonna have to know a little something about implementing dbs on unix to have much utility. Read "Intro to db Systems" by Date. Then, if someone comes to you saying they are having problems with the database you can say, "well, of course you are having trouble. Your tables aren't completely normalized!"
Get the important books on Unix and learn from them. You won't understand much at first, but you will find yourself remembering that you saw something about that thing somewhere, and once you recognize that you are half-way home.
Implement all the services you can in a specific order and KEEP A JOURNAL of what you are doing!!!
Get some load simulators and run them to see how well you have set your parameters. Set up ODBC for all the dbs. Xfer data to and from. Get some HUGE dbs--you want to be able to talk to the person hiring you with some real-life trial-by-fire experience and the only way you are gonna get it is by creating it yourself.
Avoid contact with HR as much as possible. Speak with the person making the hiring decision and the person who will supervise you. HR can never help you but they can always hurt you, so before you even let someone know you are interested in the job, find out who makes the decisions.
Join your local ACM chapter. Go to all the user group meetings in your area. That way you can find out who is doing what, what they need, and how you can supply that need.
Read the newsgroups for the distros you are working with. READ the FAQs! Ask a salient question once in a while that is specific and ask for a specific answer.
When talking with the person making the hiring decision, don't say "linux" or "Free" or "Open" unless they are specifically looking for it. Talk about unix generically and the flavors of unix in the marketplace. BSD is generally safe, and be able to talk about the latest kernel.
I could go on, and my acquaintances often say that I do, so read what everybody here has to say and synthesize it into something that works for you.
If you find particular tidbits useful, share that with us.
...just fail to write up your PhD.
it's the only work you'll be suitable for.
god i hate lmf. its gotten to the point where i tar up /var/adm/lmf and pray an audit doesnt happen :)
and any network administrator should know Unix first.
And any security specialist should know unix and TCP/IP first
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
I take it you mean just illegal drugs, in the country you live. Cos lets remember alcohol and tobacco are both drugs so is everyone who takes them losers? Everytime I get a headache and drop a nurofen am I a loser?
Moronic really, that you believe it when your government tells you how to think, without actually even spending 3 seconds running it through your head. Is everyone in the netherlands losers because they've decriminalised dope but USA hasn't? Why don't you go to war with them too until they change their laws to match yours...idiot
I said "shouldn't somebody be using that expensive tape drive hooked up to the file server to back up the code base?"
And I was told "Great! Do it. In addition to developing software, naturally. Here's the administration password. Could you add an account for this new hire while you're at it?"
And while I was adding the account, I logged into the SPARCStation 20 that was the mail-server, and I noticed that /var/spool/mail/root was the largest file on the system. And I said "Shouldn't someone take care of that?"
And I was told "Great! Do it. In addition to developing software, performing backups, and maintaing the system accounts for the other developers, of course. Here's the root password. Oh, could you add some mail aliases while you're at it?"
For some reason, people keep giving me root access.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
This probably will never get read. But what the heck. It was the right place at the right time.
I was in college and was using the Internet (while it was the NFSnet controlled by the government) to FTP, email, mud, IRC, Gopher... no web, though. That was yet to be born.
I learned that someone in my home town was setting up an ISP. I went over there and basically told him "you need me". I can probably figure out how to admin that UNIX box over there. I know how the net works and the various things work. I'd be a strong technical asset.
Mind you, my only UNIX experience was that of being a user on the school's systems... but I did get a lot of early-Internet and UNIX exposure. Just no sysadmin stuff.
The guy didn't know jack about UNIX and knew he was up to his head. What happened? I joined up with the ISP and took on the technical side of things, save for the telco connections (left that to the guy who was good at telco).
Quickly figured out the admin stuff just by doing and running into problems and fixing them. A very good knowledge of how to use UNIX was very helpful in making a transition to UNIX Sysadmin.
At the place, I picked up even more Internet and UNIX skills. After a while, one of my customers started to really notice my work. He offered me a job at a big company, a few times, I turned it down.
Then my student loans came due a few years later. I joined onto the company, was hopelessly lost at first between the differences in BSD and Solaris, but then quickly gained in knowledge and stature.
The rest is history. And enjoyable.
But in case you do, and you care,
The answer is BOCHS