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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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
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 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!
- 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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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!
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.
Try to become a programmer and fail.
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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"
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
...or at least, used to sell: "It's a tough job, but somebody said I had to do it."
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!
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
BA in history with a minor in computer science... I got into Unix Admin through Windows tech support. Long story. I think the moral is that almost any degree (or even lack thereof) can lead to a career in systems administration... The trick is in getting the inital experience, after that you're golden.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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."
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
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.
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.
And there's a reason it's so hard to fine someone who can run an E15K with a good level of competence. There's no way to get the experience without working for a place that has one (it's not like you can buy yourself one of these and stick it in your bedroom). Businesses have to hire some of their staff as inexperienced and train them if they are going to expect the experienced pool to grow. But businesses don't want to train anyone, so they just sit around whining about why there are so few people experienced in high-end enterprise class machines. And on top of that, they add on a bunch of other demands to help narrow the pool to the one guy who won't jump ship until he gets $25K more than the $100K he makes now. And businesses whine that the cost of good people is so high. Who the hell would want to go work for a business that wants them to already have experience in everything? Where's the challenge in learning something new in that? If some guy comes in, has the degree, is smart, can do the job ... but just doesn't have EMC experience (because his previous employer used something else), you turn him away and leave the job vacant until you find someone that's an exact fit?
BTW, there are plenty of people out there that lack one skill or another, and can still do the job. Too bad bureaucracy requires techies to be English majors just to get the job. Oh wait, xylix really is an English teacher. So he probably can do the job, with all it's paperwork.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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!
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.
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
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
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.
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/
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
A note for you, just doing a reboot is not cool on all operating systems Sun being one of them. Using reboot on Solaris does sync the filesystem but it does *not* go through the rc0 shutdown scripts, a big one that this affects are Oracle databases (or pretty much any db). If you don't shut it down nicely you will have issues and the dba's will be calling. Along with any other programs that need to cleanup their data. A much better one to use is "init 6" which does go through the proper shutdown scripts and will bring the system backup to it's default init level. Of course you only need it if you want to come back to the dark side and be an SA again.
I'm an SE so I get to play & design all I want, but don't have to deal with any lusers (only real user stuff I deal with are the actual SA's which we are a last level of support for when they can't figure out to get it done).
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.
As clifford Stoll might say: "I got into *ix via a 75 cent accounting glitch."
+++ath0
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
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
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
You need to sleep your way to the top. And don't be picky who you sleep with.
DEC made an RTS? Was it any good? I enjoy Starcraft and Alpha Centauri, do you think I'd like it?
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 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."
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.
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!
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?"
In my experience, the "two types of people" tends to be mostly true, but not entirely... categorizing people can be helpful, of course, but you nearly always end up ignoring important qualities in a person when you do it.
It's a mistake to say that people can't be both artistically and technically minded. I personally am a clear example that this is not true. I'm not a great artist or a great coder, but I'm way better than average in both of these (and a musician as well). I'm a very creative person, and in my experience, this comes into play just as much when I'm coming up with an elegant solution to a tricky problem as it does when I'm drawing a picture or something.
One generalization I think you *can* make, though, is that some people aren't techies and probably never will be, although with a lot of work they might be able to learn to write simple programs or whatever. This comes from me trying to tutor many of my non-techie friends in Computing Concepts (the computing course non-CS majors need to graduate). Some of them simply don't have the brain for it (although, some do, which surprised me)... the ability to intuitively break down a task into the steps needed to tell a computer how to do it. And this, I think, is a crucial step before you can really "get" computers, whether coding or admining or whatever.
Maybe this style of thinking is something you can teach yourself; I've just never seen anyone learn it who didn't seem to already have a feel for it.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
I had what I consider a lucky break as well.
I was a grad student in biology for a major university. I was really bad at research. I got my funding cut off from my prof and needed to support myself. The department needed help with their very small (7 machines) computer lab running Win95 and Mac. So I started doing that, I also had accounts on the university VMS and Unix systems for email, irc, news, etc. I started doing HTML for the department website as well. This went for about a year and I decided I loved it compared to banging my head against a wall aka research. I started looking for jobs and got one on campus that was 90% Win9x support and 10% running an Apache webserver on a Solaris 2.5.1 system. I got the job because I had the main background they needed with supporting Win9x (this is 1996). In the interview they asked about any UNIX experience and I said only email BUT I was very interested in learning UNIX and was willing to learn it. They gave me the job and I learned how to do RAID, Apache, Sendmail, POP, and a bunch of other stuff. I did that for a couple of years and since then have moved on to being an admin at the USDA and other things.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 desagree about never giving a user root. Here users are allowed root on the machine on their desktop. however IS does not maintain those machines. Screw up baddly and you re-instlal. Oh, and if you want to run any non-free programs (say that OOA toolkit that your programs are designed in, or framemaker) you have to log into one of our machines and open an xterm back to your machine.
The main reason for this is there are a lot of laptops out there, and we travel once in a while. You need root when you are at a customer site and they tell you "Your ip address is x.x.x.x, router is ..." Which happened to me once when I had to connect to their secure network. (No, not goverment, so I could move my machine back and forth, but the machine I needed was only on the secure network)
Same here. I, and every other SA in my peer group that I know, got started in tech support.
If you're in the right place at the right time, with the right skills, you might be lucky enough to skip the tech support step, but chances are you've picked up the necessary experience by doing entry-level "support" of some kind anyway.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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
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
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
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.
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!
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
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
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
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
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.
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*/
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 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?
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 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.
Irix is what I cut my teeth my teeth on... still love it over about anything else, too bad you can't get squat for 3rd party apps anymore. SGI does such a nice design with their stuff, hit the power once and it tries to do a graceful shutdown, hit it twice and it powers off without doing the shutdown, I'd love for Sun to do the same sometime, makes datacenter life much easier.
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
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.
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...
it just happens and you spend the rest of your life trying to get out. ;)
Down, not across.
And the brethren went away edified.
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.
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.
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
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.
I agree wholeheartedly with this one. You need experience on "insert big iron or high-end machine here" to get the job. You cant get experience on "insert big iron or high-end machine here" until you get a job.
It's an old story. Those select few who do have the experience are laughing all the way to the bank (God bless em!). And, they are laughing at the host of companys too shortsighted to hire newcomers to the field.
Many of those old well-trained experienced maxed individuals are beginning to reach retirement age.... what will businesses do then? What happens when he/she can no longer see? What happens when the guy dies of old age in the admin office?
Guess those short-sighted businesses are SOL then.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Yeah, you want to have a gander at my resume, too?
-- No certs, no post-secondary ed, == HR tosses the resume in the round file cabinet.
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
If I grok windows (and I might not), the win2k server isn't using WINS. However, other machines on the network might be screwing it up.
Win2k is funky.
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.