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Basic Required UNIX Skills?
xirlosan writes "I'd like to get a job working in a UNIX environment, be it programming or administrating UNIX machines. My question is this: What skills are absolutly 'must haves' and what other skills are attractive to employers when looking for a job in this field? I have my BS in Computer Science and have a fair amount of experience with Linux and Solaris, so I'm interested in what more I need. I looked for jobs at Monster, and there are so many skills the recommend it's hard to figure out what the most critical are. Any help would be certainly appreciated."
- be able to use vi. it's the lingua franca, and it'll be on every unix box.
- be able to use fsck in a manner that's not equivalent to just running fsck -y
- understand how RAID is implemented on your platforms. for solaris, you should know how to use veritas, and you shouldn't get confused by terms like disks, subdisks, and plexes
- know how to run extended diagnostics on those sun boxes
- know how to trace a process and be able to quickly parse the output
- know enough networking to be able to accurately tell which machine is causing the problem in a multi-machine clusterfuck
- know how not to kill your boss when he tells you 'yah, that stuff I had you do last week? blow all that work away and do it my way.'
- know not to be a dick about GPL v BSD or open source versus closed
- learn to document things. system setups, network setups, you name it, you'll need it at some point.
- learn how to use a task list. you'll have shitloads of things to do, and if you're like me, you'll forget something if you don't write it down
- be competent in your use of MS Office. Yes MS is evil, it's also the way people in the business world communicate. Deal with it.
- Know how to tell if a process is I/O bound, memory bound, or CPU bound.
- Know where to look for performance tweaks, even if you don't know them by heart
I'd list more, but I'm already getting quite rambly.