The ESS doesn't use fibre channel drives, the disks are all SSA (Serial Storage Architecture).
The older disks are all SSA native drives made by IBM. The 73gig drives are Seagate U160's with a converter attached so it can connect to the SSA loops that are in the ESS.
I think most of what I have to say has already been posted, but I will say it anyway.
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/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.
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.
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Personally, my colleagues from APAC all have licensed software, although none of our offices are in China.
You see, APAC is a very large place, with quite a few countries, some of which are mostly law abiding.
The ESS doesn't use fibre channel drives, the disks are all SSA (Serial Storage Architecture).
The older disks are all SSA native drives made by IBM. The 73gig drives are Seagate U160's with a converter attached so it can connect to the SSA loops that are in the ESS.
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.