Ask HN: How can I make experience as a Sys Admin? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I make experience as a Sys Admin?

2 pointsyulaow3 comments

Long story short: I am still a student in EU and in the last years I had internships and worked part-time mainly as a backend developer but, considering I ever joined only startups, I had chances to work also on the frontend and as a devops for a short time.

So I really liked the few things I did to help the Sys Admin(s) in those jobs and would like to have some more experience in the field before decide in which career path invest my future.

The problem is I can't find any junior Sys Admin job offer, even looking at medium-big companies. The most low level offer I found asked for strong experience on aws/azure and its specific components that I obviously don't know at the moment ( nor I have the money to make for myself a big enough testing architecture on which make some experiments).

Considering all that, is the best solution to try to just get a job as dev and then work from the inside to move on the Sys Admin role? Are there specific types of companies that I should look for (I don't know, maybe in consulting firms it is more common to have a team mentoring new sys admins considering the big amount of work)? Would you suggest some books or screencasts on the matter? Any other suggestion?

I am a Sysadmin. The only advice I can think of is this:

Just build stuff.

Make use of virtualization and just start building systems. There is more then one 'role' a sysadmin will play and in some areas each specialty could be its own job.

i.e. A Windows/Active Directory admin vs an Exchange Admin.

Most good admins will know how to do a bunch of various duties, setup a Samba server; building a ZFS array; install a printer driver; configure a company Wiki and all the maintenance needed to maintain these systems.

And learn how to automate 90% of your tasks.

It's your choice if you want to be picky. If you want to only work on Linux systems, or to be more anal; if you only want to work on Debian servers, don't be surprised if it's harder to get a job. Spread yourself out and learn to be a Jack-of-all-trades. I prefer working with linux, but I jump up and resolve Windows headaches for my co-workers because that annoying 10% of the job makes me more attractive to my boss then the neckbeard who is a distro snob and refuses to touch anything except OpenBSD.

Build systems to do one job. One DHCP server, one DNS server, one file server. Then start combining them and optimizing them. break them and then fix them. There are a million 'gotcha's that only show up when you start working with the systems and you never see in youtube videos.

As far as finding work; either 'exaggerate' about some of your experience while contracting, or start working help-desk and get your foot in the door.

Your resume will get you an interview, your real skills will get you the job.

This might be too broad of a question but could you give some pointers on where to start with automation? Possibly, what tools to look into, what major tasks would be ideal to automate, or what a typical workflow built on automation might look like?

I would start with small shell scripts (or the Windows equivalent).

Do you need to add users and set their initial password often? Note the commands needed, put them in a shell script and create a user with your script next time. Then make your script accept parameters and handle errors.

Automation has two main benefits: Simplifying repetitive tasks and reducing errors - and this can be achieved even with the simplest shell script.

For popular tools, you can take a look and Puppet and/or Chef, tools for provisioning servers and managing configurations.

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