How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator? 903
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."
Not to old (Score:2, Informative)
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.
start at the bottom and work your way up (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Education? (Score:5, Informative)
Good luck, and you're never too old!
Becoming a Unix Admin (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Getting Started (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Small business start (Score:2, Informative)
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
Two Relevant Examples (Score:5, Informative)
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!
How Taco became a Unix admin (Score:0, Informative)
Read O'reilly books/learn how to write C or Perl (Score:2, Informative)
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.
I started as a developer... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
It all began on a fall day 7 years ago... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Oh, that's a short story... (Score:5, Informative)
Get in with a fun group and you can do whatever you like as long as you aren't running an MP3 server and sucking up half the bandwidth of the whole campus.
We've got pretty much every OS under the sun running on different test servers.
Just do it (Score:5, Informative)
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.
It's harder now.... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Experience counts - not the age (Score:1, Informative)
In my experience, some of the industries (especially medium sized business with appox 50-100 employees in special sectors like business selling medical care equipment) rely on a program without a proper database, but the software is really the only one they can use because it has all the features they need, e.g. automatically sending bills in the correct format to the health insurance companies etc.
The software companies that produce this software has now after years and years started writing a new version using an SQL server, but no client wants to use it yet because it is too new and they don't want to be the one beta testing it.
But to write technically good programs, you need to have a lot of experience and knowledge. While you can get away with sloppy programs in a lot of cases, in the majority you cannot, especially when programes grow. Writing scalable programs just takes a lot of practice and experience.
And you cannot just learn how to write good programs by going to a school a year or two. You need a lot more than that.
Same is true for would be admins. People come to the company who used to work in a totally different field (ie social studies teacher or something) who was laid off and went to an MCSE course and now thinks they can do everything.
I have seen a couple of these.
Some, who always worked in the past with computers as a hobby and have maybe administered a school network get on OK after a while, but the majority, no. You still have to explain what a subnet is to them, what a default gateway is, and when you see them repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again, and you gently suggest why he's spending so long on the task and doesn't write a script or but when you give them a book, they just don't understand a simple loop or even how to go about explaining a problem to a computer in a step by step way needed for scripting.
This may be contraversial what I am about to say now - there are two kind of people, and you can only be one or the other - and not both.
You are either artistically talented or technically.
The artistically they can draw, write poems, and stuff. Then there are the technically minded. When they write something, they prefer plain prose as they want to get on with things and don't see the point in cryptically expressing things. They can think more logically as they take things as given and do not question them. While the artistic tend to think around a lot of corners and have problems sperating stuff into simple steps.
As far as age goes - it is not really an age thing but of experience and if you can think logically or not.
Having fun. (Score:2, Informative)
Advice:
I can't say it enough to enjoy yourself, if you don't then go back to teaching English.
Regards
My recommendations (Score:2, Informative)
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 [uci.edu].
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.
Re:start at the bottom and work your way up (Score:1, Informative)
It's hard to just jump into network administration with no experience. You have to prove that you truly have a gift. The only way to prove it is by starting off at the bottom and knowing more than your co-workers.
Spencer R.
Play with it. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Oh, that's a short story... (Score:2, Informative)
However, this might change in a few years. If security is made an official topic at such organiziations, you're going to see quite a bit of centraliziation. For example, one of the universities in Southern Germany is converting its entire network to private addresses and installing firewalls all over the campus, to split the internal network. I guess we will see more of such activity soon, and as a computer security guy (working at the local univeristy CERT), I think it's positive. However, if security is tightened, I would probably use my job (student workers are not acceptable in this area, and I tend to agree).
On the other hand, at the average university, there's a considerable amount of bureaucracy, and it's sometimes extremely annoying to cope with it. Monetary compensation is not comparable with industry jobs, either.
Re:Advice (Score:2, Informative)
value of your skills: Many years ago, being extremely computer literate was an unusual skill. Now it is not.
simple economics: How many 18 year olds can they hire for the salary you require >30?
lifestyle: At 18 I was happy to spend my nights and weekends configuring and testing systems. (Good administrators do not take the systems down during business hours.) As I get older, this gets less appealing.
upgrade path: What is the "step-up" from sysadmin? Do you still want to be a sysadmin when you are >50?
the job: Sysadmins are associated with their failures rather than their successes. You may perform the most amazing technical feats, but you only get noticed when something fails.
I understand your interest in the technology; I love it myself. In general I liked my sysadmin jobs, but there are some significant drawbacks to consider.
I personally decided to get out to save my mental health.
Too old my elbow! (Score:2, Informative)
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!
Same as above (Score:2, Informative)
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.
some suggestions (Score:2, Informative)
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.