[lug] System Administration - First Dive ?

[David "Barahon" Willson]

How'd you get the name?

Sent via David's Droid X.

-----Original message-----
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com>
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Sent: Thu, Apr 21, 2011 11:52:27 GMT+00:00
Subject: Re: [lug] System Administration - First Dive?

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On 04/20/2011 07:15 AM, Rob Nagler wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Erik Lenderman wrote:
>> What kind of obstacles should I expect from employers seeking 5+ years of
>> experience?
> 
> Kill two birds with one stone: become a Linux sysadmin consultant.


While there's truth in that statement, one thing to consider is that going
into the solo consulting is probably as much about running a business as it
is about doing the work itself.  If you really want to learn sysadmin,
learning about accounting, tax reporting, marketing, management may or may
not be what you want to spend time on...

I say this because I see people wanting to go out on their own because they
want to work with this or that technology.  But I never hear people saying
they want to go out on their own because they want to learn how to drive an
accounting system, they love making invoices and tracking down non-paying
clients, they want to do more cold calls...

I started tummy.com (we do Linux sys admin consulting), after having around
a decade of system administration experience.  Learning sys admin *AND*
business at the same time sounds likely to fail, but you *WILL* gain
experience from it no matter which way it goes.  :-)

So, back to the question at hand: What obstacles should you expect from
employers seeking 5+ years of experience?  Easy: Not having 5 years of
experience is likely to be an obstacle.  :-)

I started doing sys admin by asking a friend of mine, who had given me an
account, if there was anything I could do to help.  Then I got my own
system and started administering that.  Most of my work at that time was
doing programming, but I always made myself available for doing any sys
admin work that was available.  Often in development environments there is
sys admin that can be done.

I was then able to roll that into a job doing sys admin full time, partly
through luck.  I had worked a summer job after high school doing some
programming at the Unix Development Lab at one of the vendors.  I was
contacted by a contracting shop about a sys admin job, and the interview
was basically "So you worked at the UDL?  When can you start?"

So, that's the story about how I got started in sys admin.  Mostly: A whole
lot of experimenting with the computers.

Sean
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