No more hiding in the server room

Becoming Systems Administrator instantly

There is a question on server fault today:
http://serverfault.com/questions/119706/picking-up-the-pieces-after...

The guy is a coder with some linux / server knowledge the previous SysAdmin has left and he is now definitely IT.

I expect most of us have got to be SysAdmins over a period of time, starting with a PC at home, test machines and non critical servers and moving on and on and on picking things up as required or as our curiosity takes us.

Then again, maybe not. I don't know.

How did you get to be a SysAdmin. Was it a steady progression, a chance encounter, or did you just get "promoted" into the role in a day?

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Permalink Reply by Robert Chipperfield on March 10, 2010 at 3:45pm

There's a question! How much do you want to spend? :-)

On the one hand, if you're into electronics, you can build it all yourself from spare parts, which is rather cheap. On the other, if you go insane, you can spend $10,000 on a radio. More sensibly, something like like a Yaesu FT-857 for about $500 second hand which is a really nice starting radio that does everything - HF for round-the-world fun, and VHF for chatting to those more local to you as you drive around.

I'd really recommend finding your local radio club if you're interested - that's definitely where I find most of the fun is. Last year a group of us from Cambridge (the UK flavoured one) went to one of the islands off the coast of Scotland, and had such an awesome time we're going back again this year!

More importantly, I'm sure there'll be some guys at the club who can lend you some kit to get started on, and give you a hand getting into the hobby.

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Permalink Reply by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on March 10, 2010 at 4:02pm

I've got 10 feet of speaker wire and a spare car battery in the garage. What can I do? =) I'll take a look at that camb-hams blog and glean some knowledge from it. I've always wondered about those houses in the various cities I've lived in that had some large array of antennas in their back yard, towering over the neighboring houses.

I suspected attempts at mass mind control. Get the pitchforks and torches!! =)

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Permalink Reply by Robert Chipperfield on March 10, 2010 at 4:04pm

Well, that's your aerial and power supply sorted then! Now just for the bit in the middle! We try and keep the mind control bit quiet... ;-)

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Bukenya on March 10, 2010 at 9:51am

i have always been interested in repairing electrical gudgets, so one long holiday after school i got a job in an internet cafe.the systems admin there was kind to show me how things are done (anyway it was also reducing on his workload but i didnt mind because i was getting hands-on free training).After the holiday (about 8 months) i could solve most problems and so he encouraged me to study something in IT.That time i had got a scholarship to study a bachelor of science degree in biology which i accepted but i also decided to study a diploma in IT part time.I finished both the courses and when i graduated i stayed in IT till now.Actually i started an IT company which am now personally running.

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Permalink Reply by Robert Chipperfield on March 10, 2010 at 10:05am

Wow, awesome thread :-)

My first encounters in IT were about age 7, with an Acorn BBC Micro - Dad worked for the BBC at the time, so it was the obvious choice. My first foray into code was to try and "hack" a program my brother had written to find his password - only later to discover he was watching me do it from upstairs over an RS423 link.

From there, I eventually moved into PC land with an 8086 Toshiba "laptop", then a rather giant step up to a Pentium 120. The first PC I owned myself was a Pentium 133, which I built on my 12th birthday. No CD-ROM drive, so I had to zip the Windows 95 CD on to about 30 floppy disks.

The next challenge was to try and network them, and I spent many hours on this, mainly trying to get $1 network cards from computer fairs and radio rallies working, with no drivers, and no real idea what I was doing. Eventually I spent about $15 on my first brand new PCI network card, learnt something about how IP worked, and eventually managed it - using speaker cable and TV coax from my bedroom to the dining room.

Fast forward a year or two, and the IT Technician at school let a couple of us play with some old network servers that had been decommissioned, and suggested we install Linux on them. A few weeks later, a friend and I had it up and running, including a Squid proxy server. This got pressed into service trying to lighten the load on the single 64kbps ISDN connection we had to the Internet at the time, and so started my interest in Linux and network admin.

A degree in Computer Science later, and I'm now a software engineer by job title, but working with MS Exchange, we have to deal with our fair share of network and Active Directory issues as part of testing, as well as managing a few Linux boxes hosting VMWare Server.

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Permalink Reply by milt mallory on March 10, 2010 at 5:45pm

I've always fixed things since early grade school. Cars, radios, whatever. Then marine hardware systems in the Coast Guard. After the military it was printing presses, then Xerox copiers. I'd taken a correspondence course in digital electronics in the early 70s, so I was invited to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) about 1974 because I could fix a copier (now a printer with an on-board laser (penguins/puffins)) hooked to a computer and also fix the computer. The computer was the Xerox Alto.

After a misfire making the PARC ideas into a product (internally called dandelion), I went to Sun with many of the Engineers leaving Xerox and became a Unix SA. I got to know Bill Joy and drove his Ferrari once. Been doing the same sort of thing ever since. And I still have a Dandelion, but I donated my Alto to the Digibarn.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Holloway on March 18, 2010 at 10:41pm

It appears this thread is coming to a close, so time for one more story.

I was a "user" of a company IT system. I was interested in what it was all about, how it worked, why the data was collected and what it was used for. I got into writing up training manuals and when a job came up in Systems Support I got it despite not having any IT experience apart form some programming I did on a BBC Basic way back when.

I then became the DBA which seemed fairly logical to maintain the database that made up most of the application, before becoming the UNIX Administrator for the servers running the database.

I was introduced to Linux around 2003 and suddenly I had a real server in my home and access to tonnes of software at no cost. I spent my spare time learning Linux and services as well as PHP programming.

Meanwhile at work I was "promoted" to Project Manager to oversee IT Projects and lost touch with the technical side of things. With the outsourcing of the Web Team I realised that I would not be able to learn much more and decided to move jobs.

I moved to a small ISP, and from working in IT as one of about 30 staff to becoming the whole IT department, was and is a great learning experience.

I still get a buzz out of what I do.

What occurs to me is that many of us have drifted into being a SysAdmin because we have a character that likes to fix (or maybe break) things and pull stuff apart to see how it works.

I like reading these stories and I feel I know you all a little better now.

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Permalink Reply by Paul on March 19, 2010 at 10:48pm

I don't think I've ever met a sysadmin who got into the role by design.

I've always wanted to work with computers, but didn't have a huge interest in programming. I figured I'd learn the ropes at Uni, though, and see what happened. Except I didn't get to Uni. I got the grades and everything necessary but the summer before I was due to go I realised something. I HATE exams. I really hate having to take them. I was 18 and utterly tired of the education system.
I also realised that I could spend 3 years studying, racking up debt and come out not able to get a job earning more money than I was capable of without it.

My parents have always been great supporters and came up with the suggestion of writing to companies with jobs going and seeing if any would fancy someone interning with them for the summer so I could make sure it was definitely what I wanted to do instead of going to uni.

One did, and that internship became a full time job within a week, just doing basic tech support but critically introducing me to Unix (SCO-UNIX to be precise).
From there I moved on to desktop support in a large environment, around four hundred workstations and a dozen servers. I eventually twigged that whilst I didn't have a degree, some form of pro-qualification would help my career no end. I already disliked Windows, and had the opportunity presented to me to do CCNA, which I jumped at and passed.

From there bounced on to working in a NOC environment for a major UK ISP/Hosting company. That was where I got serious about Linux. I'd been using it for various bits at the previous job but nothing particularly major. In the NOC I had the opportunity to focus on it, and I did. I avoided Windows Server related tickets like the plague, and picked up any Linux ticket I productively could. Within a year I moved into the sysadmin department and haven't looked back since. I'm grateful to the two managers involved, the NOC manager and the Sysadmin manager who both took a gamble on me, which ultimately paid off. I don't know whether they saw anything in me, or were desperate, but without the pair of them taking chances that I would get up to speed and be valuable members of their departments, I wouldn't be where I am today.

I still hate programming, though as a sysadmin I'm rather fond of perl and bash scripting. "Do it twice, script it once" is my motto.

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Permalink Reply by Shane Corellian on March 25, 2010 at 9:53pm

I was just kind of put in that roll. I was the personal assistant to the chief engineer of a television station and as he had been, theretofore, the technical person he finally got fed up and made his lowly 23 year old assistant the tech guy. He gave me a huge budget to buy books (which I did). I spent hours reading and trying to figure all the technical crap out. I built a NetWare 2.1.2 server and networked 8 computers.

I was hooked. I jumped on the NT bandwagon with 3.51. That's all it took. I started in 1995 and haven't looked back.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Butterworth on March 30, 2010 at 2:50pm

ZX-81 -> Dragon 32 & ZX Spectrum -> Atari 800XL (really) -> Atari ST -> CS Degree -> Programming Job -> QA/Customer Support Role -> IT (after my company misled me about the possibility of moving to Boston to work in the QA department there and said I could chose another job!)

Growing up when IT was 'new' in schools, combined with an interest in it (IT), made it an easy academic path. Full time coding was a bit reclusive for me (or was it too hard?), though, so moving eventually to being an IT tech, then an IT manager (still with a lot of tech) was a natural direction, it seems.

Seem to be a part time diplomat these days, but I guess c'est la vie.