No more hiding in the server room

Knowledge Bases

It has been an interesting two weeks for me, and as I reflect on it, it reminds me of a posting that Matt of Standalone SysAdmin had made March 4th.

Gaining knowledge is imperative in our field. That is the best way to stay current. Technology changes so quickly, and we stay knowledgeable, because customers ask us about it. I had a friend suggest that IT workers are like the monks of old, always learning and studying, always on the quest for knowledge.

I share the desire to learn with the tasks of working with equipment, dealing with customers, dealing with vendors, and oh, yeah, taking time for our families too.

No wonder Mountain Dew and coffee are my friends!

I have a broad array of resources that I leverage to keep current: Internet forums, blogs, books, HowTo's, a core set of peers that i bounce ideas and issues to.

What do you do? How do you keep current? Post here and the comments section of Matt's blog.

Comment by Matt Simmons on March 8, 2009 at 12:15am: Hi John,

Thanks for the link! I'm glad you liked the post. It's a fascinating topic for me, and I think about it a lot too. I do like the monk angle. Interesting idea!

I posted an entry last summer about some of the sources of information that I use and would like to use.

To surmise, the most valuable is Google, even though it isn't technically a source, it's more of a resource, but hey, who's complaining. Blogs are the next best source for me, along with forums and mailing lists.

My reliance of documentation varies depending on the problem. There are some problems that I have which I doubt are covered on the standard docs. Of course, I'm sometimes surprised, too.

I'd like to say I'm subscribed to magazines that cover sysadmin subjects, but I don't really know of many, so if anyone can turn me on to one I'd be greatly obliged. The ones I do get are Network World and Storage.

I get a few digest emails, too. Some of the various techtarget.com digests are good, if busy.

I'm really looking forward to hearing what other people do, or even if they don't.

Comment by Bruiniusw on March 11, 2009 at 10:09am: I read a lot of blog's via an online RSS reader, listen to podcasts and vidcasts, and various online documentation sites. I also try to participate in meetings and seminars when they are available to me via usergroups and vendors. Usualy there are at least a few good ones that are either cheap or free to participate. And i do hassle my employer to send me to the bigger ones sometime (VMWorld, Teched etc.).

But there is nothing that beats the good old 'just do it' way, installing new products on a vm (test) server and trying to make it work or break it. For this purpose i have a whitebox server at home (repurposed desktop for cheapness) running VM software.

When faced with a specific problem, i tend to use the vendor knowledge bases first if i know the error code, after that query my list of blogsites and if that fails drop a query in google. Usualy i get at least some if not all the information i need to fix most problems like this. Very rarely issues pop up that have me run to a phone to call the vendor support line, and those are mostly pressured by management ;-)

Knowledge Bases

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