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You now have a shitty job! I enjoy sysadmin, partly because of the variety of problems you are called-on to solve. But the fact is, if you do the job well, and

You now have a shitty job! I enjoy sysadmin, partly because of the variety of problems you are called-on to solve. But the fact is, if you do the job well, and everything works well, nobody gives you any credit. When things go wrong everybody will be looking at you, and if you haven't fixed it within 20 minutes, then you must be incompetent. So you're the only sysadmin in a multi-campus company? As someone noted up-thread, you can't do it alone. At least, you need someone on each site that can act as remote hands for you, even if that's not their main job. And you need people to delegate grunt work to - repetitive stuff, like building workstations for new hires. That's IT, but it's not sysadmin. Get some interesting hardware to take home and play with. Stuff like smart switches and firewall boxes (the same gear your employer uses). GNU/Linux has much better networking tools than Windows; if you're in a Windows shop, get a laptop with Linux on it. Whenever you do a manual job you've never done before, let part of the job be automating it, so you never have to do it by hand again. Let the automation scripts be the documentation. Learn to be pessimistic (a common sysadmin trait). If you have bad news, don't ever sugar-coat it. Things might not be as bad as you thought, in which case your reputation is improved. But what people don't want to hear is that the job takes two hours; and then find after two hours that it's a two-day job. If you can get yourself a full-time assistant/colleague, work as a pair when you can. It reduces stress a lot if you have someone checking your work as you do it (and your decisions). And you end up with two people knowing the systems, not just one. Get a hardback A4 notebook, and record everything you do. In theory, you have a lot of power (c.f. BOFH). http://bofharchive.com/ http://bofharchive.com/ You know stuff others don't, and you have superuser powers everywhere. Don't abuse it. Be as helpful as you can. People will be nice to you if they know they might need your help one day. The BOFH was a tyrant, and I don't think he'd get far in a modern business (the BOFH worked in a university IT department, and was God; a sysadmin in a modern business can't behave like the BOFH).*

DnDGrognard 5y ago
Re Laptop make sure you have one that has a serial port and all the custom cables to plug into the switches / routers etc. (possibly having a second laptop for redundancy) And seconding the physical logbook.
- what_is_orcas 5y ago
  Why the physical logbook?
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    The reason I used a physical logbook is that if you use software, you have to have the software and the logfile on-hand all the time. You can keep them both on a stick, of course; but you still need the right OS/FS drivers etc. Also, your screen and keyboard may be connected to a machine that's crashed, or being repaired. And it's easier to scribble a line in a physical logbook than to crank-up some editor, open the logfile, append an entry, save the file etc. If you're going to log absolutely everything, then adding an entry needs to be as easy as signing your name. You could rely on your laptop; but laptops break and crash. a physical notebook is crashproof, drop-proof, and can even survive being dropped in a puddle. And short of pencils and erasers, it's intrinsically an append-only medium (except that you can still annotate old entries). Maybe an electronic logbook works for you; I found that my logs were more comprehensive and generally easier to use if I kept them on paper. I got through about two notebooks a year; I used a stack of old ones to elevate my monitor (phone directories are hard to come by these days).
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      A physical logbook isn't just for sysadmins, by the way; I kept another one for development work, so that at the morning SCRUM I knew what I had been doing the previous day. That started when I got dinged once, for not being able to tell the SCRUM what I had done yesterday. The benefit is the same; it doesn't compete with your work for access to the screen and keyboard, and you can have it open all day. Also, opening a big notebook before describing your activities confers an aura of reliability on you; there's a reason why policemen whip out notebooks when testifying in court.
    - what_is_orcas 5y ago
      Hey thanks for the explanation. That makes a ton of sense.

DnDGrognard 5y ago

Re Laptop make sure you have one that has a serial port and all the custom cables to plug into the switches / routers etc. (possibly having a second laptop for redundancy) And seconding the physical logbook.

what_is_orcas 5y ago
Why the physical logbook?
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  The reason I used a physical logbook is that if you use software, you have to have the software and the logfile on-hand all the time. You can keep them both on a stick, of course; but you still need the right OS/FS drivers etc. Also, your screen and keyboard may be connected to a machine that's crashed, or being repaired. And it's easier to scribble a line in a physical logbook than to crank-up some editor, open the logfile, append an entry, save the file etc. If you're going to log absolutely everything, then adding an entry needs to be as easy as signing your name. You could rely on your laptop; but laptops break and crash. a physical notebook is crashproof, drop-proof, and can even survive being dropped in a puddle. And short of pencils and erasers, it's intrinsically an append-only medium (except that you can still annotate old entries). Maybe an electronic logbook works for you; I found that my logs were more comprehensive and generally easier to use if I kept them on paper. I got through about two notebooks a year; I used a stack of old ones to elevate my monitor (phone directories are hard to come by these days).
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    A physical logbook isn't just for sysadmins, by the way; I kept another one for development work, so that at the morning SCRUM I knew what I had been doing the previous day. That started when I got dinged once, for not being able to tell the SCRUM what I had done yesterday. The benefit is the same; it doesn't compete with your work for access to the screen and keyboard, and you can have it open all day. Also, opening a big notebook before describing your activities confers an aura of reliability on you; there's a reason why policemen whip out notebooks when testifying in court.
  - what_is_orcas 5y ago
    Hey thanks for the explanation. That makes a ton of sense.