4 ms·
Former Big-4 sysadmin here. Most people who become sysadmins are simple the guys and gals who were playing around with from an early age and got good at it. Th
by oz 14y ago
Former Big-4 sysadmin here.
Most people who become sysadmins are simple the guys and gals who were playing around with from an early age and got good at it. This playing around led them to discover things like the concept of services, the registry 'runas' etc on Windows, and grep, init and symlinks on Linux.
This is wholly inefficient.
Tinkering is important, but structure is better. Learn the concepts behind the systems you administer, the correct way to do things, and where everything fits in and how it interacts. That transforms you from a tinkerer to a professional.
The best way to do this? Easy: Find out what the certifications are, and get the certification books. Read the books, but what you're really after is the Table of Contents - that's your syllabus. That will teach what topics are important, and what can be safely ignored.
Armed with that syllabus, you can do research on the 'Net to your hearts content, at your own pace. The beauty of the profession is that with virtual machines, you can learn the vast majority of what you need to on your own.
I've found for Linux, that RedHat / Fedora has very comprehensive documentation, that will teach you alot. There's also a Debian Handbook that I encountered a few months ago. There are a lot of sites dedicated to Windows as well, and Microsoft's own MSDN is quite good.
- antjanus 14y agoThanks, i think this is the best piece of advice I've gotten so far (I went on reddit and Quora before this). I'm currently working with CentOS VPS (I'm only a dev) and refer to the sysadmin a lot. And I actually like messing with, have liked it for a while so I wanted to start learning it but never really found anything as structure as there is for (for example) PHP, and web development in general. I've got a half-price books right next to my house and they actually have a ton of programming books so I'll give that a shot! :) Thanks!
- oz 14y agoHappy to help! One thing that you'll love about VMs is snapshots. The ability to revert to a point in time gives you the ability to mess up without consequences. Take full advantage of this.
- caw 14y agoI agree with oz about the importance of structure and tinkering. VMs are also going to be your bread and butter for learning most things. You can set up clusters very easily with just a couple of VMs. MSDN subscriptions will let you set up test environments for Windows, and as otherwise mentioned, CentOS is free. I believe the best way to learn a concept is to have a running system that breaks. You'll find out a lot of new information by just trying to debug the systems. Bonus points if the computer is physically inaccessible and you manage not to lock yourself out of the box remotely.