Sysadmin Mega Thread

I jumped right into a Linux Sysadmin role by spending a year or so playing and studying Linux things. It also might depend on what you’re interested in and what you have around you to play with. I also got quite lucky to be honest.

I did two and half years at a help desk.

The technical skills have very little overlap. For example, there’s a big difference with helping people build lookup tables in Excel and having to understand DNS.

The help desk was helpful because if you’re a really good tech you’re going to have some ideas of the technical components of how things. More than just click these buttons and things work. You’ll understand what those buttons do. However, you learn how to explain technical things in ways that end lusers can digest and carry out on their own. That can help you prepare for management.

With that said, don’t take a sysadmin role lightly. There are excellent syadmins out there. These people are very knowledgeable and skilled in operating systems, databases, networking, security, programming, and general troubleshooting/operations. Truth be told, a good sysadmin is usually the best overall technical person in an organization because they can be put onto any team or problem and add value. You want to become one of these sysadmins.

They can typically identify the problem and find the right person to get it to, or fix it on their own. Also, they’re great on teams because they know so much about all of the above things and can have competent discussion and help design architecture. In other words, their opinion on a wide range of topics is highly valued.

Just keep in mind - typically these folks are not paid their actual value. So you better like being a sysadmin or figure out how to get into a specialty, like cloud admin or something. The trade off is that you may only be a cloud admin at that point.

For me, it has been very challenging to get to where I am now. Depending on how good you are, people will start to bring you the hard problems. If you want to be great take them on. If you want to live easy-mode, pass the buck.

Good luck!

cotton

1 Like

I never did helpdesk. I have seen a few people transition from PC Support roles to sysadmin, but they’re a small minority.

I did several contract jobs before getting a full-time gig, so I had some work experience on my resume. It is very difficult to get started. There aren’t many “Junior” Systems Admin jobs around, lots of people are trying to get them, and they pay poorly. Almost no companies want to spend time training an entry-level person, they’re all going after those who got at least a couple years of experience elsewhere and proved good enough.

Once you’ve got the job title on your resume, it gets easier and more opportunities open up, but it’s still never as easy to find a new role as it is for unskilled, minimum-wage, general laborers. When you specialize, you greatly limit your options.


image
with our favorite
image
2 Likes


About to have Trigger warning cuz ECC statement might trigger the weak

1 Like

This is pretty basic info, but will be good to reference if it goes on youtube or something. Nice to see the current officially recommended HBAs though.

Yeah this will be available on demand later not sure what platforms tho

image

1 Like

I wonder how many times he has regurgitated this information.

1000x times probably, he pretty much lives ZFS

You watching live? @oO.o

1 Like

Yeah, have it on in the background. No new info for me yet, but always nice to have a refresh.

1 Like

yeah i dont do more then 1 jbod and dont have any rear slots, but pretty obvious if you think about it.

1 Like

Well pretty basic tier, but still fun to listen to Allan talk

1 Like

is the talk over?

I just avoid having huge monolithic pools.

yeah just ended

damn.

We had our standup during this time.

Thinking about getting 128gb Optane for L2ARC, and using my 2x 16gb Optanes for SLOG, probably have like 64gb out of my 128gb(RAM) in spare for my box once i finally get it done (just waiting on time now, got last parts yesterday)

(Could probably just go with my spare 850 pro Sata SSD)

I was thinking about getting some small SSD’s for a SLOG to improve NFS performance.

Anything you’d reccomend?

the 16gb optane drives are dirt cheap atm

IIRC slog only matters on synchronous datasets…

1 Like