So I asked this question on a separate forum and got ZERO response from anyone. This is something I want to lean so I can expand my mind and tackle bigger jobs for my business that I work for. But here is my question. Also if this should be posted somewhere else, let me know and I'll move it or something else can.
Hey all, I am starting to get more in depth into the computer game and want to expand my knowledge of servers, Active file Directory, and just servers in general. Sadly, where I work I am underpaid for what I do an cannot afford the books in order to read up on this stuff. So I come to this great community to see if I can gain some knowledge of servers so I can further myself where I work and get paid better. Currently only making $75 to $100 USD a week doing computer and phone repair where I work. So thus is why I come here asking for help, plus I feel this community will be better and guiding me to what I need and want to know. Thanks for everyone who chimes in on this.
I think its good you want to expand your horizons, there is only one issue.....be prepared to get frustrated, alot lol. Servers are a pain in the ass....period. When they work they are magical things, but when they don't you will want to beat them with hammers.
The first piece of advice I can give you is to learn networking first.
This is very important.
Servers are designed to do whimsical things for networked computers. If you don't know how to network, its going to end your quest very quickly.
There are plenty of tutorials on you tube and around the internet for learning the basics of server os's and the basic functions of servers. Unfortunately I don't think you will find a lot of folks even here that have the time to start teaching you everything you need to know about servers. Not to mention as you research you will learn at your own pace.
One final though.......
If you want to get into this as a career, you need to make sure you really have a good grasp of things before you start actually doing it in the field. If you start taking on clients or businesses looking for server related work and you don't know what your getting into, you can cause a lot of damage.
Well I did do an entire christian school in a local town near where I work. The worst thing about that experience was, you could not explain to them that Windows XP Pro was severely outdated. Plus they were a non-profit school so they really didn't have any money to put toward upgrading all of there systems. They were using computers with 1Gb of RAM and some even have 256MB of RAM. They were running two servers, one based on PIII's that was a 1U server, then they had a Dell Server running Xeon's. Neither had great instructions on what either did, but I basically flew in blind and got it 95% working. They were still having issues with passwords expiring, even though I set them to never do that. But after that experience, I wanted to learn more so the next time I go out in the field to do some kind of networking I can do it fast and efficient.