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Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?

#121

Post by davidgerard »

protomyth wrote: post #30

Start with two mantras: 1. I will know exactly what every command or script I run on a system I control is supposed to do - no exceptions. If I don't and are just following instructions, I really need to learn what it means and why. If you need to setup a test system and snapshot before and after to see how things work. 2. I will document a lot. Imagine some poor person showing up after you have won the lottery (thin…

"why" is the most important information ever.

I've been in my present position five years. Knowing where the bodies are buried (because I buried half of them) turns out to be one of my most useful functions, and whenever I am asked such a question I add the answer to the internal wiki ...

Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?

#122

Post by davidgerard »

mtalantikite wrote: post #42

Sysadmin is (unfortunately) a role that is on the decline, so from a pure employability perspective I'd suggest you focus more on the dev side. As for the skills, I'd suggest running a Linux distro as your personal, everyday machine, not just a server you log into on AWS or DO every so often to configure (which, also -- don't do that. You don't want snowflakes in your environment). It'll force you to learn a lot abou…

The job title might change (and has changed).

I flatly do not believe the job will disappear until humans stop building technologies, and fucking them up. So, not any time soon.

Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?

#123

Post by davidgerard »

mtalantikite wrote: post #88
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you say that the need for Sysadmins is on the decline? If anything, I should think it would be greater than ever. I'm very curious here.

It's not that sysadmins are going to disappear, it's just that with IaaS and the automation tooling that's been developed in the past decade teams don't need to be nearly as large. The role has also changed. A few people can manage a deployment of a thousand server instances now fairly easily (I've been on teams like that). A decade ago you'd be renting colo space, racking/stacking yourself, managing your networks, s…

> It's not that sysadmins are going to disappear, it's just that with IaaS and the automation tooling that's been developed in the past decade teams don't need to be nearly as large. The role has also changed.

The sysadmin's role is to automate themselves out of a job: you should not need to do anything twice.

For some reason, the job never disappears and new stuff keeps coming along.

(I do know one guy who successfully automated most of this job. He got bored and got a new job.)

Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?

#124

Post by davidgerard »

pjungwir wrote: post #92

If you want to learn to "think like a sysadmin", the book Time Management for System Administrators by Limoncelli is short, funny, and excellent---and covers far more than just time management. That will give you some sense of what to care about and why. It's very useful even as a dev or devops person. If you are really serious about being a professional sysadmin, Limoncelli's other book is considered outstanding---b…

> Time Management for System Administrators by Limoncelli

YES. Best comment here.

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