Recently I got a promotion at my job. I was working with another guy in a small company with an even smaller IT department. That guy was fired and I got the position to be the only sysadmin at the moment. I never had any experience working and managing the whole IT infrastructure, because the company has 4 campuses around the city. I'm kinda confused on how to manage everything, my background is with information security and it's going to be a big challenge for me because it's my first job.
Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#2My advice would be prioritisation. In decreasing order:
1. Make sure intruders can't misuse your data/resources.
2. Make sure your data doesn't accidentally go missing or get corrupted.
3. Make sure the the resources are sufficiently set up for other people to get their jobs done.
So, with a security background you have the most important of these already. The next most important is handled with backups. Then the rest is less critical.
Next, you need to decide whether the system as it currently stands is basically working but needs little adjustments, or needs redesigning from scratch. Take a few months of observations before you decide this.
Document the issues that you deal with. Make notes on the nature of the problem, the priority, the expected effort required to deal with it, what happened, how much effort it actually took. An issue tracker is a good way to do this, and I'd recommend using one even if it's a small company.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#3As your first move I'd suggest start pushing managment for a new hire. Four locations and only one person managing them? That doesn't sound feasible in the long run and it's definitely not fair to you.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#4What a great opportunity to learn on the job!
Here are my few tips:
1 - Do not shy away from asking for help
2 - Google everything, and never be satisfied with the first answer you see
3 - Try to automate everything you find yourself doing for the 3rd time in a month.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#5This is not a promotion, this is making you to do something you have no experience with and making you do the job what the fired person done besides yours. Also being responsible for the whole IT infrastructure alone is definitely what I would not do without any experience.
If that’s how the company handles this, I would start to look for a new job immediately.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#6Here's what to do in the first few weeks:
1. Require not 1, but 2 people, for hire, right now. It will take a long time until it gets approved, HR does their thing, and you (or someone else) hire people to help you.
2. Document, as fast as you can, all of the assets in your environment. Don't waste time on looking for software. Plain text or spreadsheet will do for start.
3. Identify the most important assets (servers, network devices, etc) - and try to understand what are your priorities for each. For example, availability for your frontend servers. Confidentiality and integrity for your server storing PII. Based on this, you'll understand what are your biggest risks. Would it be a business disaster if your website is down for few hours? Likely not. What about if the PII is compromised and you get huge fines and be in the news? More likely.
4. Find out who has the access to the most important assets, and cut off anyone who doesn't really need it.
5. Establish some sort of monitoring for the most important assets.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#7Advice I heard from lab manager with 15yrs on job.
1. When everything works everyone is happy and nobody pays you any attention.
2. When something is not working you will get shit from everyone for 'not doing your job'.
You will not be able to completely avoid 2. So your only chance to balance the scales is by showing your hard work when in case 1.
That means auto generating graphs of network resources, disk space, creating trend reports with actionable recommendations to our manager/boss.
This way they have visibility into IT world instead of it being magic that just works. It also involves them when making decisions no matter how small.
This of course is job security measure and you need to do your job first. Goodluck.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#8This is not a promotion, this is making you to do something you have no experience with and making you do the job what the fired person done besides yours. Also being responsible for the whole IT infrastructure alone is definitely what I would not do without any experience. If that’s how the company handles this, I would start to look for a new job immediately.
This is excellent advice right here.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#9This is not a promotion, this is making you to do something you have no experience with and making you do the job what the fired person done besides yours. Also being responsible for the whole IT infrastructure alone is definitely what I would not do without any experience. If that’s how the company handles this, I would start to look for a new job immediately.
While there's certainly something that rings a warning bell here, let me present a counter-opinion: The biggest strides in my career have been the ones where I had to stretch the farthest. It always felt scary as hell, but with a bit of "fake it until you make it", these phases served me as massive boosters for learning, career and personal development. I didn't have too many indications to read if the culture over there is okay, but if it isn't shitty and you manage to get some support and allies higher up, filling the position properly and saving that company's ass might pay off very well for you despite the stress involved. YMMV.
Re: Ask HN: Tips on Sysadmin Job
#10This is not a promotion, this is making you to do something you have no experience with and making you do the job what the fired person done besides yours. Also being responsible for the whole IT infrastructure alone is definitely what I would not do without any experience. If that’s how the company handles this, I would start to look for a new job immediately.
While there's certainly something that rings a warning bell here, let me present a counter-opinion: The biggest strides in my career have been the ones where I had to stretch the farthest. It always felt scary as hell, but with a bit of "fake it until you make it", these phases served me as massive boosters for learning, career and personal development. I didn't have too many indications to read if the culture over t…
The indication of the culture for me is pretty clear from the followings:
- no indication in the post that they going to hire a new person
- If your company IT infra is down, you are probably dead in the water, leaving it to be managed by a single person who does not have any IT infra management experience is a pretty bad business decision
- No indication in the post that the person offered any training or anything
- my experience with 1 person responsible for IT support/management/sysadmin jobs are that they are 24/7, which leads to burnout and mental health issues