FWIW, I'm part of an 'online hackerspace' 'hashbang.sh' where we try and teach people to be better sysadmins.
Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
101–110 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely agree. Sysadmins' interface with code is basically to be a compliance-checker. Software, be it from in-house developers or a third party solution need to meet that compliance bar, or it doesn't go to production. If your in-house developers are unable to meet those compliance requirements, that's a them issue and not a you issue. It's good for devs to know some ops, and ops to know some dev from a familiari…
Continuous Delivery is going to eliminate that from the equation. The software developer will write software and tests and if they pass the tests throughout the pipeline then it will ship to production automatically and potentially multiple times per day. Much faster than the heavy ITIL based change control process that requires you to be inserted in the middle of it will manage. The companies that do this will have…
The amount of examples I have in my daily job demonstrate that no, the concept that developers won't have any need for IT staff is a day that is never going to come. And while I make a point to have a relatively varied skill set, the truth is, trying to be both a developer and an admin is going to just mean you suck at both jobs.
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a sysadmin for 16 years, I have worked in big and small companies and I don't agree with a great part of this post. I'm not a developer, I have never needed to disassemble or fix programs built by others, never needed to understand kernel subsystems or anything else kernel related (except may be how to replace a broken driver/module). I know nothing of C, I know just the basics of system calls and I've never hear…
You are literally the problem with system administration. The attitude that you don't need to know how to program or understand the architecture of the systems that you run on is a highly privileged attitude that you are practitioner who can remain ignorant of their tools. The good news is that kids these days are being raised on SREs and there's a billion people in India who will take your job and won't have an atti…
> You are literally the problem with system administration.
No personal attacks on HN, please.
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#104There's a lot of good information in this thread, but I can add this: join a SA organization and/or special interest group: Usenix, https://www.usenix.org/ LOPSA, https://www.lopsa.org/ Then read the journals, even the articles that don't interest you now, and follow the email lists.
I'd like to add that LOPSA also has a mentorship program, free for all members.
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#105Lots of good advice about concrete skills mentioned here already - eg scripting, monitoring, documenting, low level OS knowledge etc.
I reckon a good sysadmin also has a hint of nagging paranoia or slight sense of impending doom and is never complacent about how well things are currently running or how secure they seem.
On top of this they need a good instinct for anticipating problems and evaluating risks so they can proactively fix problems before they arise.
Oh yeah - learn how DNS really works.
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a sysadmin for 16 years, I have worked in big and small companies and I don't agree with a great part of this post. I'm not a developer, I have never needed to disassemble or fix programs built by others, never needed to understand kernel subsystems or anything else kernel related (except may be how to replace a broken driver/module). I know nothing of C, I know just the basics of system calls and I've never hear…
You are literally the problem with system administration. The attitude that you don't need to know how to program or understand the architecture of the systems that you run on is a highly privileged attitude that you are practitioner who can remain ignorant of their tools. The good news is that kids these days are being raised on SREs and there's a billion people in India who will take your job and won't have an atti…
Your post seems to boil down to a logical conclusion that everyone better be a software developer, as if there is no value in abstracting to a layer where things aren't pieced together with compiled software. Feels rather myopic to me. There will always be work to do at every layer
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#107You have to be organized and thorough. You are going to do a lot of stuff no one appreciates or cares about unless you don't do it. (such as backups)
Organized and thorough and don't forget backups. You can never have too many backups.
cd /bin and cd /sbin and cd /usr/sbin. Do you know what every command in those directories do? No? Learn them. On some systems /sbin and /usr/sbin have different files in them. Why? Try to figure that out on your own.
cd $MANPATH, do you see more man pages that you didn't know existed? Read them.
Signs of a poor administrator: System clocks are all different; not sure if the backups work; don't know who every one who has an account on the system is; don't know what the system does; system way out of date on patches; large garbage files floating around; inconsistent and incomplete monitoring; don't know where the server is; etc...
You don't have to be a top notched system ENGINEER to be a good system ADMINISTRATOR. It helps (a lot), but I think attention to detail, thoroughness, and organization are core skills. Also, you are the interface between the machine and the human world. You. Be prepared to deal with people. Developers can get away with living with their heads buried in code. A System Administrator cannot. 90% of the problems a System Administrator faces in their job is not the technology, but the people trying to use it and manage it and mess with it and own it.
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#108Maybe my advises are more abstract than what you are hoping for, but this is what I learnt after 15 years being a sysadmin.
- The good sysadmin is not the one who makes difficult things, is the one who makes the things easy. If one you find yourself wanting to recompile a Linux Kernel, probably you are taking a really bad approach for the problem.
- Document, document, document. Think about the bus factor. If a junior sysadmin is able to rebuild and manage your infrastructure using your documentation, you are doing the things in the right way.
- Never make an step forward without a backup plan. If you are going to make changes in the production servers, always have a plan B in case something goes wrong. Doing an `apt-get update` and hope that everything will be ok, is not a good policy.
- Always remember that your job is to serve the other departments, so they can do awesome things. If too many people in the company knows your name, you are doing something wrong.
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#109I would recommend following Hackr's System Administration section. It's been my starting point for most sysadmin learning I have had so far (even though I am a software developer) - http://hackr.io/tutorials/system-administration
Re: Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?
#110A lot of comments here already address how to get into the learning side, and the theoretical side.
If you also want to get your hand dirty and learn some more that way (eg: experience), get some VPS with BSD (my preference is OpenBSD) or some really bare linux distro and set up your own email server (eg: OpenSMTPd), IM server, etc there. You'll learn plenty on the way: about servers themselves, how emailing works, management, etc, etc.
I learnt huge amounts doing this years ago, and have an extremely detailed understanding of how email, anti-spam, validation, etc work.
Don't do this "instead of" grabbing books though, do it "on top of", especially if you want to make a career out of it in future.