[Gllug] getting into the linux work scene

[Mark Lowes]

On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 23:31, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 22:39, ben f wrote:
> 
> > I use linux at home (yeah, I'm posting from another box now Win2K 
> > via yahoo, but hear me out!). I'm learning C++ and sendmail.
> 
> Sendmail (or another MTA)

At least sendmail, but more importantly an understanding of how mail
works and what can go wrong and why things go wrong.

> is a useful skill for a network admin type> role, C++ is probably not the sort of thing you'd need. Not that I'm
> knocking C++, it's a very nice thing to have, but network admin roles
> are unlikely to ask for it.

C/C++ is a useful skill but not one I'd employ on, from experience those
with good programming skills who are coming into network/system admin
tend to drift back to wanting to do their own hours and spend all their
time programming.  A more useful set of skills is good shell skills with
perl (or other similar powerful scripting language) in the toolbox as
well.

[...]
> > I want to focus my time as best I can. What I want to know is: if
> > you were hiring for a junior network admin, what do I need to add
> > to my skillset to make you sit up and take notice?

Clue, the ability to quickly find out knowledge to resolve a problem if
you don't know it already.  Routing, LAN and WAN stuff, telco
experience, how to shout at Telco's effectively for fun and profit, how
to shout at ISPs (or transit providers etc etc) effectively to get
things upstream fixed fast, DNS etc etc etc

Tell me, how quickly can you read and understand an RFC? :)

[....]
> Hardware & software familiarity, Samba is very useful when
> you have to interoperate with Windows, which most net admin roles will -
> there are relatively few shops with no Windows machines at all. LDAP
> woulnd't hurt either.

NFS, RAID (hardware and software), apache, SQL, *ftpd

> You should remember however, that a lot of these things you aren't going
> to pick up easily, except by using them in a real live environment. It's
> often easy to run something on a single user box, but very different to
> make it into a reliable service that real users can depend on.

Not only that the change from 'oops I broke my home box with a really
stupid mistake which is going to take all of today to fix' to 'Oh fuck
I've just shafted a core server which the whole company depends on and
...ohshitohshitohshit' is interesting.

> > I've thought about getting involved in linux community projects. 
> > Naturally I intend to go to llug meetings to learn more too. Are there
> > any exams I can pass? I use slackware at home so I wouldn't want to
> > do the Red Hat exam unless I had to (don't want to tie myself in to
> > a distro) but this might not be realistic? 
> 
> People who know what they're talking about tend to look for experience
> rather than certifications; for the people who don't, any set of letters
> will do. The RHCE is actually, from what I've heard, mostly vendor
> neutral.

The office uses Redhat historically, though Mandrake is making a bid for
control, I personally use Debian but I started on Slackware.

Get experience with all, and if you can go play with other *nix variants
(*BSD etc etc).

    Mark

-- 
The Flying Hamster <hamster at korenwolf.net>     
http://www.korenwolf.net/
"Are you American?"                             - Kids in the Hall
"No, I'm Canadian.  It's like American, but without the gun."

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug