It's a dirty job, but someone told me I had to do it
--Usenix fridge magnet

Another good book is the Unix System Administration Handbook, which has the nice feature of pointing out specificities of different versions of Unix along with the more general descriptions.

I would like to stress the advice about staying (starting now) up to date on the latest happenings, particularly in security: subscribe at least to BugTraq and to the security mailing lists of the vendors whose OS's you will be administrating, and stay up to date on patches and fixes.

Another useful thing is having a good set of tools at your disposal. For example, for tracking user requests, where I work they use wreq, which works out quite well, although I think they had some trouble setting it up (I'm not the sysadmin here, but I talk to them a lot). There are other similar systems, I'm sure several will come up if you search in Freshmeat.net.

Read The Egoless Admin, a recent piece on Freshmeat with some good pieces of advice. Also read The Bastard Operator From Hell, of course :-)

And remember that no matter what you do, Systems Administration is a thankless job: when everything is working, you are completely transparent (as it should be!). But when things go south, it's all your fault. But it's a job that is its own reward: there's nothing more satisfying that having everything working perfectly, automated, and well-tuned.

Good luck!

--ZZamboni

Abilities needed for a UNIX sysadmin: the command line has to be dear to you. vi, because that's everyone and the other editors aren't. Be able to RTFM. But keep in mind that all soft- and hardware sucks, and all documentation lies. You need to know shell scripting (Bourne shell, because that is everywhere). Knowledge of sed/awk/Perl are definiately pres. You also need a LART, to punish your lusers with. Distrust everyone. They *will* lie to you ("no, I didn't change anything!"). Be prepared to work long and odd hours (the mailserver always goes down at 5 PM on Friday night, or 3 AM Monday morning). Your pager will go off all the time. Forget your social live - you'll see the inside of the server room most of the time you are awake - sometimes even 24 hours a day. Of course, you need to know how UNIX works. People will automatically assume you also know how each application works, even if it's a Windows application! And you'll be the one maintaining the phone system, and repairing the copier machine.

And remember, just because everyone is out there to get you doesn't mean you are paranoid!

-- Abigail

Well, pager (or mobile for that matter) going off all the time, applications crashing at times when normal people don't even think about confusers anymore, and people expecting the IT personnel to know everything about phones and copiers - that sounds very much like my job, and I'm (unfortunately) a windows admin...


But then, every user is potentially (and probably) dangerous. So, be prepared. They will ask you questions when they see you on Sunday morning in town. They will leave their password-protected screensaver on, go for a coffee and expect you to repair their machine in the meantime. And true, you don't learn Unix from books - but they may save your life, so keep them where you can get them quickly.


--cs

> Be prepared to work long and odd hours (the
> mailserver always goes down at 5 PM on Friday
> night, or 3 AM Monday morning). Your pager will
> go off all the time. Forget your social live -
> you'll see the inside of the server room most of
> the time you are awake - sometimes even 24 hours a
> day.

While this is probably the case for many unfortunate sysadmins, I happen to be one of the lucky few with an 8-5 UNIX (well, Linux) sysadmin job. But I suppose what it comes down to is, who you are sysadmining for?

The system I keep up and running is for users who are only in the building between 8 and 5 on the weekdays. Almost none of them ever works late (and no, it's not government work ;-), and weekend work is almost nil. The 2.5 years I've been here, the only weekend I came in to work was for a few hours one Saturday morning for Y2K testing.

Also, we don't host any in-house apps that customers would need to view from the web, we are currently outsourcing that portion of our business. So if that goes down, some unfortunate person at the local ISP will have to handle that work. However, that may not last as our needs for more flexibility grow.

We are also lucky here in that the users don't typically push the limits. On the weekends, people don't want to think about work. So they have no desire to check their email remotely. With that in mind -- if by chance the mail server does go down, our ISP is nice enough to queue all our mail for us until we fix up the server Monday morning. Nobody will miss it while it's down.

Our management is kind enough to respect the difference between work time and personal time. However, I can't say that on some weekends I don't get curious and ssh in to the servers to see what all is going on. If you are looking to save yourself some grief, by all means make sure you set up some tools to monitor the systems, to both watch over your services, and to keep an eye on security. The tools "Big Brother" and "Log Check" are good for that sort of thing.

I have to say though, the thing that really helps keep management off our backs here is the fact that these Linux boxes just never seem to go down. Our DNS servers have uptimes over half a year, and the Linux router we use has over a 400 day uptime. So I tend to sleep very well at night :-)

Does this mean everything is always peachy at where I work? Heavens no. While the boxes stay up, someone has to make sure the services running on them are still working properly. Now, Big Brother helps here, but there's just some things it won't find. We once had an extremely odd issue with one of our DNS servers. The service still allowed you to connect to it, but it was apparently giving back bogus information. Now, I'll tell you, sendmail just didn't like that at all. So instead of quietly accepting that bogus information, or not accepting emails at all, do you know what it decided to do? It decided to take every email that came into our system, and duplicate it hundreds of times. Now, thats all good, but of course this happens on Saturday... and the day after my boss signed up on a high traffic mailing list... and it was one of the weekends where I did NOT happen to check up on things. So, needless to say, it was a messy Monday morning :-)

In any case though, you'll have alot of fun, not much beats a good UNIX/Linux sysadmin job.
-Eric

xoxo,
Andy

%_=split/;/,".;;n;u;e;ot;t;her;c; ".   #   Andy Lester
'Perl ;@; a;a;j;m;er;y;t;p;n;d;s;o;'.  #   http://petdance.com
"hack";print map delete$_{$_},split//,q<   andy@petdance.com   >

To quote the game Paranoia: "Trust no one and keep your laser handy."

Backups will be your nearest and dearest friend. If you are new to this, do backups and make sure your backups are good.

One thing you didn't mention is if you're the sole admin or if you're under someone. Learn from them, but learn from outside as well.

My admin story:
I was hired to take care of a HP-UX system. First week I'm there the medical Lab manager asks me if I would know what could cause all medical systems to be cut off from the HP at 1am every night. If the lab hadn't finished processing by 1am, they would have to start over.
I immediately think that sounds scheduled and notice backups start at 1am. Look in the script and wow, there's a few kills involved.
I move the start time to 3 am after checking some other dependencies. This takes 15 minutes at around 6pm.
I shoot an email to my manager who had gone home at 5pm and talk to the lab manager. She's thankful and when I get in the next morning I find a nice note on my desk from the lab people.
I then get chewed out by my manager. He's really pissed, but I don't get a real reason why. He goes away after I go over what I did showing him why it works. (All of which was in my email)
Later that day I find out he had been telling the lab for the last three months that there was no way to fix it. I had cost him major points. He worked hard to fire me for the next year.
So find out what the environment is like as well as the systems.