Any UNIX SA's?

skiba

skiba

skiba

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Always wondered if there are any sysadmins in here, I know there are a lot of people that tinker around with desktops and making peripherals work etc but is there anyone that does it for a living or uses anything on an Enterprise basis/bleeding edge stuff?
 
I am and from what I have read there are quite a few people who post in this forum who are too.

You will find that enterprises don't really use bleeding edge 'stuff' anyway and generally prefer to use slightly older, more stable and tested software. For instance you'll have a hard time finding any enterprise using Fedora for it's core servers than say RHEL (example used due to Red Hat support contracts, not necessarily the best choice of distribution).
 
Yes sorry, bad choice of phrase, I guess I meant in the H/W space for the latest stuff. We are running a mix of RHEL 3, 4 and 5 across about 10k+ boxes, a small amount running the MRG kernel and then another few thousand Sol 8 and 10, would be interesting to discuss the kind of challenges we face in a forum like this if there are people in similar situations/environments.
 
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As a company we have about 12k unix machines deployed, RHEL5 for most recent things, Solaris for a few specific bits and remnants of old debian based systems kicking around. I don't get directly involved though, my responsibility is the network.
 
Bit of a hodge podge at our place, mainly HPUX at the high end, RHEL is very popular, followed by Fedora, then Centos. But "I don't do administrating"
 
Up until ~6months ago I was a senior Unix SA here but now I've moved into another role which involves looking at new work coming into the Unix area and checking that it (a) is supportable and (b) follows our standards on how we want systems to be configured. My area also creates said standards by evaluating new technologies which we feel may be of use and creating the necessary standards, reference architectures and implementation guides for them. It's interesting stuff, (and a lot better than dealing with day to day end user issues!).

Currently subject we are looking at include virtualisation and encryption, the latter being part of a general investigation into the requirements for PCI-DSS. We do feel that we are a bit slow at times in picking up new useful technologies which is one of the reasons the new group has been created.

We have all sorts of kit which our Unix teams look after covering; RHEL, SLES, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and even things like Tru64 (ick). Before moving into my current role I was technical lead on a HP-UX estate which covered Blades to Superdomes. Other non-commercial Linux flavour tend to not be used due to the lack of enterprise grade support available for them.
 
I spent a year testing Enterprise storage solutions. One of the test stands I ran had over 60 machines, most posing as 4 machines by having multiple FC I/O cards, some posing as up to 14 machines.

These were varying architectures (mostly system-x and system-p) including Linux (RHEL, SLES and Debian), AIX, Solaris, HP-UX...
 
I suppose technically i'm a UNIX SA, but it's only a small company so we don't have serious kit or many of them, one solaris box, a couple of NetBSD boxes and several CentOS boxes.

My biggest problem is supporting things like NetBSD - not by choice, i would only really choose RHEL/CentOS for a small business (or windows) because of how easy it is to find information on problems.
 
how did you all get into these roles? I'm in IT support in a windows environment at the moment, but would like to venture into *nix support/servers in the future.

I've only been using Linux for just over a year, so i've still got a lot to learn :)
 
I applied for a job as a basic IT Support Technician and when a position opened in the team that deals with the servers (about 1 year after I started work) I applied and got accepted as a trainee. I then went on to get my RHCT and RHCE qualifications during the following year and am now no longer a trainee (pretty much once I passed my RHCE).

I would say that I was lucky as well as trying hard to prove I'm good at what I do.

However I don't think I would have been accepted as a trainee if it wasn't for me dabbling with a private server I bought in the states running FC3 as that was really my first introduction to Linux.
 
I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I left University but had grown up with various computers at home (my Dad was in the industry). When I was looking for jobs I saw an advert for a junior Unix admin in the local paper so I applied for it.

Fortunately the interview went quite well (I did a science, not computing, degree but I had been running Linux at home for years previously) and I got a job as a junior AIX admin.
 
I transferred to unix after doing some windows for a while, technical concepts are the same, its just much easier to fix things (and break them) with *nix. I got sent on some courses, Solaris Admin, VxVM, VCS, read a lot and learned all I could.
 
Quite easily really, i've always had computers as a hobby - right now running a mix of Solaris, Windows 2k3 and CentOS in the rack downstairs ;)

At uni i ran the student radio station which had some a pretty sophisticated setup, but none of that relates to the job i'm actually employed to do - i'm a C++ Developer, but we're a company of 7 people, so i also look after all the IT and since it's a technology company, we've ended up with quite a lot of systems on the go (none of them as sophisticated as i'd like, but thats the way it is)
 
quackers said:
how did you all get into these roles? I'm in IT support in a windows environment at the moment, but would like to venture into *nix support/servers in the future.

I've only been using Linux for just over a year, so i've still got a lot to learn :)
Click to expand...

Applied to big company for Software Engineer position, online tests, assessment centre (confirmatory test, group tasks, interviews), interviews with potential managers, one was the department developing and testing the enterprise storage product, got the job and was placed on the test team.

Staring out small in support to gain experience is not the best way in.

But then I am talking about internship/graduate positions which don't expect to see any experience, and I do have a lot of extra curricular on my CV.
 
I've just got hold of an old dell poweredge server, which I'm planning on installing ubuntu server and having a mess about with. That should broaden my knowledge a little bit more, in terms of numbers what is the most popular distro used on *nix servers? Redhat?
 
quackers said:
I've just got hold of an old dell poweredge server, which I'm planning on installing ubuntu server and having a mess about with. That should broaden my knowledge a little bit more, in terms of numbers what is the most popular distro used on *nix servers? Redhat?
Click to expand...

Red hat probably.
 
In a commercial environment ... probably Red Hat, but proper RHEL not Fedora or any variant based on it. If you want to get experience at home then use CentOS as it's basically RHEL without the Red Hat branding and means you'd easily be able to get updates etc without a support entitlement for the RHN.
 
Thanks for the advices guys, I'll have a go of Centos on my poweredge 1750. Can you use webmin to access it or should I be using something else?
 
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