As a System Adminstrator, what kind of tasks do you complete on a regular basis?

Hello Nick,

Hope this message finds you well, as SysAdmin one of my first duties was to make sure that everything was under control at the moment my shift ended and that everything worked fine until next shift started, most of time administrating Linux CentOS & Red Hat, creating webserver, HA cluster, backup servers (Bacula), DNS, Proxy, Firewalls, all of these Linux based, did not know the power of Open source until I tried it, and was at that specific moment that I started to feel the power of these utilities at a enterprise level,

Not only Linux I work with daily, Virtualization is very important for you to start practicing, technology is moving so fast that in a couple of month will have a little box (as Raspberry pi) powering thousands of server around the world, try some VMware and Linux KVM.

I am currently working as a Storage Engineer and it has given me the chance to learn not only from the logical perspective but also physical too I am still amazed of how you can learn every single day, what's important is to continue to learn, always pointing to what you love the most .

keep practicing with that Pi, I'll do the same with my, some FreeNAS, Router, Firewall project you may try on it,

Best of luck y by any chance you need any advise or if there is anything else you'd like to know, do not hesitate in contacting me,

Regards,

Jorluis

Hi Nick,

A System Administrator's job can be very varied as mentioned before depending on the company that you are working with. I have worked on a team where our focus was only on one type of server hardware (IBM P Series) and OS (AIX) and we did hardware installs, OS installs and configuration, OS patching and customer support for the systems. I have also worked in environments where we had different environments made up of different kinds of server hardware from different vendors (HP, Dell, Oracle, and Cisco) using different OSes (Linux, Windows, Solaris). There were also storage components of these environments once again using storage from different vendors and virtualization components involving the use of VMware. With these kinds of diverse environments, a day could be made up of any combination of tasks including, physically installing servers, installing and configuring the OS on servers, creating a virtual environment, building VMs in the virtual environment, adding and provisioning storage, attending to issues on servers (break/fix), helping customers who are having issues getting on the servers, creating design documents for new builds and installations, just to mention a few.
It's a job that is never boring...there's always things to do and it can be very challenging too. There are also always new things to learn as technology changes. Personally I love being a Sys Admin :)

Hey Nick,

It's great that you're digging into different things and finding what you like to do! Like previous posts, it really does depend upon the company, its size, assets, the business it's in (or businesses); the various support groups and their role in supporting the business. For example, some of the larger companies will have groups of sysadmins performing various functions.. i.e., storage, server builds (OS), architecture, infrastructure, patching, operations support, and OS specific sysadmin support teams. Working as a sysadmin in a large company typically has more opportunities to be exposed to the many types of hardware, software, and access to other experienced sysadmins. Whereas in a smaller company, as a sysadmin, you may be performing 2 or more of those support roles in a smaller environment. I know people who work in both small and large companies and they all really like what they're doing.

Personally, I have the pleasure of being in a unique setting where my group supports tens of thousands of servers, all operating systems, many types of server hardware and virtualization systems. One thing I do is working remotely with field engineers at various locations while they perform hardware repairs or upgrades. When things don't go quite right, I will work with the vendor's backline (experts) engineers to get the hardware and software back online and ready for use. Learning various operating systems such as Oracle (Solaris), HPux, AIX, Linux, Windows Server is a must for what I do. Becoming more familiar with Unix in general is always a good idea. It's also important to familiarize yourself with virtaulization as many of the operating systems and hardware makers have their own VM versions or the ability to use other VM software on their hardware.

So you can see there Nick, in my short example, there's many, many opportunities and levels of system administration support, not only for the people or businesses who use the systems, also the people who make the hardware, software, and their supporting teams.

100% agree... never boring and whether it's old or new technology, there is always something to learn from it!

Best of Luck,
Steve

The job is going to vary greatly depending on the company. The essential duty they all have is that they support the systems running in the corporation. A good way to familiarize yourself with some would be to review the job boards. Here's a link to a site with job listings: http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobs-systems-administrator