Careers in System Administration

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Careers in System Administration

• Fran Fabrizio
• UAB Computer and Information Sciences

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Talk Outline

• A Day in the Life
• What is a Sysadmin?
• What does a sysadmin do on a daily basis?
• Other kinds of sysadmins
• Does This Sound Interesting?
• Benefits of Being a Sysadmin
• Compatibility
• Traits of Successful Sysadmins
• Preparing to Be a Sysadmin
• Required Skills
• Ideas for College

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A Day in the Life

• What is a sysadmin?
• What types of things do they do?
• The different types of sysadmins

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What is a Sysadmin?

• Googles answer to definesysadmin
• This is the person or people that takes care of a
  UNIX system This person has full access to all
  system resources.
• Employee responsible for a company's computer
  network, also sometimes called a network
  administrator. A sysadmin's duties may include
  configuring the company's firewall, acquiring and
  installing hardware, setting up email addresses
  and keeping the printers working.
• A job position of engineers involved in computer
  systems. They are the people responsible for
  running the system, or running some aspect of it.

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What is a Sysadmin?

• My informal definition
• A person who is responsible for creating and
  maintaining an IT environment (or some aspect of
  it) to support users needs.
• How it relates to other areas of IT / CS?
• Draw picture

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How I Became a Sysadmin(An extremely concise
history of my past 14 years)

• Left TJ and went to Wash U. wanting to be a
  doctor
• Organic Chemistry happened. I didnt want to be
  a doctor any more. I was good with computers, so
  I tried computer science
• I was a programmer for 6 years, first at a local
  St. Louis company, then at WebMD
• I had to find a job in Birmingham. This one was
  mistakenly listed as a programmer job. I learned
  otherwise at the interview. They still hired me!
• (More practical advice coming later)

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What I Do

• Higher Education Sysadmin
• Department of Computer and Information Sciences
• University of Alabama at Birmingham
• IT staff consists of myself and 3-4 student
  workers

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Scope

• 20 faculty and staff
• 250 students
• My organization is responsible for something like
  400-500 systems
• 1.5 - 2 million in IT

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A Brief Tour

• Slide Show

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The Mythical Typical Day

• Each day is completely different from the last
• Everchanging activities
• reactive, helpdesk response
• proactive, strategic project development
• physical labor
• Teaching
• Working with vendors
• doing the soft stuff - administrative, PR,
  recruitment, professional development (like this
  talk)

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Job Responsibilities

• The entire IT cycle
• Research
• Vendor negotiations
• Procurement
• Receiving
• Installation
• Configuration
• Maintenance
• Decommission

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Job Responsibilities

• End User Support
• Answering helpdesk requests
• Setting up laptops and desktops
• Handling department guests
• Academic Support
• Setting up servers and software for academic
  activities
• Research Support
• Maintaining specialized research equipment and
  services
• Infrastructure Support
• Core production servers - email, web, etc
• Centralized storage and account management
• Network infrastructure

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Job Responsibilities

• Other activities
• Managing the student staff
• Maintaining vendor relationships
• Coordinating with other areas of campus IT
• Public relations - giving tours, attending
  events, creating department advertising
• Grant writing
• User training

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Job Responsibilities

• Even more activities
• Producing documentation
• Teaching classes, seminars and workshops
• Annual budget
• Strategic planning
• Training and development

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Recent Tasks

• Provide IT support to Alabama High School
  Programming Contest including development of
  program to automate submissions
• Install security cameras
• Upgrade cluster software
• Troubleshoot error conditions on server hardware
• Create system for automating subversion access
  and wikis for new accounts
• Wrote a grant proposal for student technology
  fees

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Recent Tasks

• Develop system to automate lab machine installs
  based on location and role
• Troubleshoot lost DHCP packets
• Prepare workstations for summer research students
• Migrate users to new email system
• Install interactive monitors and remote lab PC
  control software and create training docs

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Other Types of Sysadmins

• Corporate
• Network
• Database
• Security
• Domain-Specific

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Domain-Specific Admins

• Bioinformatics
• Computer Forensics
• Computational Chemists
• High Performance Computing
• Most physical sciences have become extremely
  computation-oriented. They need people who
  understand IT -and- their world.

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Does This Sound Interesting?

• Debunking some Myths
• Benefits of the job
• Compatibility

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Myths of Sysadmins

• Theyre in front of a computer all day.
• They dont interact with people much.
• They never get to program.
• Its not a very creative job.

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Why I Like My Job

• Challenging
• Hard problems
• Never the same day twice
• Great if you are easily bored
• Always learning something new
• IT reinvents itself every few years
• Freedom
• Autonomy, independence

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Why I Like My Job

• Academic Environment
• Relaxed / casual, respectful, supportive
• Feeling of Enabling People
• Pay and Benefits
• High salaries
• Get to travel a lot
• Public sector advantages

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A Quick Look at the Industry(this slide is for
the parents!)

• The IT job outlook is phenomenally good right now
• The outsourcing myth - debunked!
• Explosion in need - 43 job growth
• Job happiness - IT dominates these rankings
• Competitive salaries - Top 5 of all degrees.
  Start gt 50k.

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Is Sysadmin Right for Me?

• I like to always be doing something different.
• I am spontaneous and adapt well to sudden changes
  and new situations.
• I multitask well and dont mind interruptions.
• I dont fear the unknown.

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Is Sysadmin Right for Me?

• I welcome challenging problems.
• I enjoy installing and debugging computer
  hardware and software.
• I get along with all sorts of personalities
  easily.
• I work well under pressure.
• I like puzzles.

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Is Sysadmin Right for Me?

• Id rather know a little about a lot than a lot
  about a little
• I dont mind unpredictable work schedules and
  being on call
• I like to take things apart and figure out how
  they work

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Preparing to be a Sysadmin

• Required Skills
• Traits of Successful Sysadmins
• Maximizing College

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Required Skills

• Hard skills
• Must be an expert hardware and software tinkerer
• Comfortable in multiple Oses
• Install and configure server and client software
• Know how networks work and how computers
  communicate
• Script programming
• Leveraging the Internet for information
• One of the biggest mistakes I see young admins
  make!

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Required Skills

• Hard Skills
• Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris, Perl, PHP,
  JavaScript, HTML, XML, CSS, AJAX, Active
  Directory, SQL, Amanda, TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP,
  POP, SVN, CVS, LDAP, DNS, DHCP, SSH, SFTP, FTP,
  SSL, Java, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
  RRT, Cricket, Nagios, Samba, SMB, BOOTP, IPMI,
  PXE, Python, sh, bash, csh, MPI, SGE, Globus,
  Grid, Cluster, CUPS, LPR, DFS, EXT3, Reiser, XFS,
  JFS, Squid, iptables, IBRIX, Infiniband,
  Ethernet, DVI, USB, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe, DIMM, CMOS,
  BIOS, ISO, IIS, Postfix, sendmail, dovecot,
  courier-imap, scp, df, du, top, uptime, find,
  tar, tail, less, grep, ls, vi, emacs, ps, man,
  which, crontab, cp, dump, more, ruby, c, c,
  sed, awk, proc, postscript, pdf, latex, drupal,
  plone, modprobe, regedit, group policy, ping,
  route.
• The point is, you obviously cant learn all of
  these, so focus on getting a good foundation and
  being able to learn new things quickly.

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Required Skills

• Soft Skills
• Be an excellent communicator
• Written
• Verbal
• Communicating technical information clearly and
  concisely is extremely hard!
• Adaptability
• The landscape is constantly changing. Stay ahead
  of the curve by keeping track of current
  development, maintaining current training, and
  trying new things.

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Required Skills

• Soft Skills
• Tolerance, Patience and Compassion
• End users can be difficult and unreasonable
• Put yourself in their shoes
• Self-Motivating
• Often, the only time you hear from users is when
  theres something wrong. The best ones remember
  to praise you when things go right, but dont
  rely on it for motivation
• Creativity
• Ability to think outside the box and come up with
  creative solutions to problems

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Successful Sysadmins

• Generalize.
• They become a Jack-of-all-Trades. They dont get
  trapped in a specific technology or product.
• Are expert problem solvers.
• They understand how to attack the unknown in
  manageable, measured steps.
• Are very good at time management.
• They manage information and workflow effectively.
  

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Successful Sysadmins

• Think ahead.
• Put monitoring systems in place before the
  problem exists. Identify bottlenecks and
  weaknesses and address them.
• Solve a problem once.
• Build a permanent solution, not a one-time hack
  job. Higher Order Administration
• Are often outgoing, social people

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How To Prepare

• Most college programs dont do a good job of
  preparing people to be sysadmins
• Which department? Computer Science? Computer
  Engineering? MIS?
• My choice, and why

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Maximizing College Opportunities

• While at college, try to work at student labs and
  helpdesk jobs and get IT internships and co-ops.
• Good classes to take
• Technical writing
• Networking
• computer architecture
• operating system theory
• scripting languages
• web applications/services
• distributed computing
• computer security

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The End

• Thank you!
• Questions?
• Contact me at fran_at_cis.uab.edu