What should a new SysAdmin know first?
Posted by drake90001@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 64 comments
Hi,
I recently lost my job, non IT related, I’ve never worked in a professional IT environment let alone a data center. All of my projects have been my own personal projects, including building 3-D printers or jailbreaking (first person to publicly have a jailbroken iPhone on iOS 10.2) among many other things, some notable some not.
Anyways, and a hunch and desperate, I reached out to a connection I made at my old job, an Internet hosting company, along with cloud infrastructure, and we connected pretty well. I asked if he had anything I could do to help him, even answering Support tickets and initially he said not sure but after looking at my projects and stuff, and meeting in person to discuss it over a sub, he agreed to take me on.
He gave me a big list of long-term goals along with a small project to get started with, learning open stack and deploying four VM’s along with using Ansible for automation. I finished that in about 19 hours. I’m not an expert in Open stack by any means, but it kind of just makes sense to me. What happens in the physical world is just done virtually, so it’s pretty natural to me.
He mentions in his document about goals that I need to achieve in the long-term to be considered a system, administrator, which I never thought in 1 million years I would be in this position, especially not having a degree.
He’s made me a 1099 employee, and while I haven’t signed the contract yet he’s gonna give me a check tomorrow. I feel like getting his first project done for me in 19 hours with no experience whatsoever in cloud infrastructure was pretty good, but I guess I’m nervous if this sounds achievable coming from a person who is more of a home lab guy of course. The pay is $30 an hour, and I can work remote whatever hours I want, it’s basically just me and him. We’ve even discussed having me help him install hardware which I think is a good fit also for me, I’m really good at troubleshooting issues and I even wrote some scripts to help automate the systems I set up.
I see no downsides in my eyes, and also it’s a dream come true, but what should I focus on learning and doing to prove my value? setting up for open stack VMs is definitely some entry-level stuff, and he’s giving me some more tasks like learning how to automate deploying lets encrypt certificates for domains and such, so I feel like he’s seeing me as more of an apprentice. I wanna focus on proving my worth, though, as I’m experiencing a bit of impostor syndrome.
I basically have unlimited access to the platform, so I can toy around with whatever I want. Are there any cool projects that are entry-level system Administrator cloud infrastructure based that I could deploy in my free time to prove my understanding?
dlongwing@reddit
You set up VMs on a system you didn't understand in less than 3 business days. You're doing fine and you're in the right profession. Ask your buddy for the next project. Ask him what he'd like you to work on.
I was a Sysadmin for about 10 years before I got my degree. Its one of the few professions where you can get by without any professional credentials. As a profession, IT is generally more interested in what you can do and how you approach problems than in certifications.
However, I would strongly reccomend going to school and getting a diploma. My job hunts without a diploma were MUCH harder. Plenty of colleges offer fully-remote courses that can be done at night. When I finally went to get my degree I'd say about 70% of the course load was "yeah, obviously", but 30% was "Oh! That's why that works that way!". You'll learn stuff you don't know. If you're the sort of person who can set up VMs with minimal instruction, then you're already smarter than at least half your potential classmates.
You're not an imposter. You're where you are supposed to be.
I said it before: I've been doing this for decades. A month doesn't go by where I'm not learning something new. The difference between good sysadmins and bad ones is whether you enjoy that or not.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Thank you so much for this. He’s given me more stuff he’d like to do like Zabbix integration, automatic SSL certificates, etc. and I’ve almost tackled the SSL certs already lol.
The imposter syndrome is real but you and everyone else here has been so supportive and helped my fear go down because I know I’m capable, I just struggle mentally especially after some stupid job losses that I’ve had a hard time moving on from.
Going back to school is definitely on the list of goals, especially now that I have a pretty significant raise in income ($16/hr to $30/hr). I do have a couple of semesters completed, literally about 50% of my degree is done. I’ve been building and programming since I was in my teenage years if not younger, but some bad relationships and choices made going to school not feasible for a while. I do agree it’s definitely a long-term goal.
He’s supportive with me billing hours for just reading, documentation and studying, so in a way I’m treating this is sort of an apprenticeship. I don’t have any crazy access to production servers yet, I’m just toying around in my own virtual space which is good, because the last thing I would ever want is to bring down production lol.
It’s bound to happen at some point, but that day will not be today haha. Thank you, again. I really appreciate this comment.
Nintenduh69@reddit
It was DNS.
link3it@reddit
When I read the question, I searched for DNS. Well done.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
DNS literally scares me so much lol, when I first met him, I transferred my domain and accidentally misconfigured my DNS records, and I felt like such an idiot
Capta-nomen-usoris@reddit
Do not assume.
Exciting-Past-7085@reddit
How to restart production server first thing morning
/s
AlfaHotelWhiskey@reddit
I recommend in an enterprise / company environment avoid using the word “Support” or having that term laid upon you- always lean on the term Service and Services. It has a dual effect. It hedges against people regarding you and you regard yourself and your work as a “helper” role when you are an instrumental part of the company operations.
Double_Confection340@reddit
Cover your asses, follow the procedures and make sure you have good backups.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Good idea, everything is redundantly mirrored by default, but we do offer backup solutions and so I think I should become familiar with those. I should have access to be able to toy around with that in my own environment.
liocer@reddit
Backups mean many things, large full image backups take a long time to restore, small incremental backups are great for your personal use, tools like rsync, restic, but don’t dump work stuff in random unsanctioned places.
keep a collection of scripts and notes and put it in a small git repo.
Try running a git repo and remote without a service provider like GitHub. You can do it all with ssh and command line. Or lazygit if you want a helper.
Being able to pull out a commit anytime gives you the freedom to not sweat the small stuff.
Man pages are your friend.
Frothyleet@reddit
For a 1099? I know you are probably hoping for just whatever you can get, but you are getting taken for a ride here. Remember that you are responsible for FICA employer taxes, your $30/hr take home will be substantially less than as a W2 employee.
Fuzzy_Paul@reddit
Do not go into it is my advice. Reading your post you go from A to Z random. Hacked a bit around jailbreak a phone. My advice would be grow up and be serious. Learn networking specialized on fiber and switches firewall etc. If ya become any good in troubleshooting network issues the money will follow. But i have my doubt..no offense.
Renfah87@reddit
Users lie. Never take them at their word. Confirm everything yourself.
And sfc scan works great if you dism restore health first.
Secret_Account07@reddit
Do the work others don’t want to. You do that and they will happily share their knowledge.
How I got ahead. Folks wanted me around because I made their life easier
drake90001@reddit (OP)
I worked in manufacturing, and I became besties with the engineers and mechanics because I could troubleshoot the issue for them, meaning I’d just radio for a part or a specific thing that meant they could spend more time on TikTok lol
I didn’t mind. I wanted to learn and sharpen that skill. Troubleshooting alone should be a job lol.
Secret_Account07@reddit
Yeah generally speaking anyone who has a good attitude, works well with others, and works hard will get ahead. In fact, you tend to get further than those who are even more competent. Best guy on my team is somebody other teams don’t like because he’s difficult. He’s one of the most brilliant engineers I’ve ever met but man he pisses ppl off lol
bionic80@reddit
How to deal with people. I can teach you literally any system, any technology, any specialization IT related on the planet. I can't teach you how to NOT be an asshole to a given person, even if said person is saying unhinged bullshit.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Hah, coming from mostly customer facing jobs, people are my special skill. I got a lot of good feedback from customers working with regulars, which is how I met my new boss. So I know exactly what you’re talking about (:
bukkithedd@reddit
Some of the best people I've worked with over years have no degrees in the field, just an interest in tech and the ability to learn things (plus often one or more diagnoses like autism, ADHD/ADD etc). Especially when they're fresh in the biz. That's more than enough and also tends to be a better fit since that means that they don't have to be de-trained out of their mindset and predispositions before they can be re-trained on how shit in the real world works.
Your focus right now is learning. Don't sweat starting with entry-level stuff, it's called entry-level for a reason, and remember: you came into this field only recently. And besides, I'm not sure I'd say that automating deployment/updating certs for domains is entry-level in the first place. But it's a good thing to start with and learning how to automate boring, repetitive tasks is something I'd count as a holy grail in this field.
Impostor-syndrome is a real thing in this field. You kinda just learn to live with it after a while, but you'll most likely suffer from it to a certain degree until you retire.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Thanks, I really appreciate this comment. It addressed some of my real fears and it helped reassure me. I was scared to submit my hours of like 19 hours reading documentation and deploying the openstack workloads. But he was perfectly happy with it and he’s given me more projects to work on as I see fit, to eventually deploy for clients like Zabbix, and some more plans for the future which sounds like he’s liking me so far!
I’m grateful for all the kind responses here, I never thought in a million years I’d be doing any IT stuff like I said, and I feel I got a big jump in my life that I was scared to fuck up due to struggles in the real world. Everyone here is right, it’s only the beginning and I need to just focus on reading and learning proper procedures or writing them down (:
L0stG33k@reddit
Who would downvote this?? People are disappointing.
Whyd0Iboth3r@reddit
The same people that berate people in /r/networking
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Thank you, we’ve been communicating very constantly and he’s always telling me to ask questions, so I’m not worried about doing something. I shouldn’t unintentionally yet, especially since I’ve been on my own jump back that I ordered initially before we started working together.
This is exactly why he had me start practicing applying virtual machines there, as well as using Ansible. I think this is gonna be a long process, but I’m prepared for it and more than happy to learn as long as he’s willing to take the time to help me even if I ask a dumb question like how the fuck do SSH keys work because I’ve never had to use them, but I’ve got that pretty well down now also.
L0stG33k@reddit
Yeah, SSH keys is actually the perfect example of knowing how to use something versus understanding how it actually works. They've made it so easy and convenient to simply run ssh-copy-id and bam, your key is installed in the remote machine... but definitely good to read up on it and understand how it actually works under the hood. Sounds like you're doing pretty well though, happy to hear that.
sin-eater82@reddit
What not to click.
RipperFox@reddit
Backup & restore + CYA
Texas_Sysadmin@reddit
Never, EVER give a user full control rights on file sharea or folders. They will remove the admistrators from the share thinking you shouldn't have access to their files. You won't be able to scan them for viruses/malware, and you won't be able to back them up. Then they will "accidentally" delete something and you won't be able to restore it for them. And they will blame you.
And always remember what Uncle Ben said in Spiderman... "With great power comes great responsibility.". Think about everything you do before you do it.
And never push the big red button. 😋
Barious_01@reddit
communicate, ask questions, be willing to take criticism. Ask for help, Document everything. Find ways to improve systems, be vocal about your ideas.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
I started just writing scripts for things that he was having me do, and he liked that. Anything that can help automate the system, he appreciates so eventually, maybe some of those will become production scripts.
Cloud deployment jump box comes with a bunch of scripts. He wrote himself, some of which I found some errors in and fixed or made a note of to fix. I hope that doesn’t come off as wrong for him, but I also think that it’s a good starting place to point out some issues that I could easily address as a noob.
Barious_01@reddit
Very insightful, yeah sounds like you will do just fine. Keep progressing stay on your lane as well for a bit, butndon't be afraid to express your concerns as well. Bit of a tight rope walk but let your peers and management get used to you.
zonz1285@reddit
First thing you need to learn is don’t play around on the production system just to toy and learn
TommyVe@reddit
It's the best way to remember what not to do tho. For example me, I'm never in my life touching a printer driver again.
Xattle@reddit
Adding on to this one - even if you don't test on production, at some point, you will break production spectacularly. Sysadmin right of passage. Be prepared to have a functional roll back plan for any bigger things and always own up when you do break things. A lot of this role is built on trust.
Old-Flight8617@reddit
What do you mean?
That's the best place to test. You get instant feedback if something breaks.
/s
jcpham@reddit
Don’t teach how ShittySysAdmin works, he’s new we don’t need to get him fired yet let him at least break something first
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Lol don’t worry, I’m not that new to the idea of prod vs test (:
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Of course, I started out by ordering my own cloud access and regular VM as well, so nothing I’m messing around with has anything to do with clients.
Eventually, I will be deploying things for clients, of course, and then I am very well familiar with this rule, since I have my own rocky jump back so I can spin up whatever I want and toy around there and not on some production system.
jcpham@reddit
Oh yeah this too. Set up a server to do a thing and then leave it alone. You can patch or do updates but don’t just start doing “desktop cleanup” or try to “make it faster”. Production isn’t your playground
drake90001@reddit (OP)
I’m definitely not doing any production stuff yet, I’ve access to my own Rocky jump box, nothing is connected to any clients or anything like that. He initially funded my account with credit when I first started talking to him, and transferred my domain to him, and said that he would just keep funding it so I can mess around. Now that I’m actually working with him, I actually asked because I was worried that me toying around in there would mean he gets a bill for $1 million, but since he owns all the hardware he is just paying himself essentially.
I’ve been messing around with Open stack, very cool and easy to deploy VM and I’ve written a few scripts to help automate that process for myself.
ZestycloseAd2895@reddit
This 👆
DanielWW2@reddit
Break2FixIT@reddit
How to work help desk.
Sorry, not sorry.
fdeyso@reddit
To not trust AI blindly, not to trust anyone blindly, where’s the coffee machine.
Mister_Brevity@reddit
Learn how to say no without saying no.
“Sure, I can do that but here’s what I need from you to accomplish it” and make the requirement something they won’t be willing to do. It’s an art.
bobdobalina@reddit
I enjoy helping and often fail at this to my own detriment. I had one user last week demanding support! His scanner just had to work, and now! But his system wasn't online...so I waited for the call...he calls, complaining. -- system online, I remote in show him the software while he berates me and pays no attention to the screen. I ask him to put something into the scanner and he tells me it's down stairs. I sigh and remind him that I cannot help if we cannot recreate the problem, software looks good to me and hang up.
gumbrilla@reddit
Mate, not having a degree is fine. Suggest you don't do yourself down, it's about what you can do.
Best people have passion, having a degree is far down the list. Imposter syndrome is real for everyone with a brain.
Ramiraz80@reddit
That you will never know everything. In this job, you need to keep learning.
detonal@reddit
Where the coffee machine is.
amang_admin@reddit
You're a kid in a man's world.
Cultural-Coast9665@reddit
Power shell.
ErrorID10T@reddit
Your job as IT is to serve the needs of the company. That's both security and productivity, and as it turns out, happy employees are more productive employees. Your coworkers might be idiots, but they're also idiots that happen to know the day to day workings of the company and are a huge source of information for how things are going and what can improve.
There are 50 million ways to do things. There's no "wrong" and "right" way, there are lots of great solutions to a problem, and many more bad ones. Don't get caught in the mindset that you've learned the right way and that's now the only way.
Make sure you know why you're doing what you're doing and how it works. It's easy to learn a routine that solves a particular problem, but taking the time to learn exactly what the purpose of every step of that routine is and how it can be applied elsewhere will dramatically save you time down the road.
Have the right mindset and never stop learning.
lbaile200@reddit
Document everything. Gotta restart that troublesome system… again… for the third time in a month? You should have created a doc the first time and logged when you restarted it and any other vitals you can think of. Our structure is a series of folders in one drive. /tasks is for one off stuff that you mostly complete and then don’t come back to, /projects is for long-term stuff with a lot of docs. The folders are named like 20260403_jim_pc_restarts.
The important stuff you’ll need to remember often in the future such as “how your organization creates its specific ansible jobs” put it in a wiki.
Your thought process for troubleshooting should include “how do I monitor this in a way that isn’t overwhelming, but also lets me catch it if it ever happens again?, or even better, catch it BEFORE it happens”. Once the problem is solved look for what you could have seen earlier and monitor for that.
You (and your department) should develop slowly and respond to incidents quickly. It takes months for a major deployment where I’m at. It may only take a week or two to actually develop the solution, but then we TEST it. We tear it all down and we TEST it again. Then we tear it all down and we test the deployment and so-on. When we actually deploy it’s like a dance and everyone knows their place and role. We have a post deploy test plan and an emergency fallback plan.
Enough_Swordfish_898@reddit
Backups. Start with understanding your backups.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Definitely noted, someone else suggested this as well and we do offer backup solutions ourselves, so that’s another thing I should try playing with.
sSQUAREZ@reddit
Don’t skip the basics. Go do a bunch of research on how networks work and what each device/component does. Maybe consider getting a comptia network+ just to get yourself that foundation. Lots of free resources online you can use.
ZealousidealTurn2211@reddit
I want to emphasize this. Take the time to understand each component of what you're working with.
There's a lot of individual systems at play and understanding their roles and how they operate will be immensely helpful. DNS, TLS/SSL certificates, and firewalls are the top three I see often misunderstood even though they really aren't that complex conceptually.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
Very true, DNS/TLS certificates are actually what I’m gonna be focusing on right now, and he suggested that I try and learn how to write a script for automated deployment of SSL certs using Let’s Encrypt and openstack with ansible.
He also referenced koala ansible is a good example of a larger ansible project. It seems like a really great resource for learning the abilities of ansible!
MrNegativ1ty@reddit
Documentation is massively important, and organizing notes/documents so that you can quickly search and find what you need if you, say solve something a year ago, forget about it, then run into the same issue.
If you need help with something, ask your supervisor. Teams are meant to help each other.
Also, try to not tackle too much at once and burn yourself out. You’ll notice a lot of users on this sub are bitter and completely burned out to the point where they’re changing careers. You don’t want to ever hit that point. Just take things one day at a time.
drake90001@reddit (OP)
We don’t have any other employees really, he’s been doing this himself for like 20 years. Which is why I think he initially was apprehensive, but realized he could probably use a bit of help. Even if I am just doing basic stuff at first, I’m just glad to make myself useful and I’m extremely grateful that someone recognizes my skills and is willing to further them.
He wrote all of his own documentation for how to use the health services, and so I actually went through that for the first test project and then documented all the issues I ran into so that we could fix them later because eventually he said I could help write the documentation.
As well as tools we use, I asked specifically which documentation I should be referencing since I want to make sure I’m doing things his way, as I’m well familiar there’s always a different way to do something.
Credibull@reddit
Read Only Friday is a real thing.
No_Resolution_9252@reddit
The user is probably lying to you.
Bigdaddyjim@reddit
Document what you're doing on the admin side. Test, test, test before you make a global change. Renaming files rather than deleting them when you're fixing something saves you much heartache. Learn to read the event logs. That's where the gold is. Make it common knowledge that bribes involving cookies, snacks and beers move your ticket to that secret SEV1 place at the top of the priority list.
jcpham@reddit
It’s your fault even if it isn’t your fault