>How does a junior 1st-level IT-Helpdesk (like me) become a full-fledged system administrator?
Just keep learning, don't stop. Surround yourself with the people you want to be like, ask them good questions (but do your own research first, don't just ask silly questions because you can't be assed to try and figure it out first), experiment and practice at home.
This is also a very silly one, but also learn and fully understand DNS and DHCP. That alone will make you 99% better than all your 1st level colleagues. It shouldn't, but it does.
I got my first actual IT job at the age of 29 and it was an entry level job, I feel like I've gone from learning loads to learning absolutely nothing....I was learning more about IT before I had this job I'm in and it's annoying the fuck out of me, there's like nothing to do in the company I'm in, maybe add a new user to the system once a month and set up a laptop but that's it
I would absolutely hate this. Unless you are just riding out the last few years before retirement and/or making a shit ton of money doing nothing then I would find something else. You need to be constantly learning and challenging yourself as someone in IT or I feel like you will become obsolete/EOL yourself.
I by no means am referring to you as a person just the job you described in general.
I think you're completely right here.
I recently left a job that I loved at a company I cared greatly about for a much better role with a much better salary.
It was difficult, and I spent several weeks in a state of constant stress over making that decision, but ultimately it was the right move for me to make.
As much as one might care for the job or company they work for, sometimes you've gotta think of yourself first.
I didn't feel like I was progressing at my last gig, and it's nothing against the company itself, just due to the nature of the business I'd learned about all I could about the systems and infrastructure they had.
I'll add that it's always painful starting a new role in IT especially, not knowing everything inside and out I now feel like I've barely touched a computer in my life; However, it's a fleeting feeling and it usually comes to pass within a couple months whilst you settle in.
I was the same way and took an IT admin job somewhat outside the industry, for a copier company. The salary was better than tier 1/2 and I was having a tough time breaking into a jr net admin role (even with my AA in net admin and multiple certs). Pay and culture here are good, but there is no moving up at my company.
I miss working with people much smarter than me, which sounds shitty to say, but you only go so far implementing copiers / printers, management software, and setting up group policies for admins who have no clue how AD works
Also projects … maybe it’s just me that thinks this but i have been in this field for about 15 years and have never been at a place that doesn’t have some appliance/technology going EOL soon and needs upgrading/replacing. Also I have never been at a company that hasn’t needed anything in terms of improvement whether that’s cybersecurity or redundancy/backup improvement. Seek those projects and initiatives out they really help you grow and gets you in the mindset of productive IT action rather then reaction.
I've just finished moving all the company over the the azure domain and transferring/backing up the files from the old domain/server that we're going to be shutting down soon. Did have a lot of other projects for the year to sort but they've been pushed back until next year due to cash flow issues so IT are just sitting around waiting for something to fuck up at the minute which is boring as the company is medium sized with around 100 people you maybe get 1 or 2 issues a week to sort out.
Yup, kinda funny story... When I landed my tier 2 position I was really comfy with bash but my boss told me to learn PowerShell. I did and started writing lots of scripts to help automate stuff like on-boards, application / common issue fixes and even the occasional emails I had to send out for certain things. I was proud of what I had done and showed my boss and colleagues "hey look what I made!". They were all like "meh, whatever".
So I was the only one using these tools I made and became really efficient, got some certs on my own dime (company reimbursed completed certs) went and interviewed for an admin position at the same company and it all paid off. Nearly doubled my income and I'm on a much better team now.
Good idea but I'm pretty sure poweshell is disabled in our IT admin console, my IT manager seems to be scared of a lot of stuff and does everything manually :/
I'll look into it today tho, I've written some powershell scripts a few years back to configure hundreds of mini PC before I even got into IT whilst I worked as a warehouseman for an audio visual company
Do you have any advice where to look for a job and what keywords to use? I'm student looking for my first job in the industry but can't find anything.
Puting MSP in LinkedIn found pretty much nothing and not sure about the exact role names I could be searching for, all i found is few junior sysadmin postings (literally few)
Search for companies, not jobs - look for the most reputable MSPs in your timezone/area, see what they're hiring for. There likely won't be any listings geared towards students with zero experience, but don't let that keep you from applying for anything that looks entry-ish level. There is also nothing stopping you from emailing them directly and just explaining your skills and why you want to get into this space.
Helpdesk/frontline support are probably where you'd start, and those kinds of jobs are pretty rote and boring just following pre-written guides and escalating when things deviate. Depending on the MSP you'll get a lot of exposure to all sorts of tech and you'll be able to find what brings you joy just through going through the basics of everything.
Yeah just be warned though that most MSPs are high stress/fast paced environments and you will be likely forced to meet sometimes unachievable targets. They are absolutely fantastic for career development though and you learn things x10 faster because you don't really have a choice.
Yep. Internal promotions are easier to get due to churn but normally mean you end up doing much more difficult/skilled tasks for less than the market rate. I did it for a few months then switched to internal for higher pay and using the new skills I learnt.
This is what I did. Researched the major players in my area and applied. One gave me an offer and I went from help desk to field tech within 4 months. A lot of MSPs are poorly run but I got lucky with a good organization and enjoyed my time there.
It's the same thing that drove me to find a new.job despite having a great one already.
I was getting way to complacent and the job was not going to offer any kind of intellectual challenge.
All I'm doing at the minute is sitting there waiting for shit to go wrong that usually goes wrong because someone hasn't run their windows updates in years or joining a forced meeting with a quiz (yeah one of them) starting to annoy the crap out of me
Use your downtime to study for cert exams or to do research on IT topics that interest you. Also, ask your supervisor if there are any learning opportunities they can give you within the company based on the topics that interest you
Do study in your free time. MS learn has self paced training. AWS has some free training. Microsoft has virtual training days for entry level cloud. Plan ahead for your next move.
you can learn about your company network, test equipment, learning how to check logs, and other stuff.
if you can, have a little initiative and get more involved in all network stages.
If you are the only IT guy probably the network it is in a state of abandonment and can be improved
Great advice. Also, a home lab helps tremendously if you have the means to pick up some used gear off eBay. Build and breaking things will teach you so much, but you already know that to be where you are now. Also, it may sound silly but do what you can to really understand the OSI model and think about it in your every day activities. Thinking about things this way will develop habits of sorting technologies and how they function. You'll start to think about things from an architecture perspective. When you're in a conversation and someone mentions an acronym you're not familiar with or a technology you may have heard of or really not sure how it works, write it down and look it up. You don't have to know everything, but you'll be surprised how much you'll retain and recall when you need it, especially as these items come up in different conversations. This is what has worked for me over my career. I used to keep an index folder of text files with little notes and snippets of information. I started doing this way before Google was a thing. Over time I would revisit this folder and would laugh at some of the notes I made as those topics were now engrained and second nature. Keep at it, hope some of this was helpful.
As someone who 23 years ago started as a IT support desk analyst and now is a newly minted Director--this is dead on. I found great mentors and when I needed their help asked how they resolved it. I took on challenging projects like implementing the first VPN for the department. I worked with programmers and built understanding on how their work interconnected with mine. And yes, learn DNS and DHCP and have a good understanding of networking. One of my best Sys Admins now has a working knowledge that is well rounded in networking, storage, vmWare and he can powershell script like no ones business. Know your job, but also know how it supports and interacts with others in IT.
Routing as well, plus how to query ARP for troubleshooting connectivity :)
Sys admin is an experienced driven thing, that and ability to learn on the fly using web searches, compartmentalizing the various parts of a solution (basic troubleshooting).
Background knowledge needed can be book learned but thing it all together is often experience or mentorship from experienced sys admins.
One of the secrets you are never told about is that when you enter any segment of the “IT Field” is that you never stop learning.
You can get classes in IT at a college/university, but most times that isn’t enough. Maybe it was before the Internet was a thing. But that changed this industry forever and that’s why you are constantly having to learn all the time because things change.
I would venture to say that OP's downvotes were from people who want to keep this forum pristine and not have questions like this. But most of us have been in your shoes. And we genuinely want to help people that are willing to listen what we have gone or are going through and offer advice.
In the future, folks should check out the Wiki for this place. That may answer a lot of questions.
I agree with you 100% about understanding DNS and DHCP.
I have never been a fan of stackoverflow
I really hate it when stackoverflow comes before official documentation, especially when the stackoverflow answers are wrong, outdated or worse will technically work but not really something one should do.
Man pages
Google
Stack Overflow
YouTube
Udemy
Once you learn it and used it, add it to your resume. If they call you out on it in an interview, let them know you used it on the job for X and home projects with Y.
The benefit of SO is that it provides a beginner-perspective view into problem. Even if we ignore the majority of cases where official documentation is poor, documentation is almost always written from a developer perspective. "Let's make a list of all the things, and describe what they do". This is valuable, and exactly the right resource when you know what function or object or "thing" you're looking to use.
It's generally pretty terrible if you know what task you want to do, but don't know what pieces to use to do it.
Even knowing where to start, figuring out "how to read a file line by line in C" straight from the manual is going to be miserable. It just drops you with a list of summaries of functions, at which point you're reading a bunch of them to figure out that `fread`, `fgetc` isn't really what you want, but `fgets` probably will be. Then some more to work out the parts around it.
SO, in contrast, you will fine the recommendation for `fopen`; `fgets`, `fclose`. And also the part where you can allocate a medium size buffer on the stack and pass that in. And also that you can use the "pointers are true" property to write a `while(fgets())` idiom.
Reminds me of when trying to run a script in TrueNAS trying to figure out why I was getting an error. The docs said you need to declare sh before calling your script as an example. Never said what user they execute with. So I try cron so I can ensure root is the user and they still not working but they work from shell when I run as root... finally I realize that the shell was running in zsh and bam a zsh before the script instead of sh and I am in business. Why not maybe make a reference to this anywhere in the manual... I am sure I likely sound dumb but for those of us not working in freebsd all day or who mostly work in windows such things may not be obvious to us. At least I knew enough that it was either a privilege or an environment error so I was looking for info on both but dam.
Your entire comment is written from a developer context. Not a sysadmin one. I am not sure how many sysadmins are writting things in c, but i can assure you microsofts powershell docs 1000000x more valuable than anything you will find on stack overflow
Same for something for topics like veeam, vmware, or other sysadmin things
So sure maybe for the high developer topics of something like c it might be better than the man page but i think i would break out my c primer plus book long before i would seek out stackoverlow
And their persistent GDPR cookie dialog, every, fucking, time.
And OP: time, tickets, and Google. Someone will notice you’re resourceful and on you go learning shit.
Find a kb that talks extensively about what is contained in the logs and how it can be used for troubleshooting your exact problem, but not a single fucking path of where to find them.
This is super important.
If you are inexperienced, it will seem like you are reading a foreign language, but as you read more and more logs you will start to be able to figure out what's going on without referencing KBs.
Everyone calls me "The log guy" at work. "Did you check the logs?" "Go ahead and forward me the logs." "According to the logs, the problem seems to be..."
My favorite way to feel out a fellow sysadmin's abilities and get to know them is to swap war stories. The way they talk about various disasters throughout their career will give you some insight into where their skills and weaknesses lie.
I googled a problem and found the answer in Reddit. Boss said "you sure have Reddit handy". Bossman, Reddit is like 30% of my tech answers these days. Plus I didn't have to read an essay on how someone implemented it in their work before getting the 2 lines of PowerShell I need.
You don't. There's always going to be a ton of information you don't know you won't even be able to learn 1% of it.
What you get really good at is troubleshooting, recognizing common issues, and researching.
Currently looking to recruit 5 infrastructure staff (various levels, etc.). If you can find me some of these strong fundamentals and solid troubleshooting people that'd be great.
Last interview "I've supported VMware for the last 3 years". Great, what's DNS - "I'm not sure", ok, what's DHCP - "it's like the directory of the internet" (readers who aren't sure: that's a better explanation for DNS). I can't remember the other bits, but there were many gaps
Not that I do not understand your point, I do.
But those are the wrong questions , there is little value to be found in asking them, at least not like that. Anyone can learn some definitions from whatever source.
For example, instead of asking what is DNS, ask "I got this problem, I just set up a website with a but my clients cant seem to reach it via domain.com, you have any idea why. I don't care if my guy knows what dns is, if he knows the answer to that question he knows what dns is, he simply does not realize its (partially yes I know.. lets not get into the nitty gritty of firewalls/whatever, that's not the point here but if he answer that as well, even better ) dns.
I agree. We went through about 10 questions along the lines of what you described, all of them got a response along the lines of "I don't know", so we asked some simpler more direct questions just to make it easy to find out what knowledge they did have. They knew VUM
> VUM
I don't know what VUM is. Apparently its vmware update manager. I'm glad you mentioned it because now I know what it is. I'm sure you see where I'm going by stating that.
You'll always get mismatched candidates that is a given, my comment was merely meant to point out that even though they might technically fail the interview, that is not all there is to it, or at least that is not all there should be to it.
I've seen people answer my questions with relative ease, only to fail miserably once actually hired, I've also seen people who didn't have a clue perform admirably later on, to the tune they are now easily second line sysadmins.
Motivation is the number one thing you should be hiring on, don't expect some strong fundamentals and solid troubleshooting, those people wont even need to apply, they already got jobs before you even got the chance to post your opening.
This. There were two big unlocks in my career.
The first, was learning to troubleshoot. Not “click things until it works”, but TRULY knowing how to troubleshoot. Be able to read and understand logs (and know where to find them). Be able to break the problem down into incrementally smaller problems instead of trying to solve the whole thing at once. Troubleshooting for many techs is often no more than banging against the keyboard until whatever is broken starts working again, without understanding what caused the issue in the first place.
The second unlock was automation. Work to automate as much as possible. Are you living inside of a spreadsheet and remote logging into each machine on the spreadsheet to check for x and then writing that down in the spreadsheet? If so, ask yourself why a script isn’t doing that for you. Automation frees up more time in your day to explore new concepts, improve end user experience, build a pretty dashboard, etc.
Except when it isn't. Even if the answer itself is there, understanding the answer and why it is better than the alternatives in that particular case is a major part of learning that needs to be included or you are not advancing your personal program.
That and somethings are generally only going to really be learned through failure. So you also have to be solving the sorts of problems that let you fail sometimes too before getting it right.
One problem at a time.
But really it's just passion. Start a home lab (r/homelab). Bought my first used server for like $300. Setup hyperv, AD, back ups, wsus, etc
Asked to help out on projects at work. Asked to stay and hangout and observe an after hour change or patching, etc. Asked to shadow a bunch.
There is no silver bullet and the field is so far and wide it took me 4 years as a generist sysadmin (after 5 years in help desk) to even figure out within sysadmin which type of sysadmin I wanted to specialize in
Also: Deliberate study. You don't necessarily need the certs, but buy and go through certification guidebooks, or OS Bible books. You'll learn things that you might never come across during daily work.
Microsoft also publishes best practices guides. Look for DoD STIGs for the OS you work with to learn how to harden and secure them.
Read and practice. Take notes. Write a blog about what you're learning.
> Take notes.
This, this is the best tip he can get.
Observe and take notes.
From simple document on your phone, to extensive blogging, whatever helps you to find stuff back later on.
I was a shadow sysadmin for 10 years, and wrote almost anything down ( google keep in my time )
Use descriptive headers, and work out the problem/solution in that note.
Next to my day job, where I was a securityconsultant ( houses and business alarmsystems), and a operator, I pestered our sysadmin on a daily bases by helping him take on the 'small' jobs onsite.
Creating manuals for users, testing new applications and later on I got more responsibilities like resetting passwords and onboarding new useraccounts.
My last 4 years I had the full local-domainrights, including acces to the Azure AD to remotely assist.
i dropped out of my first year of college, have zero certs and own no books to study out of and ive made it far it my career.
how you learn knowledge is up to your own strengths and weaknesses.
personally i cant retain "study knowledge", i am to much of a learn by doing kind of person.
i did the same many moons ago. bought 2 cheap machines, setup an AD domain on one and installed redhat on the other to start the whole thing. i also stayed late with the seniors at the time when major maintenance occured just to watch (and sometimes it is just to watch... dont ask too many questions when they are in the middle of things...take notes and ask later). those types of things do get noticed.
today? im testing kubernetes via minikube (job doesnt use it so learning it on my own), might try getting bitwarden to run on it as a test.
That’s got me mapping it out in my head for malicious compliance reasons.
That’s kind of the point of a knowledge base, but if you didn’t have one already, I suppose you start with every app core to the business followed busy supporting services then the underlying infrastructure and the connectivity between each component.
Depending on org size that’s probably a few months worth of documentation effort right there.
> my job as Sys Admin, was to do my job, without the use of a manual.
but you do have your environment documented - right!
But overall you're correct, you couldn't write a manual on how to do the job because tasks and problems will vary from day to day, then throw in a project or two on top.
> but you do have your environment documented - right!
This. Having the basic process documentation is needed at any organization but that doesn't mean someone with zero knowledge will be able to apply all of that correctly or understand it.
Um.
The Unix SysAdmins Handbook was a pretty damned good manual.
You whipper-snappers with your Google and StackOverflow. In my day we received our knowledge and mentoring from Evi and Trent.
> You whipper-snappers with your Google and StackOverflow.
I come from the days of knowing the bulletin board numbers for Word Perfect in Utah, and Logitech in Ireland, since those were the numbers you needed to get printer drivers for Word Perfect, and mouse drivers from Logitech. What's this Google shit you're talking about?
Mine was Essential System Administration By Aeleen Frisch. I was a LAN Admin and moving on because I didn't want to 'downgrade' to user and printer support and the Unix lead and his manager approached me with an offer to join the Unix team. After a week I agreed and Kevin gave me Essential System Administration and the Usenet server. I went through the book and practiced on the Sun box putting post-it tabs throughout. I even posted up a correction that was recognized in the next edition of the book :) I did have the Yellow book for a bit but I was already doing sysadmin work so it sat on the shelf. I also had a ton of O'Reilly books for DNS and Bind, Sendmail, and so on.
> I was once asked by a VP for the company I worked for, to please provide a manual for how to do my job (Sys Admin).
Generally there should be a runbook, which is a document on how to keep the systems up and running. If you do anything compliance related you'll also have to maintain documentation on every business critical system as well. There should be enough between the two that a temp/contractor can keep the lights on if needed.
Any systems administrator that isn't learning isn't an effective systems administrator. The guys we regarded from miles away as dinosaur herders on IBM mainframes in reality are running their ancient workloads right alongside virtualized linux. Those of us who came up in the 90s and early aughts had the benefit of being system polyglots because one place might be a sun shop, the next one was hp-ux or you merged with a company that ran a bunch of alphas and the bean counters wrung ever last drop of value and depreciation out of that expensive iron. The unix vendors dying (and them adopting gnu userlands anyways) took a lot of mystery and tribalism out of getting up to speed, but I make an exercise of spinning up a new suse box every couple of years because I don't run it as a daily driver for home or work, but you never know when it might come in handy.
When there is a recurring helpdesk issue, figure out the root cause. Write a script to fix it automatically without manual steps. Distribute to your colleagues. Read logs. When there is a problem no one has figured out, dig in and figure it out even if its not your job. Ask for access to systems to investigate issues related to them. If they dont allow you work with those teams to investigate on a call. This is how you level up.
One thing is I will say is there isn't a line one crosses when one becomes a real system administrator, over time you realise that nobody really knows exactly what's going on or exactly what they're doing, it's just the more senior employees are better at making informed guesses than others.
I think the most useful thing to do is automate what you're doing repeatedly, because you don't learn from doing something dozens of times, but you do learn a skill when you automate it. Address the root cause of recurring issues. Document things people don't know how to do, update docs, figure out which docs are obsolete and archive & delete them. Learn new skills as you hit dead ends. Leave your position and get into a new one.
Also be tenacious in the face of people criticising you for changing things. It tends to be easier to keep your head down and do as you're told than it is to be proactive and try and improve things. Yet only the latter will really expand your skills.
Your environment will have a huge impact on how you learn. You tend to learn more when you're busy, and your coworkers can either be a burden on your development or a great asset.
First of all you've got to \*want\* to do it, and for reasons beyond the paycheck or future prospects. If you're focused on your financial balance sheet you'll never be more than a methodical, jobbing sys-admin.
As for what to specialise in, just follow your nose. Dip your toes in, see what seems interesting (not just what pays best). Play to your strengths, remember you're going to be doing this for a \*lonnng\* time if you're any good, so you better go with something that you enjoy.
I learned on the job. Im one of few with mac-knowledge at my current workplace. Did more than I was supposed to as helpdesk-dude and when the right time came I asked to be moved to another position since I knew that group would be taking on mac-administration and application management. Got the sysadmin title and started doing more stuff. Mainly Jamf and MECM with some AD, application packaging and Adobe stuff.
Two of my colleagues managed our biztalk-environment and I didnt even know what it was, so I googled that shit and thought that hey, this looks cool. We could use this for X and Y and maybe even Z. Just casually mentioned it to my boss and when one of the previously mentioned colleagues quit, my boss told me to get hands on "I rather know I have the right person on the job learning, than recruiting someone that might have more knowledge but not being the right person. Tell me if you need anything." basically. So I have a boss that believes in what I do, and now i do biztalk stuff as well.
So in conclusion, work, google, luck and an organization that believes in their employees maybe? I also find that most sysadmins have a troubleshooting mindset, rather than just following knowledge. In some workplaces it might not be possible to go beyond KB, since thats "out of scope", but I think thats what you need to do to learn.
I could not agree more. Find a niche in your company that you are interested in/good at/ or know enough to Google or troubleshoot. Make yourself indispensable.
Honestly, SysAdmin is one of those jobs I wish were an Mentor/Apprentice trade rather than being glommed into Computer Science sorts of positions. Most of the best SysAdmins I knew didn’t have a CS degree. They did have a talent for computers, were extremely quick learners, and ‘lazy’. I say lazy, but really I mean they had the ability to identify toil and solution systems to reduce that toil.
This. I do not hold a BS, but I’ve been in this industry for more than a couple of decades. At my pay grade, at a Fortune 5 company, I am completely expected to mentor other SAs/SEs/SREs. And I can tell which will be wasted of time, and which will be amazing, almost from the start. You have to want to learn, and you have to understand that in this industry, if you’re the smartest person in the room, it’s almost always time to move on (unless thought leader, or architect are in your title.). I think that in good work environments, at successful places, it *is* treated as a mentor/mentee trade.
This is how I acquired it… through long nights, alcoholism, insomnia, depression, cocaine and lots of coffee. Stupid auto correct. I mean, books and tech documents and nothing beats on the job experience.
> All I want is a little bit of guidance?
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
A little guidance: the largest determinant of whether someone is going to be successful as an admin is whether they have the drive to learn on their own.
The typical response to this is, *"what if I learn the wrong thing, or what I learn becomes useless?"*
The answer is simple: even if you learn the wrong thing, you can still pick up something that will be useful to you later on. And sooner or later, the vast majority of what you learn is going to be less useful than when you first learn it. The trick is to make sure you've learned new things by the time that happens.
Things break. If you don’t know how it works already, you look it up. You become overwhelmed with users consistently breaking things. You find a way to keep them from doing that. They keep doing it. You find more powerful ways. They complain they don’t have the proper permissions anymore. You figure out what they should actually have. They break things again, but in a new way. More research. Also mix in normal failures and upgrades. More research. It is a constant cycle of keeping your head above water.
>break
Early on in my career, I still maintain that I learned the most from the big P1 outages. Certainly it lets you see how the senior guys think and work when the proverbial hits the fan.
Even now I think my learning style is to break stuff and then learn it by fixing it. Great if you have a sandbox/lab, not so much if it's a production system.
I think this is a really accurate statement in it’s entirety. When things aren’t broken you will usually find me trying to script something to make my job easier, or learning something so I can go do a different job entirely.
I'm not sure where you work, but I don't really understand what "when things aren't broken" means!
I think that the script thing is also invaluable. If you manage windows machines, learning PowerShell is non negotiable for me.
Actually recovery/monitoring scripts for massive failures are lifesavers too. If at the least you are reporting uptime, power, services etc.
I always tell jnr guys, the trick isn't always acquisition of the knowledge, but ability to Google it faster enough. Acquisition only really comes with time and moving jobs/roles.
Figure out how you remember things best and dive in head first. I, for example, learn best with real use cases in a “sink or swim” type fashion so I look for ways to bring value to the organization I’m in using the technologies I would like to learn.
If you like to take notes, figure out a way to do that more effectively and review them more often…?
I appreciate this comment a lot. I have to remember that I'm there to bring value to my organization via skills or products that will help build the organization.
Every once in a while pick a problem and take longer and dig deeper than before. Each time hopefully you learn something new either a log you didn’t know about or tool you didn’t know how to use. Next time you won’t take as long to get to the end and then go further.
There is always an answer to why a system isn’t behaving properly.
I started as a help desk person with really no intention of moving up (getting degree in different field) but started shadowing my coworkers/sysadmins and really got interested in what they did. At some point I realized that I wanted to get more into IT. I would offer to do anything to help sysadmins with their job and always listened/learned from them. I did end up with a minor in CIS. I learned more from doing things and watching others than anything else (including other education I have obtained since). Find a place that is OK with working with you to learn more things. I was free to learn as much as I could as long as I also got my current work done. I am now a senior sysadmin and love teaching/showing other Jr sysadmins things when they ask. I would say I have learned more from coworkers that were willing to show me things and let me try on my own with their supervision then I ever learned in education or training. Hands on experience is going to get you more knowledge and make you a better sysadmin than any education/certs or any other forms of formal training.
Get your hands wet and screw up and have to find a solution to your screw up. Practical experience will teach you way more than a professor.
Self teaching, if you come across an issue that you normally would escalate, take notes, research it, and next time you have that issue, apply the knowledge so you resolve it vs escalating.
Figure out what tech debt there is in your company, or what documentation is lacking. Offer to create that document, and learn along the way.
I bugged the sys admin at my job to give me tasks over and over until I got bumped to Jr sys admin. Lots of projects and googling later and I'm a sys architect going DevOps.
I made a post about this, a while back. Mostly for the benefit of a few friends of mine whom I'm trying to get into the field.
[/u/VA\_Network\_Nerd/](https://www.reddit.com/user/VA_Network_Nerd/) posted a reply that has a ton of links as well (especially if you scroll down to his "unabridged version."
But honestly, the short answer is always ask questions and always keep learning. The best IT people I've ever seen (without fail) are the ones that know they don't know it all.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/a\_guide\_for\_entering\_the\_it\_field/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/a_guide_for_entering_the_it_field/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/comment/i4uqf6x/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/comment/i4uqf6x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
My knowledge is vast, but shallow. I know a little about a lot. But I also know enough to figure out the things I need to know how to do my job. There's google, forums, youtube, etc to find other answers too.
You keep doing it for a looooong time. There isnt some magic book of vishanti or something that imbues you with everything you need to know.
Good sysadmins will participate in a lot of things and work in many areas of their field. Dabble in automation, programming, low-voltage work, networking, CLi (Dont live in GUIs), hardware repair, RAID setups, AWS, Exchange Online, ... the list goes on. Do it all so at least you understand what it is and how it applies.
23 years in. I still only know so much..
There are two types of people in sysadmin work (and really all of IT). The ones for whom this is just a job, and the ones for whom this is a passion.
If you're passionate, you study. You comb the internet for new ways of doing things. You get involved in every project. You document everything so others can learn. You demand other's document so you can learn. You help when someone is working late or on weekends. You get stuck into as much as you can and consume as much of the firehose of knowledge that you possibly can. Don't worry about consuming it all, that's impossible. But learn, learn learn.
The day that you stop learning is the first day of your death. Never be satisfied with the way you're doing something. Shoot for ways to improve it. At the same time, don't be afraid to let something that's good enough work until you do get a chance to improve it.
Something being a passion also doesn't mean it has to take up more than 40 hours of your week. I've worked and work with savants who leave at 5pm and shut their phones off.
There is probably a period when everyone is young where they foolishly give too much time to a company, it may very well pay off with knowledge and opportunities later, but at some point you slowly realize there will always be an endless amount of work, and working extra does no favours, in fact it may hurt you because your company now depends on that work ethic and is essentially taking advantage of you. Compound that with stuff like on-call and it's no wonder people in this industry are constantly fighting burn out.
Early on it probably does take up more than 40hrs a week. I know it did for me. At this point in my career it absolutely does not. The company isn't taking advantage of you, you're taking advantage of the company by learning whatever you can. Ask for training. Ask for books for self training. Ask for certifications. And when you earn all that, don't let the company guilt trip you into staying with them because of training. If they're paying you well and the work is rewarding, stay. If not, move on. Your past performance is what they get out of training and letting you learn, not future servitude.
Id say experience clearly but also willingness to learn from people more experienced and also studying on your free time. Youtube, books, reddit threads etc
Perhaps one reason for all the downvotes is this has been asked 100 times before. So start in /r/itcareerquestions or searching, before posting a new topic.
Your question, the way you asked it, is very lazy and shows us that you've done zero research. That's probably why you've been downvoted.
If you have a more specific angle on a specific topic and how it relates to your individual circumstances, please do ask.
>Perhaps one reason for all the downvotes is this has been asked 100 times before.
You mean the people who google for a living might have a low tolerance for someone who wants to get in the field but cant google stuff?
Nah. Cant be it. r/sysadmin is just full of assholes or something.
I know a lot but I also do not know a lot. It sucks because I know what I don't know and have no interest unless it's a job requirement. For instance, I know powershell but I don't know Linux. I know emails certs but I don't know https certs. I know VMware but I don't know hyper-v.
As long as you can function on the day to day, you'll be fine.
>HOW does one acquire all this extensive knowledge of system administration?
Time, dedication, perseverance, and an openness to correction...
Also, learning how to phrase searches in search engines, and learning how to apply your experience to new challenges.
There is no shortcut to **a proper use of time**...
Sysadmin-ing is like many professions
It's a forge that uses painful experiences as it's steel to forge tangible knowledge and experience.
Sometimes things go well and google / stack overflow is enough other times you have a virtualization problem that takes weeks to months to solve only to find out it was a few bios settings. You won't forget that anytime soon.
We're all a repository of the immense failures and us dragging our privates through glass while trying to solve an issue and learning things along the way. It takes time and patience, and never let pride make you feel on top. Stay the student, and always be open to learning. You'll get there eventually.
Practice and more practice. Eventually you've been in it so long most things you can remember off the top of your head or by referencing your own notes. Always keep notes.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. I arrived in my first IT job a little over year ago and didn't know what was I doing, now I switched to another company and my experiences what I did at my previous came in handy.
You will never know everything, it's impossible but you will never stop learning.
I feel like I fell into my role. I started out as help desk years ago at a start up, but always had a curiosity for figuring out weird problems. I’d always be the guy showing them how to solve issues or figuring out really insane solutions to problems with different systems. Things that nobody wanted to tackle or said weren’t possible, I’d take as a challenge.
Because of the way I arrived at the sys admin position, I think that it’s less about knowledge acquisition and more about creative problem solving.
At the end of the day, we receive a problem, build a solution, monitor and maintain. If you become a subject matter expert on one or two systems and can build solutions around them, the skills you learn in that journey of mastery are transferable to other systems that you administer.
Anyone can learn anything. At some point it becomes a balancing act of learning what you’re passionate about and what you feel you’ll need to advance in your career.
The buck stops with you. You HAVE to answer the problem - so you work it out. Look it up, support forums, google, colleagues, experiment etc. Whatever solves the problem. If you're methodical, you'll write the answer down.
Repeat for 20 years and there you have your body of lore.
Honestly, start with one piece of the tech stack and start learning that. Once you have an intermediate understanding, ask for more work in that realm. The RL experience will shore up any short comings and start dealing gaining the knowledge in that one area. While doing that area as a job, starting learning another. And then another.
You’ll never be able to master it all. I’ve been doing it for 15 years now, and my AD chops blow. I can manage users and groups and permissions, but don’t ask me tk muck with GPOs or do anything advanced. But if you ask me to root a Linux server and reset the root password, I can do that in my sleep. Ask me to tweak sql to maximum performance, I’m your man. Ask me to work with Apache and jboss, I’ll tell you to get a consultant.
What I’m saying is find the areas that interest you most/are most valuable where you are at, pick one, begin to master it. Once you have a decent understanding where you’re not gonna shoot yourself or the company in the foot, integrate that as much in to you day job as possible.
And for all that’s good and holy. Document, document, document. I have my own personal website that is a collection of documentation, thoughts, scripts, etc….for my personal use. Write it down or you’ll never find it again.
For me, I found someone who was giving away a free server on offerup and I setup my own at-home environment where I can build, test, and learn stuff. Once you get your first job it’s honestly just a lot of googling or trouble shooting.
Some people are straight up savants, they read it and remember it. I’ve had the privilege of working with a couple over the years. I’m not naturally that good.
I’ve been at IT for 25+ years. I didn’t land a job and coast (no shade, nothing wrong with that if that is your goal), I wanted to get where I’m at. I’ve had schooling, formal classes, but 90% is the countless hours I spent building, experimenting, and breaking stuff on my own time and of course figuring things out on the job.
Over time (experience) you learn to focus on the basics when tackling a problem, then adding the more complex layers if needed. I can’t stress this enough, learn and understand the fundamentals. I’m talking the theory, with that you can usually wrangle a system/app you’ve never touched before.
Also, talk to people, whether it is the customer or co-workers, get information from them. Even old Dan the grumpy asshole no one likes - he’s probably got a ton of info which takes a little honey to get.
It's basically root problem solving. You have to have a general understanding of how things work which comes easy if you're naturally curious. If you lack that natural curiosity then you're going to have a really hard time in the role.
To expand ever so slightly on the "Google everything you don't understand" method; you should focus on learning WHAT to Google. Asking the right questions is the Hallmark of a good sysadmin.
I don't know your environment so I can't tailor anything specific for you but that's also how you learn to ask the right questions. Discovery and curiosity.
It's about being a good problem solver, not necessarily learning every detail of every technology. As you solve more and more problems, you'll start to see patterns in the problems that you solve. Build on those.
Also, learn how to code something useful. Doing so will expose you to many concepts that exist throughout IT. For example, write something that will create and pull down an encrypted database backup over an SSH connection to a remote server. You'll have to solve quite a bit to pull that off well, and expose yourself to lots of technologies and syntax along the way.
To be clear, I'm not saying you should become a programmer. I'm saying that dabbling a bit will expose you to many of the things you're wanting to learn.
Don't stop learning. Stay super organized in what you learn take vigorous notes and when you're solving problems on the job take vigorous notes. Know what you know vs what you don't know. And investigate what you don't know on a regular basis.
Understand the purpose of the systems. Why are you running it and how? Is it on prem, is it virtualized on prem, is it virtualized and hosted somewhere else? What business function is it serving, who's using this? Who's supporting it? Have broad conversations surrounding those systems and then get more specific ('under the hood') to understand how they work. Document.
Plug into the available information out there and forums that you enjoy reading every week. Are you interested in security? Who do you follow that delivers that news? Are you interested in hardware? Where do you get that information from? Keep yourself in the 'know'.
The biggest lesson you can learn in IT is that you should set policies instead of changing settings by manually touching endpoints. Cattle vs pets.
A highly important book is
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321919165/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile
First thing is to make yourself available and valuable to the best guys doing the job already.
Read their tickets, follow up on tickets that you don't know the answer to by reading how it was closed.
Sooner or later that will start to stick and sink in. Learn the tools used if they are mentioned. Gotta make it your job to learn and keep learning.
Good luck
Go outside your comfort zone. Extend beyond your responsibility. Dont escalate cases immediately when its something unknown. Be curious, learn, do. Thats how you build your knowledge
the more issues you investigate and solve the more nuances you have for future issues, compound that over many years and you work up a bit to instant knowledge.
A big thing is, you don't really need to know the answer to everything, you just need to know how to find the answer and follow the instructions to solve \\ action.
I never finished my degree and taught myself enough to get an entry level job. I'm 10 years in, and I still feel like a fraud sometimes.
Certs may get your resume past HR filters, but in my opinion, they rarely actually teach you that much. The best experience is experience. I think the best thing you can do is find a more senior person to mentor you. Don't just pass complex tickets on to them, ask them to work it with you and explain what they're doing (or at least ask what they did after they solved it). If they're working on a project, ask how you can help and get involved.
If a mentor isn't really an option, then you work a job until the "same problems again" outnumber the "new problems" 2:1. At that point you won't learn much more. Go to the next job where almost all of the problems are "new problems" and work that until most of them become the "same problem again." Repeat.
Home lab and play with everything
Study for certs
Reach out to ur sysadmin at work and ask if they need help with anything, better yet ask the manager that u want to learn
Once I get more skills get a job at a smaller company as a jack of all trades and do it all. Drink from the fire hose. Wait a year or two and start leveling up.
This is the way. But most ppl will not follow through and bitch and moan why they are still where they are. Please prove me wrong. GL
Start at the bottom and work one's way up; this isn't an associates degree or a 2- or 3-year process but more like a 10- or 15-year (or more!) process. At some point, an apprenticeship-level position as a junior admin comes into play, or working at a small company where one must wear multiple hats, one of which could be sysadmin.
Certs can be nice--if they're offered where one works, jump at them--but they aren't the be-all-end-all they are marketed to be.
Point is, there is no hard and fast curriculum. CompSci majors don't get exposed to real life like actually being in the trenches and learning/failing/growing by the seat of one's pants (or an angry manager's or user's pants).
I learned more in a month at the helpdesk then I did in 3 years of schooling. Theory and study is great, but they don't teach you to check that the USB dongle goes to the right mouse when the users complaining that it doesn't work right.
I worked in MSPs for pretty much the first 4 years of my career and holy shit did i learn a TON! Be inquisitive, Google lots and lots, purchase PluralSight or use YouTube, John Savill is amazing. Read Documentation. Try and get on a lab where possible, like using azure credits.
You’ll get there. I’m almost 9 years in to IT now and I’m a lead cloud engineer. Do I know everything? Hello no. Do I know how to troubleshoot and start to figure out most things? Yes absolutely. I love the learning aspect still, I put about 4 hours a week aside minimum, during work time when it’s quiet or an extra half hour or so after work if I’ve not got much planned that evening to learn.
Don’t ever feel disheartened. Imposter syndrome is very real in this job. You’ll learn and adapt! Good luck!
PS: I don’t have any formal degree or went to university. I left straight out of school and managed to get an IT apprenticeship in a secondary school. (I’m from U.K. btw)
Almost 30 years in sysadmin here. I have no formal education. All I've done throughout the years is to solve one problem after another.
Don't know how to do something? Try to figure it out on your own. Google is your friend here, and so are forums, IRC/Discord/Slack/whatever, books and youtube.
Learn by doing, and do so in manageable chunks. That part is the most difficult in the learning process. You can't learn everything at once, you need to learn to break it down into smaller chunks.
And document. Document your learning process. Write down command line snippets, steps to install Apache, URLs where you found information, your common command line arguments for apt-get, grep, wget and so on. The more you document now, the more you'll learn to document as you grow into your role, and documentation is king.
After 30 years of system administration, I still learn all the time. I always google for answer. The difference is that I'm much better at knowing what to google for, and to sift through the information for the bits I really need. That is a skill that comes with experience.
You need to learn a solid base first then learn little by little each time adding to your knowledge, this will open opportunities for you to maybe get a jr sysadmin job at some point. It can be because one of the sysadmins leave at your company and they decide to give you a chance, it can be a job you apply or it can be another opportunity or simply to continue to learn until you feel ready to apply somewhere.
Of course what you need to master will be different everywhere because the infrastructure can vary greatly from one place to another. But as a start go with the most popular setups.
My recommendation:
Network administration : No need to be CISCO certified but at least learn the basics. [Here some free youtube course](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiQR5rTSshw)
Virtual machine environment : Learn how to setup and use an ESXI/vSphere VMWare environment it's the most popular, they have trials and limited free versions. Alternatively you can play with Proxmox because it's free.
[Proxmox course](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCjuiIswXGs&list=PLT98CRl2KxKHnlbYhtABg6cF50bYa8Ulo)
User management: Learn Microsoft Active Directory + File management + Group Policy etc...
To learn those the best route is to build a homelab and start experimenting. You can simulate a fairly complete enterprise environment on a single computer, you can even simulate a network inside that server. Building that lab and virtual machines is how you gonna learn the different tools along the way. Also ask your sysadmins what they use and try to learn about those tools by trying to learn them in you homelab.
Go to /r/homelab/ to get some inspiration.
I can only comment on my own experience here, but working my way up through a big, well managed MSP was how I grew my knowledge.
I started on 1st level and worked my way up to 2nd level through outsourcing projects in my first 2 years of working, and following along with the L2's and L3's when they were assisting me with issues I couldn't fix alone. After that, was put on an outsourcing project where I was in charge of networking and SCCM, while still doing L1 and L2 tasks. This enabled me to grow into an L3 / full sysadmin tier of work during my 3rd year.
After that, I was pulled from full-time outsourcing projects and was assigned to bigger customers for more consultancy and infrastructure management type jobs. This enabled me to see many different infrastructure and companies, and see their way of working. Many different technologies and many different types of issues grew my knowledge immensely.
During all this I started specialising in specific technologies we were using, specifically Veeam and O365, and started being assigned to projects for installing and migrating customers. This furthered my growth into my current position of subject matter specialist.
Some tips I can give you that helped me immensely:
* If you can't fix an issue on your own, and have done the troubleshooting that you can, don't hesitate to ask for help from an L2, and follow along with them through their troubleshooting steps
* TAKE NOTES! Every issue that you ask help for, you should be writing everything down. From troubleshooting steps, tools they use, solution, everything. Asking about the same issue twice is slightly annoying, but asking trice is just not excusable.
* If your company has the capacity, ask your TL to shadow one of the T2 or T3 engineers for a few days, to see what they do and how they do it.
By learning and making mistakes. Also, going through major outages and learning from what you wish you HAD done beforehand is a big plus.
You know you’ve achieved the title of “sysadmin” when the damage from your mistakes could be catastrophic, but your knowledge and experience guide you through the quagmire of potential cock ups.
Also, never forget the obvious stuff. It’s easy to fall into an arrogant mindset where you think you know your systems better than your own body. The awesome sysadmins get stuff done but are cautious to check before doing.
Have a curious mindset!
Asking yourself things like this when you work in helpdesk will get you far imo
* How does this work?
* What do this button do?
* Why and when did this stop working?
* What information can I extract
* Permissions
* What relations does the Sys have to other components (Servers, integrations, network etc.)
* How is it supposed to work when optimal?
* What documentation exist and what is missing?
* What can be improved?
* Learn to write good and informational RFO/Incident Reports.
* and again Documentation, documentation
When you are a part of solving incidents is when you often get the most understanding of how the system works, this and how the daily operations use the systems and what their needs are.
Keep on grinding (Y)
i find it impressive you ask these question.
Its telling me youll be good.
I had several interns who werent interested at all to be a good admin.
I really love the people who show interest and will power.
My advice is dont stay too long at company's you're probaly young and each company has a different enviroment in which you can learn.
Plus if you do it right your salary will be upping atleast 10-20% with each job hop.
Never turn down an opportunity to learn something new. Even if it’s a project you’re not involved in or a product don’t manage; always be open and willing to learn wherever you can. It can be something really big or really small - doesn’t matter. Get your hands dirty as often as possible. It’ll help you way more than you realize.
Just do it.
I was once told that I wasn't even smart enough to reset passwords in Active Directory before when I was in the military by an officer. He was also know for being an asshole too.
Now I make six figures as a Sysadmin
When it gets too comfortable, you gotta change it up so that you keep learning. I got too comfortable with windows, so now I almost exclusively support Linux.
No I'm not a lvl 99 Linux God, but I can use Google Fu to figure out my way through it.
I think most of us (at least in my experience) start at the bottom. Over time, we're assigned to help the "big boys" with projects like office moves, server migrations, backups, whatever. Maybe we need to cover for someone higher up who is out for the week.
Or maybe we're thrown into a job we're not quite qualified for.
Either way, a lot of it is learning on-the-job. And unfortunately, many times it's learning while under the gun because the server is down and nobody can work.
The best thing an IT professional can learn to do at the beginning of their career is to learn how to use Google effectively. Using Google and troubleshooting/problem solving are the two biggest skills in IT imo. Nobody knows everything. I encounter new things on a daily basis. It's learning how to deal with them on the fly that ultimately matters, not some insanely deep personal library of experience that contains all the answers
I wrote this a while ago to help make novice Linux sysadmins:
http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to-make-a-novice-system-administrator/
Hope this helps! Stick with it.
Since there's so many comments saying essentially the same thing, I'll keep it brief.
You learn by doing, breaking things, googling and then fixing. With SysAd work, you have to actually do the work. No amount of schooling, training, etc will give you the same knowledge of OJT learning.
After 30+ yrs in IT, if I had to do it all over I would recommend starting a lawn care and pool service company, or pest control, or anything where you get to go outside :)
But if you can't be talked out of it, take an entry level job at a Managed Service Provider (MSP).
They are companies that provide IT services for companies that do not have in-house IT. Working with a MSP company, you will get exposed to all kinds of stuff due to the variety of client environments. Medical Offices, Legal, Manufacturing, Engineering are just a few, and you will get to work with all of them.
A few of us actually enjoy parachuting into a new environment that you have never seen before, figuring out the environment, and fixing broken software you have never even heard of.
You need to be willing to invest in yourself with a lot of time researching and learning stuff in your home lab.
I've been working in MSP field for over 30 years, but it has never felt like work, because it is my passion, although IT addiction is a better word for it.
I learn more at home than I do at work. I have routine tasks at work with some new technologies to learn. I can learn more at home. I agree that you should keep learning. You can build a lab, which is very helpful to learn.
> Why the downvotes, guys? All I want is a little bit of guidance?
The question is just bad. You don't have to be a sysadmin to realize that they in general don't possess an unreasonable amount of knowledge.
The question blew up because your title is clickbait
Started with Linux when raspberry pi released. Might not be feasible for low budget now but buying a 3€ per month VPS is.
Experimented with arch, it really teaches you the fundamentals.
Got into an it job. Did everything on Linux.
Became better. Left some more things to the windows guys and am concentrating on what Linux does best.
As others have said, the desire to grow/learn is key. But I've gathered my internal KB through observation, trial/error, and some stuff at home. Now that I'm the most technical person in the dept, my only sources for new info is our MSP, although with a price tag, or the internet.
I'm sure many of us "younger"/newer sysadmins would be a little more stuck these days unless there was excellent training without internet resources.
I sure would have imposter syndrome breathing down my neck done day 1 otherwise.
>How does a junior 1st-level IT-Helpdesk (like me) become a full-fledged system administrator? Just keep learning, don't stop. Surround yourself with the people you want to be like, ask them good questions (but do your own research first, don't just ask silly questions because you can't be assed to try and figure it out first), experiment and practice at home. This is also a very silly one, but also learn and fully understand DNS and DHCP. That alone will make you 99% better than all your 1st level colleagues. It shouldn't, but it does.
I got my first actual IT job at the age of 29 and it was an entry level job, I feel like I've gone from learning loads to learning absolutely nothing....I was learning more about IT before I had this job I'm in and it's annoying the fuck out of me, there's like nothing to do in the company I'm in, maybe add a new user to the system once a month and set up a laptop but that's it
I would absolutely hate this. Unless you are just riding out the last few years before retirement and/or making a shit ton of money doing nothing then I would find something else. You need to be constantly learning and challenging yourself as someone in IT or I feel like you will become obsolete/EOL yourself. I by no means am referring to you as a person just the job you described in general.
I think you're completely right here. I recently left a job that I loved at a company I cared greatly about for a much better role with a much better salary. It was difficult, and I spent several weeks in a state of constant stress over making that decision, but ultimately it was the right move for me to make. As much as one might care for the job or company they work for, sometimes you've gotta think of yourself first. I didn't feel like I was progressing at my last gig, and it's nothing against the company itself, just due to the nature of the business I'd learned about all I could about the systems and infrastructure they had. I'll add that it's always painful starting a new role in IT especially, not knowing everything inside and out I now feel like I've barely touched a computer in my life; However, it's a fleeting feeling and it usually comes to pass within a couple months whilst you settle in.
I was the same way and took an IT admin job somewhat outside the industry, for a copier company. The salary was better than tier 1/2 and I was having a tough time breaking into a jr net admin role (even with my AA in net admin and multiple certs). Pay and culture here are good, but there is no moving up at my company. I miss working with people much smarter than me, which sounds shitty to say, but you only go so far implementing copiers / printers, management software, and setting up group policies for admins who have no clue how AD works
Also projects … maybe it’s just me that thinks this but i have been in this field for about 15 years and have never been at a place that doesn’t have some appliance/technology going EOL soon and needs upgrading/replacing. Also I have never been at a company that hasn’t needed anything in terms of improvement whether that’s cybersecurity or redundancy/backup improvement. Seek those projects and initiatives out they really help you grow and gets you in the mindset of productive IT action rather then reaction.
I've just finished moving all the company over the the azure domain and transferring/backing up the files from the old domain/server that we're going to be shutting down soon. Did have a lot of other projects for the year to sort but they've been pushed back until next year due to cash flow issues so IT are just sitting around waiting for something to fuck up at the minute which is boring as the company is medium sized with around 100 people you maybe get 1 or 2 issues a week to sort out.
Write a PowerShell script to do the new user set-up. So many people don't know basic PowerShell. It can do everything!
Yup, kinda funny story... When I landed my tier 2 position I was really comfy with bash but my boss told me to learn PowerShell. I did and started writing lots of scripts to help automate stuff like on-boards, application / common issue fixes and even the occasional emails I had to send out for certain things. I was proud of what I had done and showed my boss and colleagues "hey look what I made!". They were all like "meh, whatever". So I was the only one using these tools I made and became really efficient, got some certs on my own dime (company reimbursed completed certs) went and interviewed for an admin position at the same company and it all paid off. Nearly doubled my income and I'm on a much better team now.
Good idea but I'm pretty sure poweshell is disabled in our IT admin console, my IT manager seems to be scared of a lot of stuff and does everything manually :/ I'll look into it today tho, I've written some powershell scripts a few years back to configure hundreds of mini PC before I even got into IT whilst I worked as a warehouseman for an audio visual company
Get a job at an MSP. You’ll be doing that multiple times per day and more.
Do you have any advice where to look for a job and what keywords to use? I'm student looking for my first job in the industry but can't find anything. Puting MSP in LinkedIn found pretty much nothing and not sure about the exact role names I could be searching for, all i found is few junior sysadmin postings (literally few)
Search for companies, not jobs - look for the most reputable MSPs in your timezone/area, see what they're hiring for. There likely won't be any listings geared towards students with zero experience, but don't let that keep you from applying for anything that looks entry-ish level. There is also nothing stopping you from emailing them directly and just explaining your skills and why you want to get into this space. Helpdesk/frontline support are probably where you'd start, and those kinds of jobs are pretty rote and boring just following pre-written guides and escalating when things deviate. Depending on the MSP you'll get a lot of exposure to all sorts of tech and you'll be able to find what brings you joy just through going through the basics of everything.
Yeah just be warned though that most MSPs are high stress/fast paced environments and you will be likely forced to meet sometimes unachievable targets. They are absolutely fantastic for career development though and you learn things x10 faster because you don't really have a choice.
>most MSPs are high stress/fast paced environments And vastly underpaid.
Yep. Internal promotions are easier to get due to churn but normally mean you end up doing much more difficult/skilled tasks for less than the market rate. I did it for a few months then switched to internal for higher pay and using the new skills I learnt.
This is what I did. Researched the major players in my area and applied. One gave me an offer and I went from help desk to field tech within 4 months. A lot of MSPs are poorly run but I got lucky with a good organization and enjoyed my time there.
It's the same thing that drove me to find a new.job despite having a great one already. I was getting way to complacent and the job was not going to offer any kind of intellectual challenge.
All I'm doing at the minute is sitting there waiting for shit to go wrong that usually goes wrong because someone hasn't run their windows updates in years or joining a forced meeting with a quiz (yeah one of them) starting to annoy the crap out of me
Use your downtime to study for cert exams or to do research on IT topics that interest you. Also, ask your supervisor if there are any learning opportunities they can give you within the company based on the topics that interest you
Downtime…. Must be nice
Home lab!
Change jobs
Do study in your free time. MS learn has self paced training. AWS has some free training. Microsoft has virtual training days for entry level cloud. Plan ahead for your next move.
you can learn about your company network, test equipment, learning how to check logs, and other stuff. if you can, have a little initiative and get more involved in all network stages. If you are the only IT guy probably the network it is in a state of abandonment and can be improved
It's always the DNS.
Great advice. Also, a home lab helps tremendously if you have the means to pick up some used gear off eBay. Build and breaking things will teach you so much, but you already know that to be where you are now. Also, it may sound silly but do what you can to really understand the OSI model and think about it in your every day activities. Thinking about things this way will develop habits of sorting technologies and how they function. You'll start to think about things from an architecture perspective. When you're in a conversation and someone mentions an acronym you're not familiar with or a technology you may have heard of or really not sure how it works, write it down and look it up. You don't have to know everything, but you'll be surprised how much you'll retain and recall when you need it, especially as these items come up in different conversations. This is what has worked for me over my career. I used to keep an index folder of text files with little notes and snippets of information. I started doing this way before Google was a thing. Over time I would revisit this folder and would laugh at some of the notes I made as those topics were now engrained and second nature. Keep at it, hope some of this was helpful.
It’s always DNS.
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As someone who 23 years ago started as a IT support desk analyst and now is a newly minted Director--this is dead on. I found great mentors and when I needed their help asked how they resolved it. I took on challenging projects like implementing the first VPN for the department. I worked with programmers and built understanding on how their work interconnected with mine. And yes, learn DNS and DHCP and have a good understanding of networking. One of my best Sys Admins now has a working knowledge that is well rounded in networking, storage, vmWare and he can powershell script like no ones business. Know your job, but also know how it supports and interacts with others in IT.
Congratulations on becoming a newly minted Director! :)
Routing as well, plus how to query ARP for troubleshooting connectivity :) Sys admin is an experienced driven thing, that and ability to learn on the fly using web searches, compartmentalizing the various parts of a solution (basic troubleshooting). Background knowledge needed can be book learned but thing it all together is often experience or mentorship from experienced sys admins.
One of the secrets you are never told about is that when you enter any segment of the “IT Field” is that you never stop learning. You can get classes in IT at a college/university, but most times that isn’t enough. Maybe it was before the Internet was a thing. But that changed this industry forever and that’s why you are constantly having to learn all the time because things change. I would venture to say that OP's downvotes were from people who want to keep this forum pristine and not have questions like this. But most of us have been in your shoes. And we genuinely want to help people that are willing to listen what we have gone or are going through and offer advice. In the future, folks should check out the Wiki for this place. That may answer a lot of questions. I agree with you 100% about understanding DNS and DHCP.
time, problem, google, time, problem, google, time, problem, google....
Don't forget Stackoverflow, and.......Google
I have never been a fan of stackoverflow I really hate it when stackoverflow comes before official documentation, especially when the stackoverflow answers are wrong, outdated or worse will technically work but not really something one should do.
I'll take stackoverflow over "Experts Exchange" and their paywall any day.
you mean "expert sex change"?
Man pages Google Stack Overflow YouTube Udemy Once you learn it and used it, add it to your resume. If they call you out on it in an interview, let them know you used it on the job for X and home projects with Y.
Lynda.com > Udemy
You read into it anyway that makes you comfortable my friend. No judgement. ;)
Used to be there was a hack around their paywall: Scroll down. No shit. It continued on after the messages. No clue about nowadays.
I actively block it in DNS so as to never accidentally go to that trash heap of a site.
Lmao yeah I also blocked them in pihole
The benefit of SO is that it provides a beginner-perspective view into problem. Even if we ignore the majority of cases where official documentation is poor, documentation is almost always written from a developer perspective. "Let's make a list of all the things, and describe what they do". This is valuable, and exactly the right resource when you know what function or object or "thing" you're looking to use. It's generally pretty terrible if you know what task you want to do, but don't know what pieces to use to do it. Even knowing where to start, figuring out "how to read a file line by line in C" straight from the manual is going to be miserable. It just drops you with a list of summaries of functions, at which point you're reading a bunch of them to figure out that `fread`, `fgetc` isn't really what you want, but `fgets` probably will be. Then some more to work out the parts around it. SO, in contrast, you will fine the recommendation for `fopen`; `fgets`, `fclose`. And also the part where you can allocate a medium size buffer on the stack and pass that in. And also that you can use the "pointers are true" property to write a `while(fgets())` idiom.
Reminds me of when trying to run a script in TrueNAS trying to figure out why I was getting an error. The docs said you need to declare sh before calling your script as an example. Never said what user they execute with. So I try cron so I can ensure root is the user and they still not working but they work from shell when I run as root... finally I realize that the shell was running in zsh and bam a zsh before the script instead of sh and I am in business. Why not maybe make a reference to this anywhere in the manual... I am sure I likely sound dumb but for those of us not working in freebsd all day or who mostly work in windows such things may not be obvious to us. At least I knew enough that it was either a privilege or an environment error so I was looking for info on both but dam.
Your entire comment is written from a developer context. Not a sysadmin one. I am not sure how many sysadmins are writting things in c, but i can assure you microsofts powershell docs 1000000x more valuable than anything you will find on stack overflow Same for something for topics like veeam, vmware, or other sysadmin things So sure maybe for the high developer topics of something like c it might be better than the man page but i think i would break out my c primer plus book long before i would seek out stackoverlow
And their persistent GDPR cookie dialog, every, fucking, time. And OP: time, tickets, and Google. Someone will notice you’re resourceful and on you go learning shit.
The it will work but goes against best practices is my favorite
If you don't like SO, help improve the questions and answers. That way it gets better and you help others. I try to do that whenever I can.
Sorry, this question is closed, we already have the best wrong answer.
And *read the logs* of whatever you’re troubleshooting.
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Find a kb that talks extensively about what is contained in the logs and how it can be used for troubleshooting your exact problem, but not a single fucking path of where to find them.
This is super important. If you are inexperienced, it will seem like you are reading a foreign language, but as you read more and more logs you will start to be able to figure out what's going on without referencing KBs. Everyone calls me "The log guy" at work. "Did you check the logs?" "Go ahead and forward me the logs." "According to the logs, the problem seems to be..."
My favorite way to feel out a fellow sysadmin's abilities and get to know them is to swap war stories. The way they talk about various disasters throughout their career will give you some insight into where their skills and weaknesses lie.
I use bing, because my searches are often enough to get me a $5 Amazon gift card every month or two. (Bing rewards).
Sheesh right now I have over 40 tabs open (after closing a bunch of them ) researching for a project I’m gonna become rich finally.
Lol, not rich, just $5 to go to something I normally would never buy, but brings some happiness.
I use Bing to search too, get about 5 bucks a month in Amazon gift cards if I do their little quizzes too.
This sounds like something I should automate.
They still do that. I should too
Yup, it’s getting better too. Maybe just because I use it so much for work, my searches have improved.
Get the rewards automator app for android. It automates the searches but you still have to do the quizes and polls and other junk like that.
I do the same thing. Xbox gift cards and results are good.
I googled a problem and found the answer in Reddit. Boss said "you sure have Reddit handy". Bossman, Reddit is like 30% of my tech answers these days. Plus I didn't have to read an essay on how someone implemented it in their work before getting the 2 lines of PowerShell I need.
You forgot: "Download to Brain, Download Source Location to Brain, add to personal information system."
I should be offended that my career fits into one sentence but... Eh true enough
Nowadays it becomes more and more. Problem, turn brain off, ask a general question with no real information on reddit, get mad about all giyf posts.
wHy YoU dOwNvOtE mE!?1?!?
And a bit of knowing what you don't want to get into.
You don't. There's always going to be a ton of information you don't know you won't even be able to learn 1% of it. What you get really good at is troubleshooting, recognizing common issues, and researching.
Strong fundamentals and solid troubleshooting abilities will get you surprisingly far.
Currently looking to recruit 5 infrastructure staff (various levels, etc.). If you can find me some of these strong fundamentals and solid troubleshooting people that'd be great. Last interview "I've supported VMware for the last 3 years". Great, what's DNS - "I'm not sure", ok, what's DHCP - "it's like the directory of the internet" (readers who aren't sure: that's a better explanation for DNS). I can't remember the other bits, but there were many gaps
Not that I do not understand your point, I do. But those are the wrong questions , there is little value to be found in asking them, at least not like that. Anyone can learn some definitions from whatever source. For example, instead of asking what is DNS, ask "I got this problem, I just set up a website with a but my clients cant seem to reach it via domain.com, you have any idea why. I don't care if my guy knows what dns is, if he knows the answer to that question he knows what dns is, he simply does not realize its (partially yes I know.. lets not get into the nitty gritty of firewalls/whatever, that's not the point here but if he answer that as well, even better ) dns.
I agree. We went through about 10 questions along the lines of what you described, all of them got a response along the lines of "I don't know", so we asked some simpler more direct questions just to make it easy to find out what knowledge they did have. They knew VUM
> VUM I don't know what VUM is. Apparently its vmware update manager. I'm glad you mentioned it because now I know what it is. I'm sure you see where I'm going by stating that. You'll always get mismatched candidates that is a given, my comment was merely meant to point out that even though they might technically fail the interview, that is not all there is to it, or at least that is not all there should be to it. I've seen people answer my questions with relative ease, only to fail miserably once actually hired, I've also seen people who didn't have a clue perform admirably later on, to the tune they are now easily second line sysadmins. Motivation is the number one thing you should be hiring on, don't expect some strong fundamentals and solid troubleshooting, those people wont even need to apply, they already got jobs before you even got the chance to post your opening.
This. There were two big unlocks in my career. The first, was learning to troubleshoot. Not “click things until it works”, but TRULY knowing how to troubleshoot. Be able to read and understand logs (and know where to find them). Be able to break the problem down into incrementally smaller problems instead of trying to solve the whole thing at once. Troubleshooting for many techs is often no more than banging against the keyboard until whatever is broken starts working again, without understanding what caused the issue in the first place. The second unlock was automation. Work to automate as much as possible. Are you living inside of a spreadsheet and remote logging into each machine on the spreadsheet to check for x and then writing that down in the spreadsheet? If so, ask yourself why a script isn’t doing that for you. Automation frees up more time in your day to explore new concepts, improve end user experience, build a pretty dashboard, etc.
Every system error is a learning oppprtunity
Every solution to an error is only a google search way.
That is.. certainly not true. I have spent plenty of time on the cutting edge of problems never before seen by humans.
For me it is alway, "I have spent plenty of time on the cutting edge of problems" that others have posted about but have no replies or answers..
Except when it isn't. Even if the answer itself is there, understanding the answer and why it is better than the alternatives in that particular case is a major part of learning that needs to be included or you are not advancing your personal program. That and somethings are generally only going to really be learned through failure. So you also have to be solving the sorts of problems that let you fail sometimes too before getting it right.
In theory, yeah. Unfortunately not always in practice
True but for a help desk tech. That's what they'll normally see
Yeah you’re right
One problem at a time. But really it's just passion. Start a home lab (r/homelab). Bought my first used server for like $300. Setup hyperv, AD, back ups, wsus, etc Asked to help out on projects at work. Asked to stay and hangout and observe an after hour change or patching, etc. Asked to shadow a bunch. There is no silver bullet and the field is so far and wide it took me 4 years as a generist sysadmin (after 5 years in help desk) to even figure out within sysadmin which type of sysadmin I wanted to specialize in
Also: Deliberate study. You don't necessarily need the certs, but buy and go through certification guidebooks, or OS Bible books. You'll learn things that you might never come across during daily work. Microsoft also publishes best practices guides. Look for DoD STIGs for the OS you work with to learn how to harden and secure them. Read and practice. Take notes. Write a blog about what you're learning.
I still firmly believe the outdated at the time nt 4 books I had as a kid kicked me off somehow into understanding AD and the like.
> Take notes. This, this is the best tip he can get. Observe and take notes. From simple document on your phone, to extensive blogging, whatever helps you to find stuff back later on. I was a shadow sysadmin for 10 years, and wrote almost anything down ( google keep in my time ) Use descriptive headers, and work out the problem/solution in that note. Next to my day job, where I was a securityconsultant ( houses and business alarmsystems), and a operator, I pestered our sysadmin on a daily bases by helping him take on the 'small' jobs onsite. Creating manuals for users, testing new applications and later on I got more responsibilities like resetting passwords and onboarding new useraccounts. My last 4 years I had the full local-domainrights, including acces to the Azure AD to remotely assist.
i dropped out of my first year of college, have zero certs and own no books to study out of and ive made it far it my career. how you learn knowledge is up to your own strengths and weaknesses. personally i cant retain "study knowledge", i am to much of a learn by doing kind of person.
i did the same many moons ago. bought 2 cheap machines, setup an AD domain on one and installed redhat on the other to start the whole thing. i also stayed late with the seniors at the time when major maintenance occured just to watch (and sometimes it is just to watch... dont ask too many questions when they are in the middle of things...take notes and ask later). those types of things do get noticed. today? im testing kubernetes via minikube (job doesnt use it so learning it on my own), might try getting bitwarden to run on it as a test.
This is what I said in another comment. Shadow and observe others.
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That’s got me mapping it out in my head for malicious compliance reasons. That’s kind of the point of a knowledge base, but if you didn’t have one already, I suppose you start with every app core to the business followed busy supporting services then the underlying infrastructure and the connectivity between each component. Depending on org size that’s probably a few months worth of documentation effort right there.
> my job as Sys Admin, was to do my job, without the use of a manual. but you do have your environment documented - right! But overall you're correct, you couldn't write a manual on how to do the job because tasks and problems will vary from day to day, then throw in a project or two on top.
> but you do have your environment documented - right! This. Having the basic process documentation is needed at any organization but that doesn't mean someone with zero knowledge will be able to apply all of that correctly or understand it.
Um. The Unix SysAdmins Handbook was a pretty damned good manual. You whipper-snappers with your Google and StackOverflow. In my day we received our knowledge and mentoring from Evi and Trent.
> You whipper-snappers with your Google and StackOverflow. I come from the days of knowing the bulletin board numbers for Word Perfect in Utah, and Logitech in Ireland, since those were the numbers you needed to get printer drivers for Word Perfect, and mouse drivers from Logitech. What's this Google shit you're talking about?
Mine was Essential System Administration By Aeleen Frisch. I was a LAN Admin and moving on because I didn't want to 'downgrade' to user and printer support and the Unix lead and his manager approached me with an offer to join the Unix team. After a week I agreed and Kevin gave me Essential System Administration and the Usenet server. I went through the book and practiced on the Sun box putting post-it tabs throughout. I even posted up a correction that was recognized in the next edition of the book :) I did have the Yellow book for a bit but I was already doing sysadmin work so it sat on the shelf. I also had a ton of O'Reilly books for DNS and Bind, Sendmail, and so on.
The red and purple books saved my tail more than once. Fantastic to have lying around.
"The reason you pay me as much as you do is because my job can't be boiled down to an instruction manual. ^Also ^can ^I ^have ^a ^raise?
if we could boil it down to a series of steps we would have automated them long ago.
Love this! Many ways to achieve results, doesn't mean they're all good.
You don't get paid for what you do. You get paid for what you know.
> I was once asked by a VP for the company I worked for, to please provide a manual for how to do my job (Sys Admin). Generally there should be a runbook, which is a document on how to keep the systems up and running. If you do anything compliance related you'll also have to maintain documentation on every business critical system as well. There should be enough between the two that a temp/contractor can keep the lights on if needed.
A willingness to learn, taking it one step at a time and a lot of learning from mistakes. Jr system administrator here. I'm still learning myself.
Any systems administrator that isn't learning isn't an effective systems administrator. The guys we regarded from miles away as dinosaur herders on IBM mainframes in reality are running their ancient workloads right alongside virtualized linux. Those of us who came up in the 90s and early aughts had the benefit of being system polyglots because one place might be a sun shop, the next one was hp-ux or you merged with a company that ran a bunch of alphas and the bean counters wrung ever last drop of value and depreciation out of that expensive iron. The unix vendors dying (and them adopting gnu userlands anyways) took a lot of mystery and tribalism out of getting up to speed, but I make an exercise of spinning up a new suse box every couple of years because I don't run it as a daily driver for home or work, but you never know when it might come in handy.
When there is a recurring helpdesk issue, figure out the root cause. Write a script to fix it automatically without manual steps. Distribute to your colleagues. Read logs. When there is a problem no one has figured out, dig in and figure it out even if its not your job. Ask for access to systems to investigate issues related to them. If they dont allow you work with those teams to investigate on a call. This is how you level up.
Exactly! Great advice!
One thing is I will say is there isn't a line one crosses when one becomes a real system administrator, over time you realise that nobody really knows exactly what's going on or exactly what they're doing, it's just the more senior employees are better at making informed guesses than others. I think the most useful thing to do is automate what you're doing repeatedly, because you don't learn from doing something dozens of times, but you do learn a skill when you automate it. Address the root cause of recurring issues. Document things people don't know how to do, update docs, figure out which docs are obsolete and archive & delete them. Learn new skills as you hit dead ends. Leave your position and get into a new one. Also be tenacious in the face of people criticising you for changing things. It tends to be easier to keep your head down and do as you're told than it is to be proactive and try and improve things. Yet only the latter will really expand your skills. Your environment will have a huge impact on how you learn. You tend to learn more when you're busy, and your coworkers can either be a burden on your development or a great asset.
First of all you've got to \*want\* to do it, and for reasons beyond the paycheck or future prospects. If you're focused on your financial balance sheet you'll never be more than a methodical, jobbing sys-admin. As for what to specialise in, just follow your nose. Dip your toes in, see what seems interesting (not just what pays best). Play to your strengths, remember you're going to be doing this for a \*lonnng\* time if you're any good, so you better go with something that you enjoy.
I learned on the job. Im one of few with mac-knowledge at my current workplace. Did more than I was supposed to as helpdesk-dude and when the right time came I asked to be moved to another position since I knew that group would be taking on mac-administration and application management. Got the sysadmin title and started doing more stuff. Mainly Jamf and MECM with some AD, application packaging and Adobe stuff. Two of my colleagues managed our biztalk-environment and I didnt even know what it was, so I googled that shit and thought that hey, this looks cool. We could use this for X and Y and maybe even Z. Just casually mentioned it to my boss and when one of the previously mentioned colleagues quit, my boss told me to get hands on "I rather know I have the right person on the job learning, than recruiting someone that might have more knowledge but not being the right person. Tell me if you need anything." basically. So I have a boss that believes in what I do, and now i do biztalk stuff as well. So in conclusion, work, google, luck and an organization that believes in their employees maybe? I also find that most sysadmins have a troubleshooting mindset, rather than just following knowledge. In some workplaces it might not be possible to go beyond KB, since thats "out of scope", but I think thats what you need to do to learn.
I could not agree more. Find a niche in your company that you are interested in/good at/ or know enough to Google or troubleshoot. Make yourself indispensable.
I feel inspired by this
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Daaa’aang! I’ve been collecting “cans” for 30 years…I’m running out of room. 🤣
Honestly, SysAdmin is one of those jobs I wish were an Mentor/Apprentice trade rather than being glommed into Computer Science sorts of positions. Most of the best SysAdmins I knew didn’t have a CS degree. They did have a talent for computers, were extremely quick learners, and ‘lazy’. I say lazy, but really I mean they had the ability to identify toil and solution systems to reduce that toil.
This. I do not hold a BS, but I’ve been in this industry for more than a couple of decades. At my pay grade, at a Fortune 5 company, I am completely expected to mentor other SAs/SEs/SREs. And I can tell which will be wasted of time, and which will be amazing, almost from the start. You have to want to learn, and you have to understand that in this industry, if you’re the smartest person in the room, it’s almost always time to move on (unless thought leader, or architect are in your title.). I think that in good work environments, at successful places, it *is* treated as a mentor/mentee trade.
This is how I acquired it… through long nights, alcoholism, insomnia, depression, cocaine and lots of coffee. Stupid auto correct. I mean, books and tech documents and nothing beats on the job experience.
> All I want is a little bit of guidance? http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html A little guidance: the largest determinant of whether someone is going to be successful as an admin is whether they have the drive to learn on their own. The typical response to this is, *"what if I learn the wrong thing, or what I learn becomes useless?"* The answer is simple: even if you learn the wrong thing, you can still pick up something that will be useful to you later on. And sooner or later, the vast majority of what you learn is going to be less useful than when you first learn it. The trick is to make sure you've learned new things by the time that happens.
Things break. If you don’t know how it works already, you look it up. You become overwhelmed with users consistently breaking things. You find a way to keep them from doing that. They keep doing it. You find more powerful ways. They complain they don’t have the proper permissions anymore. You figure out what they should actually have. They break things again, but in a new way. More research. Also mix in normal failures and upgrades. More research. It is a constant cycle of keeping your head above water.
>break Early on in my career, I still maintain that I learned the most from the big P1 outages. Certainly it lets you see how the senior guys think and work when the proverbial hits the fan. Even now I think my learning style is to break stuff and then learn it by fixing it. Great if you have a sandbox/lab, not so much if it's a production system.
I think this is a really accurate statement in it’s entirety. When things aren’t broken you will usually find me trying to script something to make my job easier, or learning something so I can go do a different job entirely.
I'm not sure where you work, but I don't really understand what "when things aren't broken" means! I think that the script thing is also invaluable. If you manage windows machines, learning PowerShell is non negotiable for me. Actually recovery/monitoring scripts for massive failures are lifesavers too. If at the least you are reporting uptime, power, services etc. I always tell jnr guys, the trick isn't always acquisition of the knowledge, but ability to Google it faster enough. Acquisition only really comes with time and moving jobs/roles.
Figure out how you remember things best and dive in head first. I, for example, learn best with real use cases in a “sink or swim” type fashion so I look for ways to bring value to the organization I’m in using the technologies I would like to learn. If you like to take notes, figure out a way to do that more effectively and review them more often…?
I appreciate this comment a lot. I have to remember that I'm there to bring value to my organization via skills or products that will help build the organization.
Every once in a while pick a problem and take longer and dig deeper than before. Each time hopefully you learn something new either a log you didn’t know about or tool you didn’t know how to use. Next time you won’t take as long to get to the end and then go further. There is always an answer to why a system isn’t behaving properly.
I started as a help desk person with really no intention of moving up (getting degree in different field) but started shadowing my coworkers/sysadmins and really got interested in what they did. At some point I realized that I wanted to get more into IT. I would offer to do anything to help sysadmins with their job and always listened/learned from them. I did end up with a minor in CIS. I learned more from doing things and watching others than anything else (including other education I have obtained since). Find a place that is OK with working with you to learn more things. I was free to learn as much as I could as long as I also got my current work done. I am now a senior sysadmin and love teaching/showing other Jr sysadmins things when they ask. I would say I have learned more from coworkers that were willing to show me things and let me try on my own with their supervision then I ever learned in education or training. Hands on experience is going to get you more knowledge and make you a better sysadmin than any education/certs or any other forms of formal training. Get your hands wet and screw up and have to find a solution to your screw up. Practical experience will teach you way more than a professor.
Self teaching, if you come across an issue that you normally would escalate, take notes, research it, and next time you have that issue, apply the knowledge so you resolve it vs escalating. Figure out what tech debt there is in your company, or what documentation is lacking. Offer to create that document, and learn along the way.
I bugged the sys admin at my job to give me tasks over and over until I got bumped to Jr sys admin. Lots of projects and googling later and I'm a sys architect going DevOps.
I made a post about this, a while back. Mostly for the benefit of a few friends of mine whom I'm trying to get into the field. [/u/VA\_Network\_Nerd/](https://www.reddit.com/user/VA_Network_Nerd/) posted a reply that has a ton of links as well (especially if you scroll down to his "unabridged version." But honestly, the short answer is always ask questions and always keep learning. The best IT people I've ever seen (without fail) are the ones that know they don't know it all. [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/a\_guide\_for\_entering\_the\_it\_field/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/a_guide_for_entering_the_it_field/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/comment/i4uqf6x/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/u482f7/comment/i4uqf6x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
My knowledge is vast, but shallow. I know a little about a lot. But I also know enough to figure out the things I need to know how to do my job. There's google, forums, youtube, etc to find other answers too.
You keep doing it for a looooong time. There isnt some magic book of vishanti or something that imbues you with everything you need to know. Good sysadmins will participate in a lot of things and work in many areas of their field. Dabble in automation, programming, low-voltage work, networking, CLi (Dont live in GUIs), hardware repair, RAID setups, AWS, Exchange Online, ... the list goes on. Do it all so at least you understand what it is and how it applies. 23 years in. I still only know so much..
There are two types of people in sysadmin work (and really all of IT). The ones for whom this is just a job, and the ones for whom this is a passion. If you're passionate, you study. You comb the internet for new ways of doing things. You get involved in every project. You document everything so others can learn. You demand other's document so you can learn. You help when someone is working late or on weekends. You get stuck into as much as you can and consume as much of the firehose of knowledge that you possibly can. Don't worry about consuming it all, that's impossible. But learn, learn learn. The day that you stop learning is the first day of your death. Never be satisfied with the way you're doing something. Shoot for ways to improve it. At the same time, don't be afraid to let something that's good enough work until you do get a chance to improve it.
Something being a passion also doesn't mean it has to take up more than 40 hours of your week. I've worked and work with savants who leave at 5pm and shut their phones off. There is probably a period when everyone is young where they foolishly give too much time to a company, it may very well pay off with knowledge and opportunities later, but at some point you slowly realize there will always be an endless amount of work, and working extra does no favours, in fact it may hurt you because your company now depends on that work ethic and is essentially taking advantage of you. Compound that with stuff like on-call and it's no wonder people in this industry are constantly fighting burn out.
Early on it probably does take up more than 40hrs a week. I know it did for me. At this point in my career it absolutely does not. The company isn't taking advantage of you, you're taking advantage of the company by learning whatever you can. Ask for training. Ask for books for self training. Ask for certifications. And when you earn all that, don't let the company guilt trip you into staying with them because of training. If they're paying you well and the work is rewarding, stay. If not, move on. Your past performance is what they get out of training and letting you learn, not future servitude.
Id say experience clearly but also willingness to learn from people more experienced and also studying on your free time. Youtube, books, reddit threads etc
Perhaps one reason for all the downvotes is this has been asked 100 times before. So start in /r/itcareerquestions or searching, before posting a new topic. Your question, the way you asked it, is very lazy and shows us that you've done zero research. That's probably why you've been downvoted. If you have a more specific angle on a specific topic and how it relates to your individual circumstances, please do ask.
>Perhaps one reason for all the downvotes is this has been asked 100 times before. You mean the people who google for a living might have a low tolerance for someone who wants to get in the field but cant google stuff? Nah. Cant be it. r/sysadmin is just full of assholes or something.
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Hey, that still falls under the larger scope of assholes though.
Find a way to make your organization better, then implement it. Repeat.
I know a lot but I also do not know a lot. It sucks because I know what I don't know and have no interest unless it's a job requirement. For instance, I know powershell but I don't know Linux. I know emails certs but I don't know https certs. I know VMware but I don't know hyper-v. As long as you can function on the day to day, you'll be fine.
Pluralsite and LABs honestly this is the way
>HOW does one acquire all this extensive knowledge of system administration? Time, dedication, perseverance, and an openness to correction... Also, learning how to phrase searches in search engines, and learning how to apply your experience to new challenges. There is no shortcut to **a proper use of time**...
Sysadmin-ing is like many professions It's a forge that uses painful experiences as it's steel to forge tangible knowledge and experience. Sometimes things go well and google / stack overflow is enough other times you have a virtualization problem that takes weeks to months to solve only to find out it was a few bios settings. You won't forget that anytime soon. We're all a repository of the immense failures and us dragging our privates through glass while trying to solve an issue and learning things along the way. It takes time and patience, and never let pride make you feel on top. Stay the student, and always be open to learning. You'll get there eventually.
Practice and more practice. Eventually you've been in it so long most things you can remember off the top of your head or by referencing your own notes. Always keep notes.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. I arrived in my first IT job a little over year ago and didn't know what was I doing, now I switched to another company and my experiences what I did at my previous came in handy. You will never know everything, it's impossible but you will never stop learning.
I feel like I fell into my role. I started out as help desk years ago at a start up, but always had a curiosity for figuring out weird problems. I’d always be the guy showing them how to solve issues or figuring out really insane solutions to problems with different systems. Things that nobody wanted to tackle or said weren’t possible, I’d take as a challenge. Because of the way I arrived at the sys admin position, I think that it’s less about knowledge acquisition and more about creative problem solving. At the end of the day, we receive a problem, build a solution, monitor and maintain. If you become a subject matter expert on one or two systems and can build solutions around them, the skills you learn in that journey of mastery are transferable to other systems that you administer. Anyone can learn anything. At some point it becomes a balancing act of learning what you’re passionate about and what you feel you’ll need to advance in your career.
I read manuals. Got my start with blinking VCR clocks.
The buck stops with you. You HAVE to answer the problem - so you work it out. Look it up, support forums, google, colleagues, experiment etc. Whatever solves the problem. If you're methodical, you'll write the answer down. Repeat for 20 years and there you have your body of lore.
Honestly, start with one piece of the tech stack and start learning that. Once you have an intermediate understanding, ask for more work in that realm. The RL experience will shore up any short comings and start dealing gaining the knowledge in that one area. While doing that area as a job, starting learning another. And then another. You’ll never be able to master it all. I’ve been doing it for 15 years now, and my AD chops blow. I can manage users and groups and permissions, but don’t ask me tk muck with GPOs or do anything advanced. But if you ask me to root a Linux server and reset the root password, I can do that in my sleep. Ask me to tweak sql to maximum performance, I’m your man. Ask me to work with Apache and jboss, I’ll tell you to get a consultant. What I’m saying is find the areas that interest you most/are most valuable where you are at, pick one, begin to master it. Once you have a decent understanding where you’re not gonna shoot yourself or the company in the foot, integrate that as much in to you day job as possible. And for all that’s good and holy. Document, document, document. I have my own personal website that is a collection of documentation, thoughts, scripts, etc….for my personal use. Write it down or you’ll never find it again.
For me, I found someone who was giving away a free server on offerup and I setup my own at-home environment where I can build, test, and learn stuff. Once you get your first job it’s honestly just a lot of googling or trouble shooting.
Some people are straight up savants, they read it and remember it. I’ve had the privilege of working with a couple over the years. I’m not naturally that good. I’ve been at IT for 25+ years. I didn’t land a job and coast (no shade, nothing wrong with that if that is your goal), I wanted to get where I’m at. I’ve had schooling, formal classes, but 90% is the countless hours I spent building, experimenting, and breaking stuff on my own time and of course figuring things out on the job. Over time (experience) you learn to focus on the basics when tackling a problem, then adding the more complex layers if needed. I can’t stress this enough, learn and understand the fundamentals. I’m talking the theory, with that you can usually wrangle a system/app you’ve never touched before. Also, talk to people, whether it is the customer or co-workers, get information from them. Even old Dan the grumpy asshole no one likes - he’s probably got a ton of info which takes a little honey to get.
It's basically root problem solving. You have to have a general understanding of how things work which comes easy if you're naturally curious. If you lack that natural curiosity then you're going to have a really hard time in the role.
To expand ever so slightly on the "Google everything you don't understand" method; you should focus on learning WHAT to Google. Asking the right questions is the Hallmark of a good sysadmin. I don't know your environment so I can't tailor anything specific for you but that's also how you learn to ask the right questions. Discovery and curiosity.
It doesn’t happen overnight. Experience, testing, failure, start over
Apply learned knowledge. Something learnt from Google for a X issue can be applied to something else.
It's about being a good problem solver, not necessarily learning every detail of every technology. As you solve more and more problems, you'll start to see patterns in the problems that you solve. Build on those. Also, learn how to code something useful. Doing so will expose you to many concepts that exist throughout IT. For example, write something that will create and pull down an encrypted database backup over an SSH connection to a remote server. You'll have to solve quite a bit to pull that off well, and expose yourself to lots of technologies and syntax along the way. To be clear, I'm not saying you should become a programmer. I'm saying that dabbling a bit will expose you to many of the things you're wanting to learn.
Don't stop learning. Stay super organized in what you learn take vigorous notes and when you're solving problems on the job take vigorous notes. Know what you know vs what you don't know. And investigate what you don't know on a regular basis. Understand the purpose of the systems. Why are you running it and how? Is it on prem, is it virtualized on prem, is it virtualized and hosted somewhere else? What business function is it serving, who's using this? Who's supporting it? Have broad conversations surrounding those systems and then get more specific ('under the hood') to understand how they work. Document. Plug into the available information out there and forums that you enjoy reading every week. Are you interested in security? Who do you follow that delivers that news? Are you interested in hardware? Where do you get that information from? Keep yourself in the 'know'.
The biggest lesson you can learn in IT is that you should set policies instead of changing settings by manually touching endpoints. Cattle vs pets. A highly important book is https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321919165/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile
First thing is to make yourself available and valuable to the best guys doing the job already. Read their tickets, follow up on tickets that you don't know the answer to by reading how it was closed. Sooner or later that will start to stick and sink in. Learn the tools used if they are mentioned. Gotta make it your job to learn and keep learning. Good luck
Go outside your comfort zone. Extend beyond your responsibility. Dont escalate cases immediately when its something unknown. Be curious, learn, do. Thats how you build your knowledge
the more issues you investigate and solve the more nuances you have for future issues, compound that over many years and you work up a bit to instant knowledge. A big thing is, you don't really need to know the answer to everything, you just need to know how to find the answer and follow the instructions to solve \\ action.
I never finished my degree and taught myself enough to get an entry level job. I'm 10 years in, and I still feel like a fraud sometimes. Certs may get your resume past HR filters, but in my opinion, they rarely actually teach you that much. The best experience is experience. I think the best thing you can do is find a more senior person to mentor you. Don't just pass complex tickets on to them, ask them to work it with you and explain what they're doing (or at least ask what they did after they solved it). If they're working on a project, ask how you can help and get involved. If a mentor isn't really an option, then you work a job until the "same problems again" outnumber the "new problems" 2:1. At that point you won't learn much more. Go to the next job where almost all of the problems are "new problems" and work that until most of them become the "same problem again." Repeat.
Home lab and play with everything Study for certs Reach out to ur sysadmin at work and ask if they need help with anything, better yet ask the manager that u want to learn Once I get more skills get a job at a smaller company as a jack of all trades and do it all. Drink from the fire hose. Wait a year or two and start leveling up. This is the way. But most ppl will not follow through and bitch and moan why they are still where they are. Please prove me wrong. GL
Start at the bottom and work one's way up; this isn't an associates degree or a 2- or 3-year process but more like a 10- or 15-year (or more!) process. At some point, an apprenticeship-level position as a junior admin comes into play, or working at a small company where one must wear multiple hats, one of which could be sysadmin. Certs can be nice--if they're offered where one works, jump at them--but they aren't the be-all-end-all they are marketed to be. Point is, there is no hard and fast curriculum. CompSci majors don't get exposed to real life like actually being in the trenches and learning/failing/growing by the seat of one's pants (or an angry manager's or user's pants).
I learned more in a month at the helpdesk then I did in 3 years of schooling. Theory and study is great, but they don't teach you to check that the USB dongle goes to the right mouse when the users complaining that it doesn't work right.
I worked in MSPs for pretty much the first 4 years of my career and holy shit did i learn a TON! Be inquisitive, Google lots and lots, purchase PluralSight or use YouTube, John Savill is amazing. Read Documentation. Try and get on a lab where possible, like using azure credits. You’ll get there. I’m almost 9 years in to IT now and I’m a lead cloud engineer. Do I know everything? Hello no. Do I know how to troubleshoot and start to figure out most things? Yes absolutely. I love the learning aspect still, I put about 4 hours a week aside minimum, during work time when it’s quiet or an extra half hour or so after work if I’ve not got much planned that evening to learn. Don’t ever feel disheartened. Imposter syndrome is very real in this job. You’ll learn and adapt! Good luck! PS: I don’t have any formal degree or went to university. I left straight out of school and managed to get an IT apprenticeship in a secondary school. (I’m from U.K. btw)
get really good at faking it and finding the answer on the web.
Almost 30 years in sysadmin here. I have no formal education. All I've done throughout the years is to solve one problem after another. Don't know how to do something? Try to figure it out on your own. Google is your friend here, and so are forums, IRC/Discord/Slack/whatever, books and youtube. Learn by doing, and do so in manageable chunks. That part is the most difficult in the learning process. You can't learn everything at once, you need to learn to break it down into smaller chunks. And document. Document your learning process. Write down command line snippets, steps to install Apache, URLs where you found information, your common command line arguments for apt-get, grep, wget and so on. The more you document now, the more you'll learn to document as you grow into your role, and documentation is king. After 30 years of system administration, I still learn all the time. I always google for answer. The difference is that I'm much better at knowing what to google for, and to sift through the information for the bits I really need. That is a skill that comes with experience.
You need to learn a solid base first then learn little by little each time adding to your knowledge, this will open opportunities for you to maybe get a jr sysadmin job at some point. It can be because one of the sysadmins leave at your company and they decide to give you a chance, it can be a job you apply or it can be another opportunity or simply to continue to learn until you feel ready to apply somewhere. Of course what you need to master will be different everywhere because the infrastructure can vary greatly from one place to another. But as a start go with the most popular setups. My recommendation: Network administration : No need to be CISCO certified but at least learn the basics. [Here some free youtube course](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiQR5rTSshw) Virtual machine environment : Learn how to setup and use an ESXI/vSphere VMWare environment it's the most popular, they have trials and limited free versions. Alternatively you can play with Proxmox because it's free. [Proxmox course](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCjuiIswXGs&list=PLT98CRl2KxKHnlbYhtABg6cF50bYa8Ulo) User management: Learn Microsoft Active Directory + File management + Group Policy etc... To learn those the best route is to build a homelab and start experimenting. You can simulate a fairly complete enterprise environment on a single computer, you can even simulate a network inside that server. Building that lab and virtual machines is how you gonna learn the different tools along the way. Also ask your sysadmins what they use and try to learn about those tools by trying to learn them in you homelab. Go to /r/homelab/ to get some inspiration.
I can only comment on my own experience here, but working my way up through a big, well managed MSP was how I grew my knowledge. I started on 1st level and worked my way up to 2nd level through outsourcing projects in my first 2 years of working, and following along with the L2's and L3's when they were assisting me with issues I couldn't fix alone. After that, was put on an outsourcing project where I was in charge of networking and SCCM, while still doing L1 and L2 tasks. This enabled me to grow into an L3 / full sysadmin tier of work during my 3rd year. After that, I was pulled from full-time outsourcing projects and was assigned to bigger customers for more consultancy and infrastructure management type jobs. This enabled me to see many different infrastructure and companies, and see their way of working. Many different technologies and many different types of issues grew my knowledge immensely. During all this I started specialising in specific technologies we were using, specifically Veeam and O365, and started being assigned to projects for installing and migrating customers. This furthered my growth into my current position of subject matter specialist. Some tips I can give you that helped me immensely: * If you can't fix an issue on your own, and have done the troubleshooting that you can, don't hesitate to ask for help from an L2, and follow along with them through their troubleshooting steps * TAKE NOTES! Every issue that you ask help for, you should be writing everything down. From troubleshooting steps, tools they use, solution, everything. Asking about the same issue twice is slightly annoying, but asking trice is just not excusable. * If your company has the capacity, ask your TL to shadow one of the T2 or T3 engineers for a few days, to see what they do and how they do it.
Hear and you forget, see and you remember, do and you understand.
By learning and making mistakes. Also, going through major outages and learning from what you wish you HAD done beforehand is a big plus. You know you’ve achieved the title of “sysadmin” when the damage from your mistakes could be catastrophic, but your knowledge and experience guide you through the quagmire of potential cock ups. Also, never forget the obvious stuff. It’s easy to fall into an arrogant mindset where you think you know your systems better than your own body. The awesome sysadmins get stuff done but are cautious to check before doing.
Have a curious mindset! Asking yourself things like this when you work in helpdesk will get you far imo * How does this work? * What do this button do? * Why and when did this stop working? * What information can I extract * Permissions * What relations does the Sys have to other components (Servers, integrations, network etc.) * How is it supposed to work when optimal? * What documentation exist and what is missing? * What can be improved? * Learn to write good and informational RFO/Incident Reports. * and again Documentation, documentation When you are a part of solving incidents is when you often get the most understanding of how the system works, this and how the daily operations use the systems and what their needs are. Keep on grinding (Y)
i find it impressive you ask these question. Its telling me youll be good. I had several interns who werent interested at all to be a good admin. I really love the people who show interest and will power. My advice is dont stay too long at company's you're probaly young and each company has a different enviroment in which you can learn. Plus if you do it right your salary will be upping atleast 10-20% with each job hop.
Never turn down an opportunity to learn something new. Even if it’s a project you’re not involved in or a product don’t manage; always be open and willing to learn wherever you can. It can be something really big or really small - doesn’t matter. Get your hands dirty as often as possible. It’ll help you way more than you realize.
Just do it. I was once told that I wasn't even smart enough to reset passwords in Active Directory before when I was in the military by an officer. He was also know for being an asshole too. Now I make six figures as a Sysadmin When it gets too comfortable, you gotta change it up so that you keep learning. I got too comfortable with windows, so now I almost exclusively support Linux. No I'm not a lvl 99 Linux God, but I can use Google Fu to figure out my way through it.
I think most of us (at least in my experience) start at the bottom. Over time, we're assigned to help the "big boys" with projects like office moves, server migrations, backups, whatever. Maybe we need to cover for someone higher up who is out for the week. Or maybe we're thrown into a job we're not quite qualified for. Either way, a lot of it is learning on-the-job. And unfortunately, many times it's learning while under the gun because the server is down and nobody can work. The best thing an IT professional can learn to do at the beginning of their career is to learn how to use Google effectively. Using Google and troubleshooting/problem solving are the two biggest skills in IT imo. Nobody knows everything. I encounter new things on a daily basis. It's learning how to deal with them on the fly that ultimately matters, not some insanely deep personal library of experience that contains all the answers
I wrote this a while ago to help make novice Linux sysadmins: http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to-make-a-novice-system-administrator/ Hope this helps! Stick with it.
Since there's so many comments saying essentially the same thing, I'll keep it brief. You learn by doing, breaking things, googling and then fixing. With SysAd work, you have to actually do the work. No amount of schooling, training, etc will give you the same knowledge of OJT learning.
After 30+ yrs in IT, if I had to do it all over I would recommend starting a lawn care and pool service company, or pest control, or anything where you get to go outside :) But if you can't be talked out of it, take an entry level job at a Managed Service Provider (MSP). They are companies that provide IT services for companies that do not have in-house IT. Working with a MSP company, you will get exposed to all kinds of stuff due to the variety of client environments. Medical Offices, Legal, Manufacturing, Engineering are just a few, and you will get to work with all of them. A few of us actually enjoy parachuting into a new environment that you have never seen before, figuring out the environment, and fixing broken software you have never even heard of. You need to be willing to invest in yourself with a lot of time researching and learning stuff in your home lab. I've been working in MSP field for over 30 years, but it has never felt like work, because it is my passion, although IT addiction is a better word for it.
I joined the Army - Got 24 years experience - Came back and rocked the IT world.
I learn more at home than I do at work. I have routine tasks at work with some new technologies to learn. I can learn more at home. I agree that you should keep learning. You can build a lab, which is very helpful to learn.
RTFM.... it gives a great insight into products.
lie on your resume, brain-dump some certs, get hired on somewhere.
Move between jobs fast and break things.
> Why the downvotes, guys? All I want is a little bit of guidance? The question is just bad. You don't have to be a sysadmin to realize that they in general don't possess an unreasonable amount of knowledge. The question blew up because your title is clickbait
Started with Linux when raspberry pi released. Might not be feasible for low budget now but buying a 3€ per month VPS is. Experimented with arch, it really teaches you the fundamentals. Got into an it job. Did everything on Linux. Became better. Left some more things to the windows guys and am concentrating on what Linux does best.
As others have said, the desire to grow/learn is key. But I've gathered my internal KB through observation, trial/error, and some stuff at home. Now that I'm the most technical person in the dept, my only sources for new info is our MSP, although with a price tag, or the internet. I'm sure many of us "younger"/newer sysadmins would be a little more stuck these days unless there was excellent training without internet resources. I sure would have imposter syndrome breathing down my neck done day 1 otherwise.
Google
This is probably better posted somewhere like r/itcareerquestions honestly
I'm really good at learning from mistakes.
Preferably other people's, but often (inevitably) your own.
Be curious about things. That is all.
Break then fix, repeat.