You should never assume you're done learning. Recently, I've moved about 250 miles out of state (again), to take a sysadmin position. "Back to my roots", if you will. I have always felt I've had a good grasp on how unix systems in general and linux systems in particular operate, and how their relationships are formed and managed on the network with different protocols. But you can always find room for improvement. Let's just say enterprise storage is fairly fun and exiciting. LVM is a good place to start, to draw parallels and formulate minor examples for further scaling later.
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I've always believed there were four levels of computer user. Let's say a user wants an RSS reader.
The Desktop User - uses a gui program to find an RSS reader (possibly graphical and installs it).
The Power User - may use a command line tool to find one ... 'apt-cache search rss' and installs it.
The Engineer - realizes there is an available package for Debian but not Slackware system. He needs to know how it works, not only that it is installed. He finds rsstail and realizes there are two libraries necessary, libnxml, and libmrss. He finds a slackware buildscript for one but not the other, compiles the missing one as a test, modifies an existing build script, installs both libraries, and then finally the final project. He now has rsstail on slackware and debian. Maybe he contributes the modified buildscript back to the original project. (As he should).
The Developer - writes the original code for the above libraries and rss project.
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So my employer has asked me to fill out a professional profile. So I did, and came up with this:
Fred started his career with six years of electronics technician and engineering experience, working in fields ranging from digital timing controls to equipment for broadband networks. A twenty-year technology geek, he's followed his passion and ambition and has worked in enterprise IT for the last ten years. His main focus in the field has been system administration, primarily with Linux and Unix servers, and general network engineering. In 2003 Fred earned a CCNA certification, followed by CCNP in 2005, and passed the written exam for the Security CCIE track in March 2009. Fred has worked with enterprise customers all over the eastern portion of the country. While proficient in Cisco products, he avoids vendor lock-in, and believes innovation is fueled by open standards, and cross-platform functionality. He understands security and virtualization are pervasive, and is a huge fan of free and open source software, business practices and engages wherever open source ideas proliferate. He can be found in several online social networks, including Freenode, the IRC network for open source developers and communities, under the moniker "flrichar". Fred will often join a FLOSS (free/libre/open source software) developer group on IRC, or a mailing list, to discuss, contribute, or just joke around and have fun. His current interests include ProjectVRM, and watching the development of statewide WiMax infrastructure for the state of South Carolina. When not in front of the keys, Fred likes promoting local FLOSS communities in SC (Posscon, SELF, UCLUG, ColaLug), comedy shows, movies, news, politics and current events, reading about sociology, home improvement, or just spending quiet time at home with his family.
What do you think? Too preachy? Let me know.
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One of the things I loathe is filling out all of the "about me" profiles found
at $Weekly_Favorite_Social_Networking_Site, so here it is, compiled all in one
place.
I am a geek with expertise in two particular global areas: system
administration and networking. One can definitely argue that networking is a
crucial part of system administration, but I've met others who do not share
this philosophy.
To be more specific, unix system administration, and cisco networking, even
though one can definitely apply any learned cisco skills to general
internetworking. In the Cisco realm, security is my specialty. I see a CCIE
in either routing or switching, the general CCIE classification, or security,
in the near future.
When it comes to unix system administration, obviously Linux is my tool of
choice. When you begin to understand network traffic at the packet and
protocol level, any unix system admin can and and should be flexible enough to
feel comfortable with practicing any sort of system administration, including
Windows server administration.
No sys admin toolset would be complete without virtualization. When I speak
of virtualization, I don't mean Microsoft's Hyper-V, which is basically a
newcomer to the space. I've had work experience with all of vmware's
products, and some other hypervisors including Sun's virtualbox, the Linux
kernel's KVM and of course Xen.
Every sysadmin should a thorough understanding of hardware, and I'm no
exception. Having taken some computer engineering courses in college, I'd
rather build it myself than buy it from a shelf.
That's about it. This is really a work in progress, maybe I'll flesh it out
more someday soon.
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Whenever I work, I really prefer three machines. I own an HP Mini 1030nr
which runs Debian 5 (Lenny) but also dual boots Ubuntu 9.10 UNR, recently replacing
9.04 Netbook Remix. The work laptop is a Dell d620 with Ubuntu 9.04 as
well. My main server-type machine at home is a home-built AMD BE-2350, dual
core 64bit machine with 4 gigs of ram and 500 gb of hd space. Because it's on
all the time, the CPU is one of the green ones sipping less than 45w of power,
with a high efficiency psu. It runs Slackware64 13, and I use it primarily
for running guest VMs under the Linux kernel's built-in virtualization KVM.
Recently I've "retired" about 100gb worth of VMs as I'm getting bored with
them. And by retired I mean moved to an ext4 external hd. I can spin them up
whenever possible.
The list of retired guest vm machines and their quantities is as follows:
- 2x Ubuntu 8.04, one Desktop, one Server - 1x Debian 5 - 2x Fedora 9 - 1x Vista - 1x WinXP Pro - 1x OpenSolaris 2009.06 - 2x Win 7 Betas
There are also a few other machines, a tor test machine, an openfiler image,
some small colo backups. I even still use some of those actively, and some of
the above, like the OpenSolaris machine.
Currently, my active guest vm machines are:
- 2x Win7, one Enterprise Final, one RC1 - 1x Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop - 1x Fedora 12 - 1x Centos 5.4