How to become a system administrator - a guide for beginners (part 3)
Previous part: habrahabr.ru/post/118966
In this part: how to finish being an enikee and become a system administrator.
So, let's say you are working enikeem. Perhaps the second or even third job. Suppose you took seriously my advice to read 20-30 IT books a year and have already read 4 books over the past two years. You have an extensive experience in communicating with users, you have ceased to be afraid of beating a tambourine, and you have learned how to send users better than the admin. (Is this the reason for the third work?).
')
There are two important factors in “retirement”: where to go and how to leave.
I will now say a very important thing, many of them who work in “junior positions” do not understand, but in fact this is very important:
If you leave work in the mode “yes, I figured out the printer, by the way, I don’t work here from the first, if anything, I’ll go see what happened in the accounting office,” they will be offended. Why? Because it is more difficult to find an intelligent enikei (as well as the admin) than to find a job for an intelligent enikee. And for you, “a week without work” may and has some unpleasant financial results, but, in fact, is not fatal. For a company, stopping work due to a sudden lack of employees is a much more painful process.
Most enikeev and novice admins unconsciously (or consciously?) Are afraid that they will be put out of the door at the first stutter about finding a new job.
Probably, with inadequate people it will be like this, but the reaction is adequate will be much better than you expect. If you say “I’m already tired of working here, now I’m gradually looking for a new job for myself”, then you will give much more time to find a replacement for you. It is clear that this is a risk: if you are “looking for a new job” while you yourself are sitting still, it turns out a stupid situation. But, in modern realities (Moscow, St. Petersburg) you will find it for yourself quite well, even if not as well as you expected. And saying in advance that you are leaving you will give the opportunity to find a replacement in a quiet, not in an emergency mode. And yes, the company is better off paying you and your follower a couple of weeks sn than shoving you right out the door, taking to your place a noob without experience in the company. If you haven’t been fired before, why should the employer leave you early? Noob will be the first week to learn from you (less idiocy and admin administrator), and you calmly look for work.
Why these difficulties, when you can just slap on the table and say "in two weeks I have no spirit here"?
Because the higher your qualification is, the less you will be the gray faceless mass of the same category with the warehouse staff. And if your sudden withdrawal, which left a feeling of “setup”, is very bad. You will be remembered, and perhaps, in the future, they simply will not deal with you. And, I repeat, the higher the qualification, the smaller the world in which you rotate. If you want to go up - do not destroy what you are going.
The most terrible option of leaving is immediately after the holidays.
If you want to have a normal relationship - go away smoothly. An example from my experience: this winter, I parted with a small company that I outsource. Due to the specific working conditions, an adequate replacement was found only after 4 months. I said that it was no longer interesting for me to work with them in February, and left - in May. Of course, not always such extreme conditions, but try to go to meet the employer in such matters.
The first option is again an enikey, possibly with big money. By and large, it does not make sense - you will gradually begin to appear bad habits of long-standing low-skilled work. Set a limit for yourself - in enikei no more than one and a half - two years. If you have worked enikeem more than 5 years, then the prospects for becoming a specialist in some area (except for enikeystva) will be very elusive.
The second option is to go to sales managers / industrial climbers, etc. - at your discretion, I don’t know anything (although there will be more money).
The obvious third way is to look for work by a system administrator. There are two options - either the current system administrator leaves and you automatically get a career promotion, or you go to the administrator to another company.
To leave for the admin - you need to have enough courage and knowledge. Courage - because you have to become extreme in all the problems of an outside company, about which you are neither sleep nor spirit. Previously, if you could not do something, the stern and angry administrator would sit down to do it himself, even if he scolded you. Now - you are extreme.
The variant with “promotion” to the admin is much more pleasant - a familiar team, a familiar technician, a familiar person who can be asked a question if it will be bad at all. However, please note that this is a very, very harsh step. Usually, Enikei is in fairly large companies, and you’re face to face not with ten computers and a server that has not surrendered to anyone, but in a powerful infrastructure that you’re counting on - and not at all to sit in contact, these servers are more likely all, what is called 'mission critical', that is, they bring money to the company (and when idle they cause losses). And they will ask you in full growth, and even with the thought “he doesn’t know anything, but this month he blew dust from working servers”. Less radical is the increase in the conditions of a large IT-department - in this case there are colleagues and chiefs who will not let fall at all. But they will be much more strict judges than the few who understand IT chiefs.
As I have already said, categorically “no” immediately after holidays, holidays, in moments of emergency swearing, etc. About external circumstances, I wrote above. Here - about the inner feeling of their qualifications.
The exact moment of leaving each determines for himself; but keep in mind, working as admin is more difficult than it seems at first glance. The luxury of leaving work in time will be closed for the next couple of years.
By the time you leave, you should have experience installing and configuring from scratch an active directory (I'm still following the Windows path, about more interesting career options a bit later), be able to organize a small company network. Practice - virtualization will allow you to fully play around with a cool topology almost on a laptop.
There is a certain tradition of trying to grab certificates for various technologies. Skills they do not significantly add what kind of knowledge will give. The main thing that affect the certificates - the s / n and the chances of being taken to a job in all sorts of cool offices for small positions. If you have money, time and desire - get, will not be superfluous. In general, this is a more general principle: never avoid learning. Especially if you give it during working hours, especially if it is profile, especially if at the expense of the employer.
Try not to leave “as soon as you turn up where” - I wrote above about the problems of sudden withdrawal, plus, leaving on the first sneeze you risk to find yourself in a situation that you didn’t go where you wanted. If there is no special choice with the enikistvo, then with administration I do not advise you to run anywhere just to become an admin. Especially it is necessary to be careful with vacancies on which it is written "system administrator", and according to the description it is not clear what. Often, system administrators write support staff, enikeyschikov, etc. For a sonorous line in the resume is not bad, but you will lose a piece of your life there.
So, the right solution looks like this:
After that, go to the authorities, calmly say that you have increased qualifications, and you want to start looking for a new job, specifying that you do not plan to leave "right now." If the authorities are adequate, they will understand this correctly. If not - do not forget about the reserve money, and in any case, they will not put you out immediately, but within some reasonable time.
By the way, if the company is large, then you can simply offer a promotion. But do not insist on it in the “give more, or else I will go” mode - this is incorrect and under such conditions they will not give you anything. If you are offered a raise, then do not rush with open arms, tell me what you want to think a week. Although I advise you to agree - making a career is better than changing jobs.
After that, start looking for work. Resume, description of skills, experience - necessarily. By the way, if the authorities are adequate and take care calmly, then this is an important point: the contacts of the person with whom you are still working, where you can find out how and what. Again, the hellish bosses will calmly relate to your absences during interviews, which will not have to be “hidden” for being late and for personal problems.
Key changes: your previous work, your success story, deeper knowledge and skills. Since there is really nothing of this, you will have to inflate a little. But a little bit - for empty stories about anything will not convince anyone.
There are several options in which you find yourself:
Depending on the scenario, you will be asked either very difficult questions or stupid. Although I wrote the types of interviews, I can’t give specific advice on each of them - almost everything I said about the interview of the enikeyschik is applicable here.
I leave aside the question of what to do in the team (what they said, then do it) and tell you about the scenario when you were the System Administrator of a small office that decided to save on the admin and agreed to take an unskilled noob for a ridiculous salary (that is, you).
I repeat:
Most likely, in the first months there will be no time for systematic training. Your task is to understand everything that your predecessor did, moreover, both in the sense of “what he wanted to do” and in the sense of “what happened”.
You should not be angry with indignation when confronted with an unknown thing that seems illogical - perhaps there are deep considerations that you should know, but you don’t know them. A quick example of life: on Windows, in the DNS settings, not only domain controllers are indicated, but also a unix caching DNS server that does not support dynamic updates. This causes a desperate flood in the event log, but this is done in order to avoid air conditioning when the network starts up after the blackout (DC straights much longer than most other servers). In this case, you need to remember about the features of caching and reset the cache in case of changing the configuration of AD.
Also, do not blame the predecessor for the apparent "hack." The right to scold anyone will appear after you do better.
And no, the phrase “you don’t have to be a cook to say that the food is burnt” does not apply to the situation when you are also a cook. First, do better, and then scold (s).
However, closer to the point.
Your immediate tasks: to find documentation or create it in case of absence of network devices, a list of equipment with settings for management interfaces and passwords, similarly for servers, a list of workstations, printers, etc.
Without understanding the network configuration, you can not do anything (good).
After the configuration is written out, try drawing it schematically. Try to determine if there are distribution and core level on the network (rudiments), why this or that equipment is here. If you have enough qualifications - try to estimate the size of the broadcast-domains and traffic at the nodal points. It is difficult to consider traffic in LAN, but it is clear that a bunch of employees sitting with a network printer in one network segment, but working with 1C on a file ball in another, connected via a 100MB router is a bad place, a source of potential failures (including failures 1C and t .d.)
After the network topology, try to put together all the rights (groups, service accounts) and shared resources.
After that, try to find out all non-standard services that run on the network. This is usually done through employees who use them. Knowing in advance about the existence of an automatic metering system for fuel consumption is much better than finding out about it along with the complaint “stopped working”.
The same applies to server configuration - lists of accepted domains, websites, mail domains, redirection system, organization of access to the Internet, traffic accounting, etc. Particular emphasis on software licensing. Be sure to make backups of all that is. Try to raise it on the test machine (attention: the machine must be physically isolated from the main network, otherwise you can catch terrible problems with conflicts of the same settings).
With a high probability, you will find more than a lot of new things for yourself. And this determines your primary education. As soon as you come across any new service (and, assuming that you come from enikeev, each service is new to you) - do not be lazy:
a) Find literature and read. This time, not 20 (4) books per year - no more than a week or two per book. Yes, free time you no longer have and will not be in the coming year.
b) Recreate the configuration from work on the test equipment. It is necessary - remake home computer. Learn how the service works better on a running service than on its wreckage. Even in the simplest configuration of a squid, you will find a lot of new and unexpected things for yourself. Moreover, it’s not a fact that it’s in the configuration itself that the general admin level will be downloaded (starting with the simplest “how to edit a file” to the sudden question “how do programs choose which IP to use as source?”)
c) Do not change anything just like that. Works - do not touch. Until you outgrow the complexity of the configuration, you cannot break it. This is your instincts. If there is no such instinct, you are mistaken in your profession.
In the next part: how administrators live, what specialization is and when it is necessary to bring down ...
habrahabr.ru/post/120009
In this part: how to finish being an enikee and become a system administrator.
So, let's say you are working enikeem. Perhaps the second or even third job. Suppose you took seriously my advice to read 20-30 IT books a year and have already read 4 books over the past two years. You have an extensive experience in communicating with users, you have ceased to be afraid of beating a tambourine, and you have learned how to send users better than the admin. (Is this the reason for the third work?).
')
There are two important factors in “retirement”: where to go and how to leave.
I will now say a very important thing, many of them who work in “junior positions” do not understand, but in fact this is very important:
Do not spoil your karma
Don't quit all of a sudden.If you leave work in the mode “yes, I figured out the printer, by the way, I don’t work here from the first, if anything, I’ll go see what happened in the accounting office,” they will be offended. Why? Because it is more difficult to find an intelligent enikei (as well as the admin) than to find a job for an intelligent enikee. And for you, “a week without work” may and has some unpleasant financial results, but, in fact, is not fatal. For a company, stopping work due to a sudden lack of employees is a much more painful process.
Most enikeev and novice admins unconsciously (or consciously?) Are afraid that they will be put out of the door at the first stutter about finding a new job.
Probably, with inadequate people it will be like this, but the reaction is adequate will be much better than you expect. If you say “I’m already tired of working here, now I’m gradually looking for a new job for myself”, then you will give much more time to find a replacement for you. It is clear that this is a risk: if you are “looking for a new job” while you yourself are sitting still, it turns out a stupid situation. But, in modern realities (Moscow, St. Petersburg) you will find it for yourself quite well, even if not as well as you expected. And saying in advance that you are leaving you will give the opportunity to find a replacement in a quiet, not in an emergency mode. And yes, the company is better off paying you and your follower a couple of weeks sn than shoving you right out the door, taking to your place a noob without experience in the company. If you haven’t been fired before, why should the employer leave you early? Noob will be the first week to learn from you (less idiocy and admin administrator), and you calmly look for work.
Why these difficulties, when you can just slap on the table and say "in two weeks I have no spirit here"?
Because the higher your qualification is, the less you will be the gray faceless mass of the same category with the warehouse staff. And if your sudden withdrawal, which left a feeling of “setup”, is very bad. You will be remembered, and perhaps, in the future, they simply will not deal with you. And, I repeat, the higher the qualification, the smaller the world in which you rotate. If you want to go up - do not destroy what you are going.
The most terrible option of leaving is immediately after the holidays.
If you want to have a normal relationship - go away smoothly. An example from my experience: this winter, I parted with a small company that I outsource. Due to the specific working conditions, an adequate replacement was found only after 4 months. I said that it was no longer interesting for me to work with them in February, and left - in May. Of course, not always such extreme conditions, but try to go to meet the employer in such matters.
About where to go
The first option is again an enikey, possibly with big money. By and large, it does not make sense - you will gradually begin to appear bad habits of long-standing low-skilled work. Set a limit for yourself - in enikei no more than one and a half - two years. If you have worked enikeem more than 5 years, then the prospects for becoming a specialist in some area (except for enikeystva) will be very elusive.
The second option is to go to sales managers / industrial climbers, etc. - at your discretion, I don’t know anything (although there will be more money).
The obvious third way is to look for work by a system administrator. There are two options - either the current system administrator leaves and you automatically get a career promotion, or you go to the administrator to another company.
To leave for the admin - you need to have enough courage and knowledge. Courage - because you have to become extreme in all the problems of an outside company, about which you are neither sleep nor spirit. Previously, if you could not do something, the stern and angry administrator would sit down to do it himself, even if he scolded you. Now - you are extreme.
The variant with “promotion” to the admin is much more pleasant - a familiar team, a familiar technician, a familiar person who can be asked a question if it will be bad at all. However, please note that this is a very, very harsh step. Usually, Enikei is in fairly large companies, and you’re face to face not with ten computers and a server that has not surrendered to anyone, but in a powerful infrastructure that you’re counting on - and not at all to sit in contact, these servers are more likely all, what is called 'mission critical', that is, they bring money to the company (and when idle they cause losses). And they will ask you in full growth, and even with the thought “he doesn’t know anything, but this month he blew dust from working servers”. Less radical is the increase in the conditions of a large IT-department - in this case there are colleagues and chiefs who will not let fall at all. But they will be much more strict judges than the few who understand IT chiefs.
About when to leave
As I have already said, categorically “no” immediately after holidays, holidays, in moments of emergency swearing, etc. About external circumstances, I wrote above. Here - about the inner feeling of their qualifications.
The exact moment of leaving each determines for himself; but keep in mind, working as admin is more difficult than it seems at first glance. The luxury of leaving work in time will be closed for the next couple of years.
By the time you leave, you should have experience installing and configuring from scratch an active directory (I'm still following the Windows path, about more interesting career options a bit later), be able to organize a small company network. Practice - virtualization will allow you to fully play around with a cool topology almost on a laptop.
There is a certain tradition of trying to grab certificates for various technologies. Skills they do not significantly add what kind of knowledge will give. The main thing that affect the certificates - the s / n and the chances of being taken to a job in all sorts of cool offices for small positions. If you have money, time and desire - get, will not be superfluous. In general, this is a more general principle: never avoid learning. Especially if you give it during working hours, especially if it is profile, especially if at the expense of the employer.
Try not to leave “as soon as you turn up where” - I wrote above about the problems of sudden withdrawal, plus, leaving on the first sneeze you risk to find yourself in a situation that you didn’t go where you wanted. If there is no special choice with the enikistvo, then with administration I do not advise you to run anywhere just to become an admin. Especially it is necessary to be careful with vacancies on which it is written "system administrator", and according to the description it is not clear what. Often, system administrators write support staff, enikeyschikov, etc. For a sonorous line in the resume is not bad, but you will lose a piece of your life there.
So, the right solution looks like this:
- you are more or less taken aback by what happens in the company where you work.
- You learned what you could learn within the limits of the tasks available to you (it’s useless to cram BGP on two switches and a dlink router with NAT)
- You have money for a month and a half of a quiet life. It is necessary in case you do not cope with the new work and part with you.
After that, go to the authorities, calmly say that you have increased qualifications, and you want to start looking for a new job, specifying that you do not plan to leave "right now." If the authorities are adequate, they will understand this correctly. If not - do not forget about the reserve money, and in any case, they will not put you out immediately, but within some reasonable time.
By the way, if the company is large, then you can simply offer a promotion. But do not insist on it in the “give more, or else I will go” mode - this is incorrect and under such conditions they will not give you anything. If you are offered a raise, then do not rush with open arms, tell me what you want to think a week. Although I advise you to agree - making a career is better than changing jobs.
After that, start looking for work. Resume, description of skills, experience - necessarily. By the way, if the authorities are adequate and take care calmly, then this is an important point: the contacts of the person with whom you are still working, where you can find out how and what. Again, the hellish bosses will calmly relate to your absences during interviews, which will not have to be “hidden” for being late and for personal problems.
And again the interview
Key changes: your previous work, your success story, deeper knowledge and skills. Since there is really nothing of this, you will have to inflate a little. But a little bit - for empty stories about anything will not convince anyone.
There are several options in which you find yourself:
- You will be interviewed by a professional in your team. There is little chance of getting into (if we are talking about a career that I describe), if you hit, you are lucky.
- You will be interviewed by a professional replacement. It is very likely that they will take you if the interviewee has the goal of “shedding the task of finding a replacement for himself” or is not taken, if the interviewee has the task to show how unique and irreplaceable he is.
- You will be interviewed by a non-professional - an aunt from HR, a director, a person who is considered to be an IT director, but he doesn’t understand the question, etc.
- You are attached to an acquaintance. The most disgusting option, because everyone who knows about the “acquaintance" thinks that you are up to date and do not know how to do anything, plus they expect from you that you do, and you don’t know, you are this job or get paid for meeting your elder brother from the deputy director of this office. Plus, you have psychological problems with the requirement of an increase, leaving from work, etc.
Depending on the scenario, you will be asked either very difficult questions or stupid. Although I wrote the types of interviews, I can’t give specific advice on each of them - almost everything I said about the interview of the enikeyschik is applicable here.
You are admin. Hooray?
I leave aside the question of what to do in the team (what they said, then do it) and tell you about the scenario when you were the System Administrator of a small office that decided to save on the admin and agreed to take an unskilled noob for a ridiculous salary (that is, you).
I repeat:
- You are now responsible for everything that happens with computers.
- You must anticipate further infrastructure development.
- It depends on you whether the infrastructure will be dismal shit or it will work normally.
Most likely, in the first months there will be no time for systematic training. Your task is to understand everything that your predecessor did, moreover, both in the sense of “what he wanted to do” and in the sense of “what happened”.
You should not be angry with indignation when confronted with an unknown thing that seems illogical - perhaps there are deep considerations that you should know, but you don’t know them. A quick example of life: on Windows, in the DNS settings, not only domain controllers are indicated, but also a unix caching DNS server that does not support dynamic updates. This causes a desperate flood in the event log, but this is done in order to avoid air conditioning when the network starts up after the blackout (DC straights much longer than most other servers). In this case, you need to remember about the features of caching and reset the cache in case of changing the configuration of AD.
Also, do not blame the predecessor for the apparent "hack." The right to scold anyone will appear after you do better.
And no, the phrase “you don’t have to be a cook to say that the food is burnt” does not apply to the situation when you are also a cook. First, do better, and then scold (s).
However, closer to the point.
Your immediate tasks: to find documentation or create it in case of absence of network devices, a list of equipment with settings for management interfaces and passwords, similarly for servers, a list of workstations, printers, etc.
Without understanding the network configuration, you can not do anything (good).
After the configuration is written out, try drawing it schematically. Try to determine if there are distribution and core level on the network (rudiments), why this or that equipment is here. If you have enough qualifications - try to estimate the size of the broadcast-domains and traffic at the nodal points. It is difficult to consider traffic in LAN, but it is clear that a bunch of employees sitting with a network printer in one network segment, but working with 1C on a file ball in another, connected via a 100MB router is a bad place, a source of potential failures (including failures 1C and t .d.)
After the network topology, try to put together all the rights (groups, service accounts) and shared resources.
After that, try to find out all non-standard services that run on the network. This is usually done through employees who use them. Knowing in advance about the existence of an automatic metering system for fuel consumption is much better than finding out about it along with the complaint “stopped working”.
The same applies to server configuration - lists of accepted domains, websites, mail domains, redirection system, organization of access to the Internet, traffic accounting, etc. Particular emphasis on software licensing. Be sure to make backups of all that is. Try to raise it on the test machine (attention: the machine must be physically isolated from the main network, otherwise you can catch terrible problems with conflicts of the same settings).
With a high probability, you will find more than a lot of new things for yourself. And this determines your primary education. As soon as you come across any new service (and, assuming that you come from enikeev, each service is new to you) - do not be lazy:
a) Find literature and read. This time, not 20 (4) books per year - no more than a week or two per book. Yes, free time you no longer have and will not be in the coming year.
b) Recreate the configuration from work on the test equipment. It is necessary - remake home computer. Learn how the service works better on a running service than on its wreckage. Even in the simplest configuration of a squid, you will find a lot of new and unexpected things for yourself. Moreover, it’s not a fact that it’s in the configuration itself that the general admin level will be downloaded (starting with the simplest “how to edit a file” to the sudden question “how do programs choose which IP to use as source?”)
c) Do not change anything just like that. Works - do not touch. Until you outgrow the complexity of the configuration, you cannot break it. This is your instincts. If there is no such instinct, you are mistaken in your profession.
In the next part: how administrators live, what specialization is and when it is necessary to bring down ...
habrahabr.ru/post/120009
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/119407/
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