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How I did not become you: a post of love for sysadmins

Today is the Day of the system administrator - a professional holiday of the fighters of the hardware and software front and the best friends of users in business. On the occasion of the holiday, we asked to tell about our way to system administration ... our PR manager. We do not even know if you are lucky that our manager is not among you or not lucky. In general, read a little unusual story and judge for yourself.





A source



From the entire RegionSoft Developer Studio team we congratulate you on the holiday! We wish you a successful ITSM, the best of ITIL, smooth SAM, stable DevOps and understand all these abbreviations :-) Next we give the floor to our colleague and remind you that the articles of the employees in our blog are not edited or reviewed, and the company's position may be the same or not. match the opinion of the author.



Hi, Habr!

')

First meetings



The first system administrator happened in a small, literally in-chamber, but public high school. He was a true friend and helper of especially zealous guys: he gave us projectors for seminars and conferences, ordered for temporary use an old laptop Rover (once forgotten by me in a trolley bus but saved) and even luxury — a new laptop, but not leaving the university building. If something was broken by the playful hands of enthusiasts, he helped to fix it and did not run to report that these students were trying to enter IT voluntarily and were ready to collect all the viruses and redesign the internal network (then the defense was different). I must say, he quickly uncovered our brazen grouping, and the defense became better, and the students received logins, passwords and access rights. In general, we taught an important lesson - users cannot be trusted even if they are children of 17-18 years old with naive eyes. Then about the work of a sysadmin and there could be no talk - the stock market and mathematical analysis were fascinated many times stronger and seemed more promising.



Of course, the Belforts did not work out of us, and almost all of them dispersed across banking and tax structures. I was brought to one of the largest IT companies in our city. And it was there that the first desire to become a system administrator appeared - firstly, it’s unreal to help 450 employees, secondly, the server was shaken by its size and equipment, thirdly, it seemed that the admin girl was just +500 to karma. I saw myself like this:



Books



However, the position in commerce did not make this "dream" closer. So, we need a way out. So, the first way out was books, or rather E. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks. I did not get the latest edition, but I literally read it excitedly. There are several controversial points in the book, both in the manner of presentation and in the door-posts of the translators, but this is a real scholar of the most complex subject. In general, my principal position is that every beginner network engineer, system administrator, developer, and tester are required to master this particular book. Then, of course, "Modern operating systems."



At the same time there were various articles in Runet, but then Habr appeared in life. So, what conclusions I made from working with books.









During the reading of Tanenbaum, the admin’s fervor subsided, and I grew up and realized that software development is much more interesting, closed my eyes and went to study at a developer in a very good local corporate university.



Combat experience



However, life is arranged in a very unusual way and often jokes - of all the subjects of almost a two-year course, the Unix administration course turned out to be the steepest and most advanced. Everything was cool: use the console, make complex multicomponent commands (pipelines), write scripts and even compile sish code in gcc. At the same time, I abruptly changed jobs and absolutely consciously went to test complex IP-telephony systems at another large company. That's where the Unix system administration was up to and beyond - we had complete freedom not to sleep at night, linger at work, poking around in the server before installing the client build, working with a mountain of telecommunications equipment - from peaceful Linksys-ok and old-school faxes weighing 12 kg up to Cisco and the stuff you can't-call-but-we-all-understood. Since this was the first hands-on experience with equipment and networks, several months were associated with training. Conclusions have also been made.





After a few months, I easily coped with all the basic issues of working in the console (and already got used to the fact that the PC monitor is mostly a black and white console and a modest GUI of our software), once I set up and replicated databases, did hot swap HDD and helped new ones set up our entire calling-listening zoo. However, with huge loads and constant processing, the salary was not a fountain and when I was called into commerce by another IT company for twice the amount, I ... could not leave for another 2 months until the project ended and the soul did not let go of amazing engineering work. But in the end, the mind turned out to be higher than the love for the work and, rubbing tears over the equipment, I took away my work.



PR under Windows: it did not seem to you



We’re talking about further places of work not in this article, they have more relevance to the Management ’flow, but, let's say, since the end of 2012 I’ve hand in hand with the promotion of corporate software for Windows (since 2013 - this is RegionSoft CRM and all other products of our own design). And, it would seem, promote, write releases, etc., but the current IT sphere requires different approaches (and this is also a topic for a separate article, which, of course, no one will write - everything is said to us) and at some point I felt that I lacked a deep understanding of how Windows and Microsoft Server work. The fact is that promotion in a professional environment should be practically at the level of engineering - only then are you on an equal footing with the audience. Otherwise - rub down your press releases, they are not interesting to anyone.



No sooner said than done, I closed my eyes again and returned to the same corporate university for the “Microsoft Server Administration” program (7 months). And ... it turned out to be a completely different feeling from learning. When you have experience behind you, when you worked with Unix, when there is a clear understanding of what an operating system is from the inside, then all that remains is ...
... to re-learn, trying to simultaneously cut down in my head the constant desire to compare one OS with another. Of course, thinking about windows must die was not (almost), yet I am a long-standing user and sometimes a gentle lover of this operating system and even development for it.

The group had 12 people, all with experience, some are enikeyschiki, some are system administrators, some are me, the only being of the female sex. After three classes, 6 people remained, we lived to the end 5. And then I will make a very sudden digression for Habr - simply because Habr is read by both students, beginners, and those who want to “enter IT after thirty-five”.



<lyrical digression>

I'll tell you why those 7 people left. They decided that system administration is when they are taught to connect the printer to the network and tell how to view the list of visited sites. In their understanding, Windows existed as if by itself - and all administration came down to installing and uninstalling programs and cleaning the registry. In some companies and some other non-business places, this is true (still USB ports are blocked and floppies are pulled out (interestingly, everyone knows that this or the generation has already grown ...)). Only the process of deploying a virtual machine has already scared off the listeners and they left, returning their money. It’s a pity, of course: those who survived to Powershell and those who passed a mini-test went outside with unbuttoned jackets to minus 20 - the Airborne Forces rest.

</ lyrical digression>



Survivors have congregated in the first row and plunged into everything: group policies, security, forests, domains and subdomains, scripts, networking, DHCP, DNS, DFS, Hyper-V, and even SQL (here at the minimum). The classes were standard: lecture + practice. The main surprise, of course, was that all practical tasks were given in English, the interface was also English-language, and it was forbidden to turn on Russian for localization . It was an adult, serious experience - to study this business at 32 years old, in the evening after work (even two), with Unix in my head. I want the result to be heard by everyone who is going to learn something in the same situation.





I got everything I wanted from the course and more. At the moment, I am pleased with all the projects that I do, and I feel that now the quality of work has grown. For the sake of interest, I went for three interviews with a system administrator. I cannot disclose the details of the first, it was the authorities - let's say, there were more questions about Outlook and Excel than about networks and domains. But the other two were very different.



The first is an industrial trading company. The previous fighter went to another company in DevOps and left the IT infrastructure in near-perfect condition. Everything is at a minimum: Active Directory, 57 users, remote terminals, some commercial equipment and mobile, peripherals, there is already a neat (surprisingly neat!) License management policy, a sysadmin in the singular.



The second is an IT company. Needless to say, I have not grown up to this yet, the matter is already in practice: high-load systems, Kubernetes, Docker, RHEL / CentOS, a million questions on security and resiliency. I was pleased that in theory I answered most of the questions, but at the end of the interview I honestly admitted that I was not ready for practical work, since I know about these technologies only from books and Habra.



I was invited to a trading company. But I repeat that it was only for the purposes of analyzing my level, I’m not looking for a job, so I had to refuse.



So I did not become a system administrator. I met different sysadmins: purely “Bashy” and overgrown, tough guys, who are able to follow alone the scale of the level of the regional branch of a huge company, lazy and hardworking, harmful and responsive. I always liked the work of these guys - to make the lives of other people easier and more convenient. And its own - more fun and diverse, here the users also took care :-)



Friday night is the favorite time of the toughest incidents. Let today be an exception day. In general, all of the holiday!






Our RegionSoft CRM , which is nice to adminit :-)



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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/418401/



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