Hi all!
First post in this lovely subreddit. I came across it today and thought I'd pose a question that I've been wondering the answer to for some time. Some background, I've been in the Navy eight years most recently as a Sr. Network Engineer, and System Administrator. This includes experience with some of the largest networks in the world, and how huge (government) enterprise does business. I also had a stint on a ship with ~1500 users and four operational computer networks and various systems, including managing 80+ Windows, RHEL, and Solaris 10 servers. I am certified Security+ and RHCSA. One caveat for those unfamiliar: The US government is slow to change, and open source isn't widely accepted in that realm yet. Furthermore, patching/etc is a very controlled process, downloading any updates from a trusted patching server after upstream entities vette them.
Fast forward to today: I left the military, and am now a freshman undergrad looking for work. I see all these job postings for linux administration and there are many terms that I 'understand' but I'm really unsure what they mean in context with technologies I've never had exposure to. They may very well be referring to something I can relate to or extrapolate my experience, but even after googling I find the cognitive leap difficult in some cases. Example job posting:
This part is pretty self explanatory.
Operating Systems: Strong experience with Red Hat Linux Strong experience with Windows Hands on Experience with Solaris Hands on Experience with Unix Variants Working my way down: PHP engines. Proficiency in this case as simply I have installed one of these applications before? I understand job postings aren't always written by tech managers but really? Configuration I could understand, but you should be able to find the documentation and be familiar with it inside of an hour or two. J2EE containers. I've never had an opportunity to touch/see one of these in operation. Is there anything pertinent that isn't general application knowledge? Something like quirks they have with user load? Portal and collaborative technologies. I confess, unless they're talking about Sharepoint or CITRIX I'm really at a loss what they mean here. Some form of wiki for internal staff? Content and Document Management Technologies I don't know that I've ever seen a dedicated management solution for this, mostly homegrown stuff. Good docs are important, but any insight here? System Monitoring, Instrumentation, Configuration Management Is this referring to SNMP polling, dashboards for incident management, and updating your documentation? Flow Control Technologies SVN is a version control system, isn't it? Is this simply referring to managing the backend of something like that? SaaS, PaaS, Cloud VMware, web applications, application servers? Distributed Technologies Uhhh. I feel like I'm missing the buzzword train here.
Middle-tier Technologies: Strong experience with PHP Engines – Proficiency in setting up and managing Wordpress/Drupal Strong experience with J2EE Containers (Tomcat, JBoss etc.) Hands on Experience with Portal & Collaborative Technologies Hands on Experience with Content & Document Management Technologies Strong experience with System Monitoring, Instrumentation & Configuration Management Hands on Experience with Flow Control Technologies (JIRA, SVN etc.) Hands on Experience with SaaS, PaaS, Cloud Technologies Hands on Experience with Distributed Technologies Web servers This one sounds mostly simple to me. Install, configure, manage, monitor a web server, load balancing, etc. Web Server connectors The best I get with Google here is a connector is a piece of code that connects a front facing server to it's back end counterparts. What exactly does that mean to a sysadmin? Caching Solutions I'm pretty sure this is essentially a proxy server, but as much as I'd like I've never been able to work with open source options in a production environment. Experience with HTML, JS, CSS Can anyone explain to me what a sysadmin would use this for? I understand the possibility of many hats in some companies, but this still eludes me unless it's setting up a web portal to run your scripts.
Front-End Technologies: Strong experience with Web Servers (Apache HTTP Server, Nginx, IIS etc.) Strong experience with Web Server Connectors for PHP, Java, etc. Strong experience with Caching Solutions (Squid, Varnish, EHcache, CDN etc.) Hands on Experience with HTML, JS, CSS Databases I know what a database is. I know DBAs make more money than I probably ever will. I understand how a SAN works. I could trace the architecture of how a full fiber optic virtualized network gets data from one point to another, but I still don't understand what this means in terms of this job listing. File Systems I can partition, monitor, destroy partitions, move data around, ensure you don't lose your shit, find your shit when you do lose it, try not to ever type rm -rf * in the root directory. What else is there? I'm not sure if they're just covering their bases or if I'm missing something. Networking Basic networking in Linux? Any comments here? Security and High Availability Concepts This is one that I feel I've got spot on. Backup methodologies tcpdump? What do you guys use? I've never really had to do backups on RHEL, our production servers were attached to SANs which did daily full backups of the entire disks. Disaster recovery I know what I would consider this to be...COOP, distributed backups, server images, multiple physical locations. Is this just simply knowing what all this is, and being prepared, and the rest is what the company decides to do?
Back-End Technologies: Hands on Experience with Databases (Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra etc) Strong experience with File Systems (Journaling, IO, Partitioning etc) Strong experience with Networking (Interface Bonding, TCP stacking, DNS, IP addressing, Load Balancing, Proxy, Protocols etc.) Strong experience with Security, & High Availability Concepts Strong experience with Backup methodologies Hands on Experience with Disaster Recovery Scripting In the environments I've worked in, scripting was mostly frowned upon, or could get you sent directly to jail depending on what you were running. Modification of existing environment even to automate tools wasn't an option, up to and including having Python installed. I've used a few bash scripts here and there, and I've been working on learning Python for about a year now. I still wouldn't say I'm proficient. How much do you guys code, what do you use it for, how does it help you? What is necessary, and what should I know/pursue? After finding things like Fabric and other tools listed there, I'm pretty excited about what's possible. Also the realm of remote administration! Using a VPN or a mobile device to access my servers instead of walking my drunk ass to the ship on my day off! Hallelujah! What else? Is this absolutely necessary beyond familiarity with bash? This is the part I'm honestly most concerned about as any other technology I can learn in days, teaching myself to program/script has been a much longer journey and I'm still not there yet.
Scripting Languages: Strong experience with Shell Hands on Experience with Perl Hands on Experience with Python I've also seen some looking for strong experience with performance tuning. I had to google that, but it turns out it's basically just monitoring your servers and paying attention, and adjusting things that don't look like system normal? Any further input here? These really are things I would've thought would go without saying for a system administrator position, period...I really appreciate any input you guys may have that furthers my understanding of Linux administration, employability, and any of the above technologies or how to further my knowledge of them.
Thanks!
edit: first time reddit text formatting. also added performance tuning question at the end.
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