trying to land my first system admin job.. quick question

sixtyten

OK so I have an interview for a system admin I job that covers several areas that match my skillset. The job is a mix of linux,unix,microsoft, and networking. I've been in the IT field for over 10 years and have recently decided to pursue a more challenging career in the system admin or network admin field. Right now I' am a web developer but I've got a strong background in hardware/software and numerous other things. I've setup a ton of virtual servers to test different things locally, on linode, and digitalocean. BUT.. I've not unlocked the system admin title.

I want to make sure I'm prepared for the interview so I'm doing some digging on Linkedin to see what systems the current staff support. Aside from that, I typically have focused on keeping my servers up to date via cron jobs and scripting. I've also made sure to have intrusion prevention tools in place along with iptables rules. My experience on the Microsoft side is more limited but I'm hoping to offset some of that with Linux/networking skills. On the networking side, I've got my CCENT and will test for the ICND2 next week to get my CCNA.

So.. with all that being said, is there any key points you would cover in preparation for a System Admin I job interview?

Thanks!

RHEL

I can give you my perspective from the UNIX/Linux side as a UNIX/Linux admin for 5 years over 3 companies...

**** #1 **** Eagerness to learn, a passion for what you do, and a positive attitude. This is what a solid employer wants above everything else. Demonstrate this the best way you can.

Also...
* Basic command-line navigation
* Basic troubleshooting -- Be prepared to walk them through your thought process. The process in which you troubleshoot is much more important in their eyes than being able to remember specific commands or flags. That's what man pages and google is for. ie, check CPU, uptime, memory, disk utilization, log files, disk I/O, check for flashing amber lights on the system physically, check physical media (cables, etc), networking
* See if you can find out what they're using in their environment prior to the interview... That'll help you know what to focus on. What flavors of Linux? RHEL/CentOS or Debian? For Unix - Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc.
* Know basic file permissions, mounts, filesystem manipulation (creating, deleting, modifying, growing, etc).
* Know basic LVM functionality -- volume groups, logical volumes, physical volumes, filesystems, and how they integrate with one another
* Know the function of the kernel, the boot up process, core configuration files in /etc, filesystem layout, etc
* Know how to install, list and remove software. Know what package management tools are available (yum, apt-get, etc). Know how to install local packages and compile from source (./configure, make, make install).
* Know basic user administration and the files related to this. Understand the purpose of groups and how to modify/create/remove/add users to them.
* Understand how to boot into maintenance/single user mode and how to set kernel boot options. How to boot from CDROM? How to recover a lost root password?
* Understand the UNIX toolset for data/file manipulation (awk, sed, cut, sort, tr, grep, etc)
* Understand basic shell scripting -- how to read through a script to see what it is doing, why automation is important, the importance of documentation and comments, basic loops and conditional statements, variables, handling command-line arguments.
* Understand basic input, output and error redirection
* Understand basic environmental variables such as PATH, hidden files, important files in home directories and what they do
* Understand system processes, how to list them and determine which user or parent process they belong to. Know how to kill them.
* Understand startup scripts and where they reside on a particular OS
* Know how to display basic info such as uptime, memory, hardware data, oslevel, etc
* Understand basic backup and restore principles and the importance of double/triple checking your work as a single command can destroy an entire system
* Understand basic networking from the OS side -- netstat, listing and configuring network adapters, bringing an adapter online or offline, listing open/listening ports on a system, etc
* Understand soft and hard links, inodes, file descriptor areas, quorum, quota, and file dependencies
* Understand basic services that run on a local system and daemons -- ftp daemon, ssh daemon, apache, samba, inetd/xinetd, etc, and how to start/stop and view the status of them
* Understand basic firewall principles, access control, how to list and modify firewall rules
* Advanced: Understand the principles and advantages behind mirroring, redundancy, and clustering

I'm not sure how basic or advanced they're going to probe you... I didn't get drilled too hard fore a purely UNIX/LINUX mid-level position, but this stuff should get you started with some basics.

sixtyten

Perfect!! Thanks so much. This is exactly what I was looking for. I will print this out and go through each bullet point.