What do you know about Network / Help Desk administrators?

Quench24

this is a long shot but its a shot worth taking. I need some real life advice about the career path I want to take. When I was a younger boy I wanted to be a Network Administrator but I kind of doubted my self. They make good money and the job seemed like it had various tasks I'd be doing. I however am most engaged and most powered up when I'm moving the mouse and typing. This is where career paths like programming or Help Desk come into my mind, but I am getting of topic. Network Administrators manage the network traffic, monitor the firewall, manage all the computers at a company as well as the computers used as DHCP or DNS servers. If you know what else they do, specifically, tell me. It just seems that once the network is set up and configured it doesn't need much maintenance or intervention. Unless a router or server fails, but how rarely does that happen? I kinda realize that they may share job duties with a System Administrator. Managing users in AD, or managing the Domain, and using other software I'm not familiar with.

I guess the point of this post is to ask you for clarification of what the job duties of a Network Administrator are. The secondary point is asking for advice of what, besides programming, is a good title or job to have for someone that wants to be constantly navigating through Windows, opening up folders, uninstalling programs( well ok, that's not that fun), and typing. I knowwwwwwwwwwwww it sounds like programming haha.

I'll end this post with a sincere thank you if you take your time to make a quality response. Thank you.

MAC_Addy

Job titles are so difficult these days. Network Administrator at company A may be completely different to Company B. For me, a Network Administrator is someone that can take care of small network problems, route/switch type stuff. Port security. A network admin is someone that can take care of folder share permissions on the network (server infrastructure) and understand it. For example, how a folder an inherit permissions. If you don't understand it, it'll bite you in the butt for sure. For more "complex" things that need to be done will be performed by a network engineer. He's the one that'll engineer routing protocols, ACL's, and other types of security.

TheFORCE

Your best bet is to look at the job postings with those titles to find what they do. As mentioned above one job title at company A means totally different at company B.
And from my experience network admins dont manage firewalls or vpns, thats done by the network security peoplw.