Finally figured it out...future endeavor(s) Linux Sys/Net Admin

After much time, well not much time was spent because my decision was obvious to me after some thinking to myself.

What? I want to actually thank "The Technomancer" for his thread http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/94920-10-year-linux-systems-admin-engineer-ask-me-anything.html as this inspired me more every time I saw something new that he posted. I'm up for adoption too if you're looking Technomancer.

In all seriousness everyone who contributes to this forum is valuable to someone in someway, so I want to thank the entire Techexam forum members.

I currently work for a very small private business that has clients around the Greater Boston area providing IT outsourcing and consultation. Overall I'm content where I am as I have learned new skills and the experience has been good, but I feel that there is something missing. Something that excites me to learn even more, something that makes me want to know more, something that I enjoy and that something is Linux. All of the clients we handle are Windows based. While this seems to be the standard across many businesses and corporations I feel that my enthusiasm has gone down to learn more about it or at least work with it. I've said to myself over the last few years that I want to learn Linux, networking and know more about security.

Never did, never put the time or effort to, never felt like I would learn it and never felt I would be good at it. My perspective has changed because I want to do the things I said I would never do or be. I want to be a administrator specializing in Linux and networking with a good aspect of security. Since high school ( graduated in 08 ) I remember always being interested in all three, but me being who I was at the time never took any action and let the days go by, month after month, year after year.

Fast forward to the middle of this year I purchased a lab to study the new revision of the CCNA and ever since I bought it I let it sit in my room collecting dust. The reason for this was because I started to work for my current employer and while the CCNA would have been relevant to some of my work, Microsoft played a bigger role. Sure I dabbled with setting up and/or re-configuring switches, AP's, and even a couple ASA's 5505/5510 for some clients, but it was very limited as we didn't have many to do. So I did what I thought was better and left the CCNA alone and tried to learn more about Microsoft services - Server 08/12, AD, Hyper-V, File replication, VSS, etc. I felt while this had its benefits it was more of a what should I learn to show the employer I can perform my job and do well vs a what I want to learn.

I guess what I'm saying is I wish I did what I wanted to learn and this is the purpose of the thread. Don't procrastinate any further and take charge now and then. Don't wish for a brighter future, make your future bright by doing. New material can prove to be a challenge if you're not familiar with what you're learning, but I truly feel that patience is a virtue. My plan of action in getting where I want will be attainable because I will make it.

I'd like to start off fresh, clean off my plate, rinse and wash and then wipe it dry.
I will read, learn, troubleshoot, experiment, practice the CCNA material.
Pick up a Linux server distribution, learn how to install a base config, learn how to add services and/or roles, and overall read, learn, troubleshoot, experiment and practice Linux.
Pass the CCNA
Pass Linux+
Pass LPIC
Learn a language
Pass CCNA S
Pass CCNP/S
Pass RHCSA
Pass CASP
Pass CEH
Pass SSCP
Pass GSEC
Pass CISSP

If you feel I should change the order please don't hesitate to explain your reasoning as I'm still undecided on my path of certifications order, but I feel that it seems reasonable. Share you experience if you're a Linux/Network/Security admin as it would be appreciated.

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Comments

Santa_

Edited to be easier to read and added some additional context. Everything got put together making it hard to read so I spaced it out.

kohr-ah

I wanted to say first off congrats on figuring out what you want to do. I just came to this as well as I did the same thing as you. I had my CCNA/CCNA+S and then they offered me a job as a cloud engineer. I learned NetApp, VMWare(ESX 5.1), Hyper-V, Server 2008, 2012 (basics), etc. and you know that. I didn't enjoy it at all and took a risk and left my job and am now doing network engineering. Just like you I want to get my Linux + but after my CCNP because I would like to do networking / linux administration as well.

Vmware was definitely worth learning (because I learned virtual switching).

I am interested to see what the response order is as well from others but I just wanted to say it is awesome you know what you want to do and are striving for it.

pram

Why are you focusing so much on networking if you want to be a Linux admin. You'll pretty much never touch switches or routers, there's very little overlap between the two fields.

Santa_

I mentioned that I wanted to be a administrator in Linux specializing in networking and some aspect of security. The three have always caught my interest. While I can see myself also being solely a network administrator or a network security administrator I would like to have a better foundation on Linux over Microsoft. All three use some, if not all aspects of the CLI making the transition between them easier to work with once I have a good grasp. If I at least switch directions I may land myself in a better position if I have the networking foundation that the CCNA can provide while also having knowledge with Linux.

While it may not seem beneficial, I'm basing my judgement on the job searches around my area that I see requesting these as a desired skill. I mentioned in the OP that any Linux/Network/Security admin to provide experience. This would help steer me in the right direction. Maybe what I want is not possible, maybe it is and maybe there is a better way to achieve what I want.

I can see how your (@pram) post can be true based on the employer only requiring solely a Linux administrator to just do Linux only tasks while another employer may ask for Linux and networking administration.

stryder144

I see your path as reasonable. My full time job has a media service that requires Linux and networking skills. So, you may find a job that requires both, to varying degrees.

The Technomancer

Thanks for the shout out! Like you said, the whole community rocks here -- I'm just trying to add to it what I can.

There's definitely a market for Linux admins that know their way around a network, but it's getting rarer as smaller shops start off in the cloud, and by the time they're ready to build out a data center, they're usually bringing on a network administrator for that because there's going to be enough work for a dedicated guy. Every job that I've landed, I've been asked how my networking skills are. Every time, I've listed the entire sum of my off-server networking skills:

-- I don't have the OSI model memorized.
-- The only vendor's software I've even touched is Cisco's.
-- I can set ports between access and trunking, provision a basic VLAN, figure out where a box is located in my data center based on the arp table and hunting down the MAC address (then praying that they're sanely provisioned, like the server in U10 being plugged into port 10 on the switch)
-- I can do subnet math.
-- I can tell you the gateway and broadcast IPs in a given subnet.
-- Outside of the math part, I have the docs up to do every single bit of that.
-- When all else fails, buy the network admin a case of beer and apologize for dumping crap work on his plate.

I've never been turned down for a gig based on my lack of networking experience. It's a "nice to have" skill for a sysadmin.

Also, be sure you remember that, at least on the Linux/UNIX side of the house, we do very little internal office IT as most of the jobs are for production operations, so you're not gonna get much of a chance to keep such a wide variety of skills in practice. On top of that, job descriptions on the *NIX side of things consist of this format:

Opening paragraph: Why company x and job y at company x is awesome, AKA the sales pitch. If you see the word "rockstar" in here, run the @#$% away unless you really need the job because that means "We want a systems architect, but we want to pay and title him as a "senior" systems administrator."

Second paragraph: Something about working hard and playing hard, meaning there's a ping-pong or foosball table somewhere in the office, followed by the HR description of what someone in that job title does, which may or may not reflect what the sysadmins actually do.

Required Skills: A wishlist of skills, which if all of them were actually required to start out in the job, would actually constitute the job description of a title two (or more) steps up the chain and pay twice as much. In reality, they hope you know the core two to four skills that align with the key responsibilities listed, one of which is one of the scripting languages they're asking for, even if they want BASH and something else, and have maybe touched the others once or twice and know where to find the good docs and **** sheets for them.

Nice-To-Have Skills: Please have heard of these, and perhaps you've read an article or Wikipedia page about them.

The Hard Sell: The hard sell.

Needless to say, every employer wants a Linux systems administrator that can build and maintain a network from the servers to the circuit, program/script in 3-4 languages, be able to do pen testing, lift 50 pounds, do project management, admin the development environment too (@#$% you very much, Perforce and Jenkins...), know all the SQL joins, be able to tune a system at the kernel level, use a config management system, have a GitHub (even if you don't program), know the ins and outs of some sort of storage kit that costs more than a house anywhere outside of SF and NY, be able to plan and spec out a hardware purchase, design clustered systems, and when you break wind, angels sing and a double rainbow shines forth from your nether-regions.

I would too, because these people are very rare, and they don't get called systems administrators -- they generally hold titles like "Principal Systems Architect", "Lead DevOps Engineer", "The Technomancer", or "the only reason we still have a business and $DEITY help us if he/she/other gets tired of being underpaid and overworked, or takes more than one day off in a row."

Were I in your shoes, I'd pick between Linux systems and networking, focus heavily on that one, and limit your focus on the other to learning the easy stuff so that you don't have to bug the network or systems admin for something silly. Like, if you go down the systems route, be sure that you can do basic network troubleshooting and provisioning at the switch level. If you go the networking route, be sure that you can do systems-level network troubleshooting from the Linux CLI. Being a jack-of-all-trades definitely isn't a bad thing, but make sure you're master of one thing as well.

The second piece of advice I have is to put a timeline on those goals, and outside of having a vision of where you want to be in 5, 10, 15, etc. years, don't make concrete plans more than a few years out. You want to be able to adapt to the market as it evolves, and adjust your short-term goals as needed to keep the long-term ones viable. Don't be afraid to deviate from the plan as well if you find something you really love. Generalists are abound at the lower levels of the IT world, but to move from the administrator title ranks to the engineer ones, you need to be a master at something and not just know a little bit about everything. Knowing a little bit about everything lets you logic out the harder stuff, but you're a lot slower doing it that way than someone who has mastered all the tricks.

If you really enjoy networking and want to get in on the bleeding edge of it, I'd take a look at seeing what sort of training or entry-level gigs are out there in the software-defined networking (as well as software-defined data centers) space. That'll not only leverage what you enjoy about networking into your career, but it will expose you to a lot of command line action on systems and networking equipment as well as some programming/scripting.

I'd also cut out the security-focused certs like the CEH and CISSP from your list unless you really want to get into pen-testing or information security -- you'll learn enough tricks on the sysadmin side of your certification track to do 95% of the security you'll need to. I've had one system I've been responsible for "owned" in my career, and all the owning really was was someone using one of my BIND servers to conduct a DNS reflection attack on some poor VPS in Germany because the version of BIND that we were running still did recursive DNS lookups even with DNS recursion disabled in the conf. No actual access to the system, and no damage beyond an angry letter from a VPS provider. That's not to say that InfoSec people don't have a place in an enterprise environment, but it's a career focus, not something to have a few certs in the field on so you know something about it.

Hope that helps!

pram

Santa_ wrote: »

While it may not seem beneficial, I'm basing my judgement on the job searches around my area that I see requesting these as a desired skill. I mentioned in the OP that any Linux/Network/Security admin to provide experience. This would help steer me in the right direction. Maybe what I want is not possible, maybe it is and maybe there is a better way to achieve what I want.

I can see how your (@pram) post can be true based on the employer only requiring solely a Linux administrator to just do Linux only tasks while another employer may ask for Linux and networking administration.

Systems and Networking are usually mutually exclusive silos within most organizations. There is (imo) little benefit to having a mastery of layer 2/3 networking equipment as a Systems engineer. The expectation for Linux admins isn't simple mastery of the command line, it's really more about in-depth knowledge of applications. 'Linux admin' really means you're supposed to manage and maintain Apache or Nagios or MySQL or Oracle or Gluster or Tomcat or a million other things.

The Technomancer

Wait, someone actually uses Gluster?

pram

Yes gluster is fairly popular in AWS for autoscaling. It's pretty painless to mount during the bootstrap. I don't like fixing it though because its basically beta software and god help you if one of your bricks explodes and the self-heal craps out.

The Technomancer

I know that feel, bro.