Aside from maybe basic troubleshooting, just about everything a sysadmin does will be greatly dependent on where that sysadmin works.
In a past life, I worked for a company of ten people. There, I had to keep a few dozen servers humming, as well as know something about networking, VLANs, PCI DSS, FCC compliance for unlicensed RF, compiling software from source, and dozens of other things I can't even remember clearly enough to enumerate. In my current position, I manage a number of servers, but that's about it. I don't have to know anything about the physical infrastructure and HVAC (there's a whole team for that). I don't have to know that much about building server hardware (another team, and besides most of them are VMs, which introduces another layer of complications). And so on. Do I know a bit about the OSI model/toolchains/customer service/insert whatever here? Yeah, because I'm naturally curious, and was lucky enough to have spent several years in the aforementioned small shop. In my current position, I probably could still do a sufficient job at my "official" role (keeping a specific set of Linux boxes humming) without most of that other knowledge. It might be useful to try to separate sysadmin generalists from specialists, and maybe to list some specialties. Hardware, software, operating systems (split by OS), infrastructure/physical plant, networking, et cetera. David Smith From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joseph Kern Sent: Thursday, July 04, 2013 11:50 AM To: Josh Smift Cc: LOPSA Discuss List Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Mark Burgess quote from April 2013 ;login: So there's no need to focus on any specific tasks. What about models, frameworks, and methods? An SA 1 should understand: 0. Structured Troubleshooting 1. The OSI Model 2. Kernel Security Rings 3. Von Neuman Architecture 4. Customer Service 5. Infrastructure: HVAC and Power An SA 2 should understand: 1. Basic statistical analysis (Mean, Median, Mode, etc) 2. Graph Theory 3. Compiler-Linker toolchain 4. State Machines 5. An Automation Programming Language etc. etc. On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 2:09 AM, Josh Smift <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: CQ> Accounting, legal advice, marketing, development, and janitorial CQ> services all touch upon what we do. ...and at a startup or other small organization, if there isn't a dedicated person doing those things, there's a decent chance the sysadmin might end up doing one or more of them. (And that may not work out so well... But it happens.) -Josh ([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/ -- Joseph A Kern [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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