Hi All, Here's a very broad, general scenario I am wishing to get some guidance from the gurus on - it's not a technical question per se, but I'm hoping this is still a relevant place to ask.
I work in tertiary education IT, where I have done frontline desktop support for around 5 years. The bulk of what I do is overwhelmingly supporting MS Windows based computers on staff/student desktops and labs, with all the headaches and BS involved with supporting and maintaining such a mickey mouse product. Prior to mid 2007, I really had no idea what Sun was and did; I became familiar with the company and its products through the ZFS + Mac OS X Leopard announcement around that time (I'm a Mac fan at home, use it for multimedia based projects). So in short order I'd downloaded Solaris 10 (out of curiosity), played around with ZFS with a small USB-disk-based setup...then when OpenSolaris 2008.05 came out downloaded and played around with that. Most recently I've got hold of a small Sun Ray eval system and am having a ball testing it to simply do basic stuff like running brower kiosk sessions. Amazing technologies. To cut a long story short in a very short space of time I've become a bit of a Sun zealot, and am now commited to learning something like Solaris and or OpenSolaris comprehensively. My predicament is that I don't want to spend the rest of my life patching Windows and troubleshooting Outlook clients - doing desktop support. The software made freely available by Sun has removed the cost barrier to playing around with some pretty amazing and advanced stuff that a) I would not be able to afford otherwise and b) I do not have the opportunity to play around with in my current role at any rate. So let's say I want to geek up and earn some serious dollars in the process. What sort of opportunities are available out there for people with Solaris expertise? For example, what are the sort of environments where people with this knowledge would be in demand - ie. where should I be looking? Also, what level of expertise should I be aiming at for the above in-demand roles? What aspects of the OS do I need bulletproof knowledge of? I'm not stupid, but UNIX is still very new to me, things like shell scripting I have next to zero knowledge of. I can find my way around via CLI okay, but still have a preference for a GUI when available :-p Should I do training or obtain certification? What's the best way to learn "it" - maybe attach myself to a casual project and work "for free" for a bit? Any advice would be grand...I guess I'm throwing myself in the deep end, but really do need a change of scene...and hopefully a healthier salary eventually!! Cheers Dave This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
