Unix Career Path

What is on Your Mind?
1

Hi,

I've been in the IT field for a few years now, less than 10. I've done a little of everything from database administration, development, systems administration, and unix administration. Although, I wouldnt say I'm a senior level in any of those. Unix definitely stands out in my preferences of a career path so I decided to look from some kind of Junior Unix Systems Administration position. I found a position that isnt exactly sa authoritive, but has unix server monitoring tasks, and one of the biggest tasks they are looking for is a junior unix scripting person. They say in the future they are looking to take over the servers completely as its being handled by another team. Do you think this would be a good opportunity to learn more unix internals as a scripter?

2

I have done SA work in the past for many years in UNIX and non-UNIX platforms. I would say that a UNIX scripting role would be good to add to your qualifications. But, I'm not sure it will help you gain more UNIX experience from an SA point of view.

In my current role I do lots of UNIX scripts for monitoring of applications, hardware, operating systems, databases, etc. but I work from a list of requirements that development or the SA's give me. So they tell me what process or resources to monitor or mechanize and the desired thresholds and I make it happen using things like Nagios, OVO or Patrol.

Now my SA background got me into my current role. But, I don't know if my current role would get me into an SA job. I do miss the SA job but I really like being able to script more and work a regular 40 work week. As an SA I was always on-call with a cell phone 24x7x365.

Good luck!

3

Yes, but ideally not on the post mortem slab! This is an area where you need to be ahead of the game and able to foresee problems. You don't want to be reading tons of man pages at 2am in the morning trying to work out why your company's data disappeared.

4

What is the name of your role? The Unix scripting part would just be a main task, but there are other system administration tasks also some Sql database administration tasks later on. The Unix system administration role is something they hope to take over which is what the position I'm looking into would be getting involved in. For now its alot of monitoring and scripting on Unix servers. To me it sounds interesting and definitely the right path. Hope it is.

5

Well, its just test development scripting I would be doing now. They mentioned they understand this would be a junior role, but nonetheless in the beginning it would be alot of modifying Unix scripts for improvement etc......

6

unix scripting will get you more familiar with unix and make you more efficient ... if you desire to get into senior positions later, i definitely advise you to take up and get proficient in scripting ...

as an example ... suppose i want to copy one file to 10 servers ... for a non-scripter, the process would be:

scp file server1:/dir/file
scp file server2:/dir/file
scp file server3:/dir/file
scp file server4:/dir/file
scp file server5:/dir/file
scp file server6:/dir/file
scp file server7:/dir/file
scp file server8:/dir/file
scp file server9:/dir/file
scp file server10:/dir/file

basically a non-scripter took 10 steps to copy the file to 10 servers and did not even confirm yet that it is where it should be ...

for a scripter, the process would be (in kludgy ksh code and assuming proper ssh setup) ...

x=1; while [ $x -le 10 ]
do
    scp file server${x}:/dir/file
    ssh server${x} "hostname; ls -l /dir/file"
    x=`expr $x + 1`
done

the short script above that one can type on the command line not only copies the file to the designated servers --- it also confirms that the file exists on those designated servers all in 1 shot ...

so a non-typist scripter can take less time to do 1 task than a typist scripter that has to do 1 task 10 times ... big difference, right?