What is on Your Mind?

I am a junior unix sys admin (Tru64) I have been in this job for 9 months and I am quite worried.

When I first got the job I was delighted as I was finally in a job where I could have the chance to be a specialist in a field rather than being a general support guy (i graduated from uni and got my first job was working on a service desk) but after a while I found out about the fate of tru64 and wondered if I may become obsolete before my career has barely started!

I am just wondering if some of you experienced guys could give me some advice on what I should be learning or which direction I could take to make sure that I don't find myself completely unable to get a job in the future.

I am currently leaning redhat in my spare time and I have also got permission to join the SAN team in my office whenever I want but is this the best direction? Should I be concentrating solely on Tru64 and making sure I can be as good as I can be? or will this be a waste? as it will be gone soon so i will have to migrate to something else.

Any help would be appreciated as i'm worrying so much about it.

My mentor had many great sayings, the most applicable one here is "Unix is Unix". Doesn't matter if Tru64 goes away, almost everythng you learn will be transferable to other versions. Studying another like Red Hat certainly can't hurt. Working with your SAN group is also a great move, I know many Unix admins who now work full or part time as SAN administrators. If you can get some real experience on Solaris or AIX that would be great too. But the main thing is learn as much as you can about as many things as you can. At the early career stage you're at that's the most important.

I have firsthand experience with this. This summer I got a contract to do Solaris and Veritas upgrades for a very large company in my city. When I showed up they told me they changed their mind and needed me to do AIX work instead. I'd been doing Solaris full-time for 7 years. My only AIX experience was about 3 months in a company with maybe 10% AIX servers a few years back. But I took the contract anyway and found that it was very easy to get up to speed on a different form of Unix since I knew Solaris so well. Even with that handicap, I did such a good job they recruited me away from my consulting firm for a permanent position.

You will end up in the same boat someday. It is highly unlikey your next job will be Tru64. But if you learn that thoroughly while you're working on it now, and learn as much as you can about the other varieties of Unix along the way, you'll be fine.

Thank you so much for your speedy response and advice.

You've made me feel much better about everything now and i guess i shall keep on the same road as i have been but without the lingering worry that always seemed to be with me.

The only problem with my workplace is that it is quiet, very quiet, there is not all that much work to do, the only time i get to really do some practical work with our systems (10 in total) is when something goes wrong. This just leaves me to just sit at my desk and read tru64/linux/networking/san books which sounds great but sometimes i really miss getting my hands dirty, so to speak.

Do you think i can still develop my skills in this way?

UNIX.COM like forums are there to serve you, if you don't have so much work to do at your workplace then why don't you help others who are facing problems in their work.

Regards,
Tayyab

You can also spend your time writing scripts, and generally "poking" around (without breaking anything ). Look for ways you can automate processes. If you have a spare PC or x86 server, install Linux (or even Solaris 10 x86) on it, and play around with Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, MySQL, Squid, etc - learning some of these applications will always benefit your resume.

Even now after working with UNIX for many years, I'm still continually learning more. Just "playing" with my systems teaches me a great deal, and looking for new ways to solve already solved problems also is a great learning tool (i.e., can xyz be done smarter?). Perform security audits of your servers. Check for best-practices. Be curious!

Good luck!

Cheers
ZB

That's funny. I had a boss once catch me surfing the web, and when I apologized he said "Hey, I *WANT* my Unix admin to be bored. If he's not I know there's something bad going on."

Of course, surfing isn't the correct option (at least not too often), but you get the point. Your situation isn't unique at all. Many Unix jobs are like firefighting - lots of waiting around, then intense activity dealing with the bad stuff when it happens. If you have a test envirionment where you can work on servers that won't impact production do your "playing around" there. If not, at least try to scrounge up a spare PC or old server and install linux, Solaris x86, or something similar to have a box you can work on without worries.

Also, see if you can think up a project that would help the company that you can work on without touching production machines. If it is really worthwhile, you might be able to talk your boss into funding it. I have no idea what your environment is like, but here's an example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of. If you don't already have a monitoring solution to watch all your servers see if you can get them to buy you a small, cheap server to install Nagios and set up monitoring. That would teach you all about SNMP and probably a bunch of scripting as well. You could set up the Nagios server and have it monitor just a few PCs or test servers at first. Once you've proved it is working and won't hurt anything roll it out to the real servers. If that isn't applicable to you think of something else. Make it a project where you get to learn a new skill or software package, but the company benefits as well so they'll want you to do it.

Ralph