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What does a Unix System Administrator do?

How can I earn more money as a Unix/Linux System Administrator in the banking sector in Europe?

  • Some colleagues told me to "forget" Unix administration and jump into the world of Grid (DataSynapse) + Cache (Oracle Coherence) What do you think about? I have one year to specialize in what I want, but I like many things. The decision would be based on the money I could earn in the near future.

  • Answer:

    The only constant in the tech world is change.You'll find technologies changing under you, so fast it'll make your head spin.  Yesterday, you learned that something new exists.  Today, you work hard to master it.  Tomorrow, it'll be obsolete. This is our world, our challenge, our opportunity. Focusing on specific products/vendors is pointless.  Ten years ago, no one foresaw that Sun Microsystems would be gone today, and no one ever thought we'd be looking to Oracle for updates to MySQL.  These concepts are crazy, yet they occurred. Search for evidence that something will be impactful in the long run before you invest time in it.  Embrace the game-changers. For example, the long-term potential of an open source project with a lot of active contributors is MUCH higher than the long-term potential of a commercial product being maintained/sold by a company with a team of developers.  Likewise, from a market perspective, the long-term potential of a technology which serves only one vertical is much lower than the long-term potential of a more horizontal technology.  Example:  You might implement some very cool functionality in spreadsheet macros.  This limits you in terms of deploying that functionality - you can only deploy to customers who use spreadsheets.  If there's any applicability outside of the spreadsheet domain, you're unable to serve that market. The other things that are impactful in the long run are soft skills.   Skills are about people, not technologies.I'll use capitalization on some examples to make my point. You're not a LINUX admin - you're a linux ADMIN. You're not a WINDOWS dev, you're a windows DEVELOPER. You're not an ORACLE dba, you're an oracle DBA. Sure, there are always technology details you'll need to learn - so be AWESOME at learning new things. But don't try to be expert at those things - strive to be expert with your soft skills - the quality of the service you provide, and the value of the interactions you have with other people.

Paul Reiber at Quora Visit the source

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My 2 cents: focus on the base technologies, not the products that build upon it. For example: how much do you know about HTTP? Do you know what are the differences between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1? (and the upcoming HTTP 2.0) Do you know the difference between GET and POST? What about HEAD and TRACE? Do you know how a REST protocol works? While this seems simple enough, I've found many people "up in the ladder" that made mistakes because they didn't understand fully how this protocol works. You will be installing and configuring web servers, proxies, caches, application servers ... and all of them use HTTP to communicate. When a problem arises (and it will), you knowledge of the protocol could mean the difference between a quick solution and two days googling and asking around. The same is true for any network protocol, storage technology (iSCSI, for example), virtualization/container system (KVM, Xen and LXC/Docker you can try for free), etc. A good knowledge of the fundamentals will help you a lot with whatever product that uses it.

Roberto Suárez Soto

Leave linux? Maybe you're interested about this : - Build your own VPN system under linux and offer them as a secure communication solution. - Build your own encrypted storage system (pretty easy if you use EncFS) and offer them as a secure private storage solution. - Build your own replication system (Rsync maybe?) and offer them as an automated backup solution. - Optimize their hosted webapps if they're using linux server and offer them as a speedup webapps solution. There are a lot of choice, there are also firewall system, network monitoring system, etc. Linux system administration and development never dies.

Rikky Yoelanda Putra

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