Make your Unix SA training simple and awesome.

 

Go Ahead with the Video to understand system admin careers

 

 

This is a small story that explains the Job requirements of Unix System Administrator in a Start up company, In a practical manner. I hope this will help the young SA brothers who just started their training in system administration . Of course this story doesn’t explain you the entire SA role but can be help you as a initial guideline to understand what things to learn, in the class room, for what purpose.

 

 

The SoftServ Solutions Ltd. ( in short SSS)  is a new software development company, recently started their services in Bangalore, India.  They have recruited    around 200 software developers to develop a software product related to the automobile industry, and SSS also hired a team of 5 members  ( let us call them Platform Support Team )  to provide the necessary system & platform resources  to the development (Dev) users .   Mr. John is leading  the Dev Team and  Mr. Albert is leading the  Platform Support Team.

 

 

One fine morning ,  John called Albert for a meeting  and explained about his project and the development team requirement to start his new project, and the requirement list is as below:

Req-1.   We required a seperate user account for each and every team member, and  we want to keep our information private and secured.

Req-2.  Our Team members require to connect to each other computers occasionally, to share information.

Req-3.  Our team want to schedule a task of running a program every day at 9:00AM with full privileges

Req-4.  We want to store some of our important data on a central location, so that we don’t lose our work  just in case if our computer/server crash. And also we want to have multiple copies of the same data available on the central storage location for fault tolerance & redundancy.

Req-5. All of our data should be backed up to a separate storage device and keep them in safe place, outside of this building, so that we dont lose it if any fire accident/disaster happens to this building

Req-6. We want you to install oracle database on our server so that our developers can access DB and start working on project

After listening all requirement from John, Albert replied positively saying that  ” John, we will complete all of your requirements in two weeks of time” .

 

 

Later the day, Albert called his team members for a meeting to discuss  about the Development team requirements, and he assigned all these tasks to a trainee Unix SA named “Mr.Geek”, who was recently trained to perform Unix Administration Tasks. And Albert guided Geek for the appropriate skills to complete each requirement. Geek requested for a week time get ready for the implementation of the solutions.

 

 

The Skill requirement that Albert explained to Geek is listed below

• Unix User Administration’ skills for Req-1

While learning User Administration Geek should focus on creating Individual Users, and Creating Group of

• Unix Networking Configuration skills for Req-2
• Unix Job Scheduling skills  for Req-3
• Unix Network Filesystem and Disk Managment skills for Req-4
• Unix Backup Administration skill for Req-5
• Unix Package and Patch installation skill for Req-6

One week passed, and Mr. Geek were able to find solutions for all the development team requirements, except the requirements related to  “Network Configuration”  for that he went to Albert and requested for his advice.

Albert advised Geek to understand some of the below theoretical concepts in order to implement better network configuration in their environment

• Understand TCP/IP  Network Protocol and IP addresses
• Understanding DHCP Service– A service which assigns IP address dynamically
• Understanding DNS Service– A service which do conversion of hostnames to IP address , and IP address to Hostname

 

 

 

Albert also advised Geek to get familiar with advanced network configurations to  become intermediate level Unix Administrator, and the skills are

 

 

 

 

• Unix Remote Installation Services administration to install new systems remotely with unix operating system
• Unix Network Information Services ( NIS / Yellow Pages ) administration to control all the users, permissions, shares and policies from a central management server.
• Unix httpd/ Apache webserver administration to manage company internal and external web services.
• Unix Samba Service administration –   to share information from unix platform to windows platform

It took a while to Mr. Geek to be proficient in the areas, but he did it very well and quick compared to the other learners, and the only reason for his quick learning is ” he was able to map his learning plan as per the practical job role”.  And also the excellent mentoring of Albert helped him a lot, whenever he has trouble to move on on his learning.

**** Happy Learning , to be continued …….. ****