How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator?

xylix asks: "I figure there must be a number of UNIX admins among the Slashdot readership and I am wondering how you got into that field to start with. The reason I am asking is that I really want to be a UNIX admin but don't know how to get from here to there. What kind of education did you have(CS or other)? How did you start out (as a junior admin or moving laterally from another position)? What certifications are useful?"

"I am an English teacher now but am a techie at heart and spend all my time coding and using various Linux / BSD distros. I figure I am capable of handling a junior position, but most ads I see for *nix admins are looking for several years of work experience (on specific platforms), CS or EE degrees (I have a BA in philosophy) and perhaps years of experience in a specific industry (financial, wireless, transportation...).

I have been told by a couple people that at 33 I am far too old to start ANY kind of tech career (with no previous work experience). Anyone out there with experience to counter that? I know the job market is tough right now, but I am thinking long term."

Oh, that's a short story...

Simple...I was told to "upgrade the NT servers," so I installed FreeBSD :)

Re:Oh, that's a short story...

If you want a state job with total control, go to a University. It's basically anarchy on the networks, because every group has their own research needs that would be impossible to meet centrally.

Get in with a fun group and you can do whatever you like as long as you aren't running an MP3 server and sucking up half the bandwidth of the whole campus.

We've got pretty much every OS under the sun running on different test servers.

Re:Oh, that's a short story...

Hmm... I thought all it took was a deep masochistic streak and a fondness for curry.

Re:Advice

I'd enjoy being SysAdmin - if it weren't for the users...

That is to say that you do not enjoy being a sysadmin.

If it weren't for the users there would be no system to admin. Give them their sandbox and when they trash it, delete the user and their resources. If they complain, then tell them not to fuck around and hand them a policy sheet.

Admining a system is not about tinkering with the OS and hardware, it is about making the box useable to others. This implies dealing with users. If you don't like dealing with users then you need to look elsewhere for another job, because this one doesn't fit the description.

Having a system admin who hates dealing with the users is like having a developer that hates writing code.

leave sysadmin experience off your cv

When I arrived at my current place of work, I admitted to knowing a few linux hacks. Suddenly I'm the sysadmin, in addition to my real job. Now I get to spend hours and hours helping newbies configure their systems, cut ethernet cables, and clean up the carnage when we get hacked.

Don't make the same mistake I did. Never admit to sysadmin knowledge, or you will be marked for life.

How I did it

I grew a beard, started wearing only t-shirts and jeans, and developed a surly attitude. The group accepted me, and I've never worked a full day in my life since then.

Re:jeans and a t-shirt...

hmm.. you still bother with the jeans??

//rdj

Never too old!

I have been told by a couple people that at 33 I am far too old to start ANY kind of tech career (with no previous work experience). Anyone out there with experience to counter that?

This is rubbish. My wife is 33 and just started a new career as a developer. She had previously been doing international trade development, hated it, was bored silly by the politics, got out, took a two-year course at a local community college with a good reputation and is merrily writing business applications. Her previous career stood to her in that, unlike a lot of fresh developers, she understands business and accounting. I know of another developer who at age 48 retrained and has been doing that for a few years. Good luck to you!

No, you don't

I am wondering how you got into that field to start with. The reason I am asking is that I really want to be a UNIX admin

Just find a surgeon and get your fingers removed. Now. Trust me, it will be less painful in the long run.

Re:No, you don't

Heh, you hit the nail on the head, pal :)

The real "Ask Slashdot" challenge would be "I'm am ,at present, a UNIX system administrator. How the hell do I get out of this job, but still stay in a computer related field?"

I was shanghi'd into being a UNIX sysadmin for about a year. It was the nastiest experience of my life, especially since I was considered to be the "unix expert" by my non-UNIX cohorts, and was expected to waive a magic wand to get things to work. I developed a whole new relationship with SCSI cables that I never suspected even existed before.

First Mistake

I really want to be a UNIX admin

Ahh - This is your first mistake. Anyone going into the poky comms room meeting the grumpy sysadmin realises that all sysadmins would rather be anywhere else doing anything than what they are doing at that point. Serial murder for example.

Miserable Bastards

:-)

Re:First Mistake

A sys admin would never commit serial murder. Why go to jail and spen the rest of your life is a small room with no windows when you can continue to get paid while sitting in a room that is less luxurious!

Re:First Mistake

I think 'no windows' is the key reason.

start at the bottom and work your way up

Sounds cliche but that's what I did. I'm only 25 and I'm making more than your average MCSE right now (considering that MANY mcses are unemployed right now).

Started in Help Desk at college.
Did miscellaneous consulting jobs for friends, etc...
Got a job as a Jr. Admin.
Got another job as a Sr. Admin.

Education?

I started at age 26 after majoring in Art and getting into the industry through web design. My advice; find a small shop (5-10 people) that supports a few Linux/UNIX systems, and doesn't mind you learning on the job. That's the best learning environment you'll ever have. Usenet and a million other web-based resources are out there if you run into a brick wall on a problem.

Good luck, and you're never too old!

Becoming a Unix Admin

You are not too old to become a tech person at 33. As a matter of fact, you are more likely to be taken seriously then someone who is 20.

Becoming a Jr Unix admin requires that you know the basics of Unix/Linux: creating user accounts, installations, problem determination, permissions, disk space, adding hardware, backup strategies, and simple shell scripting to name a few. Solid end user knowledge of a real *nix like Solaris, AIX, HPUX, or True64 is a huge plus.

Getting your foot in the door is often more important than what you know. You usually have to have someone on the inside who knows you before you have a chance of getting hired. Unix administration isn't a job that you can get by walking in off the street. Since you are a programmer, you do have a much better chance.

Getting Started

There's any number of College Extension departments, like UCSC-EXT [ucsc-extension.edu] in the San Jose area, which offer many classes, even a program. RedHat [redhat.com] has Certification programs for Linux (and if you can admin Linux, it's a small jump to Unix)

For good practice you might want to get a PC and install FreeBSD or one of the Linuxes to familiarize yourself with the resources, shell programming, etc.

Re:Getting Started

For good practice you might want to get a PC and install FreeBSD or one of the Linuxes

I'd avoid Linux. I may well love the OS, and have been using it since the Linus boot/root disk days, but I'd advise something else for learning how to admin the box. Linux makes life too easy, with the consequence that you get used to the niceties and are then stuck when confronted with an OS that doesn't have them (and most of the paid Unix admin jobs will have such an OS).

Writing bash scripts, for example, gives you some syntactic sugar, but little in the way of real added value over and above plain Bourne shell. But it means your scripts won't be portable, and when confronted with an OS without bash, you're stuck.

I'd recommend OpenBSD or Solaris, or preferably both. Both can be acquired at zero cost for PC hardware, and hence make good choices to play with. Try to do everything you do without resorting to adding extra toys to the system (via the ports collection or sunfreeware.com, for example). Some might claim that's making your life hard for the sake of it, but I'd say it gives you invaluable experience that you'll welcome later in your Unix admin career. Get exposure to as many different versions of Unix as you can lay your hands on, and learn the differences between them. I've met (and in fact, interviewed recently) too many admins that only know Linux, or only know Solaris. Ultimately, Unix is Unix, but if you can show exposure to a wide variety, you're demonstrating an ability to deal with the variance between systems. I've met AIX admins who didn't know how to use a system without smit/smitty, and hence are useless on any other version of Unix.

Re:Get some education..

I want to put in a plug for getting started at non-profits (not volunteer work, but a paying gig at a non-profit). They tend to be a bit more relaxed about qualifications, since they usually can't pay as well as businesses can. Since they usually have fewer people to throw at a problem, you'll get a chance to work with more environments than you might if you just became the mail-server-backup-guy at a corporation with an IT staff of 500. And you won't have much of a budget, so you'll learn how to make your existing stuff work instead of just having the option of throwing money at a problem.

passionate curiousity and reckless experimentation

I am sure that others will have more specific helpful advice, but the fundamental principle is simple. It's the same way you learn to program -- or play the piano, or dance the watusi -- passionate curiousity and reckless experimentation. Education and experience are both very valuable, but both of these are offshoots of a self-driven desire for knowledge.

So, install Linux on a partition (I imagine you probably have already). Network your apartment/house/dorm room. Set up a web server and host your friends' sites. Set up a firewall. Follow the security updates for the software you have installed. Put a free database on it and write some useless but entertaining CGI on it. Translate the code into Java, Perl, and PHP just for kicks. Get excited, and the rest will follow.

Two Relevant Examples

I got my start as an admin in college. I was a CS major, and the CS department network was run entirely by students (supervised by a full-time staff member who was management only, and not too technical). I started as a lab consultant, helping people with their editors and compilers and such. It was more of a general helpdesk position, with light administration duties. I was promoted fairly soon after to a real administrator, with the root passwords and everything. By the end of my college time, I was the head of this group, which made getting my first admin job outside pretty easy.

During this time, I also helped a friend of mine (who was an English major at the time) learn to use the Unix workstations and the Internet. He parlayed this into a position within the help desk organization and then eventually into the administrator group also. So it's possible to do if you have one person who can give you the first break.

If you're not in a university environment, probably your best bet is to try to get involved in the Linux community somehow, get your name attached to some projects that you can use as partial credentials on your resume. Also, if you're not already running a network of at least a couple of Linux machines at home, you probably should. There are several skills you'll need to develop which can't be practiced on a single machine (NIS, NFS, DNS, sendmail or other mailer, etc). Good luck!

Admin fashion tips

Don't ever go out in the sunlight, bathing is optional, answer all questions with a clear and concise grunt, and use one word e-mail replies (my personal favorite is "NO").

You'll know you're good when you are like a phantom and you're co-workers can't describe what you look like and are too afraid to try finding you.

It all began on a fall day 7 years ago...

when I started a C programming class at San Diego State University. I was introduced to Unix at that time, and fell in love with it's power and simplicity.

I was content to be a user, but when I started working in the computer industry in 1995, I was introduced to Linux by a co-worker and fellow Unix lover (Thanks Martin!). I got bitten by the sysadmin bug then. We had a part-time consultant sysadmin then, and I emailed him with problems I was having with my Linux box, and he helped out immensely. Even when I brought down the email system with a badly configured sendmail.cf, he was patient and walked me through it.

As I started taking over day-to-day administration of the Solaris and SunOS servers at work, I found it invaluable to use the knowledge of the Unix propeller-heads at work. All were engineers, but they knew enough about Unix to give me a hand when needed. I also made friends with some old-time Unix-heads that proved to be a wonderful resource.

Don't underestimate the power of a mentor. Find someone with a long beard to talk with regularly. Also, read, read, read. Surf the net. Install software "just because". You will screw up, and have to recover. Nothing compares to removing "libc.so",

I now have 6 years of sysadmin experience under my belt. Even when sysadminning wasn't my official job title, I still found a way to do some. I've got the sysadmin bug, and bad. I love the challenge of it. I love knowing that every time I upgrade some software, or tune a system, that the people who make the product that pays my salary are able to do their work that much more easily and quickly.

As far as certification, it might look good on a resume for a PHB, but in real life don't mean much. Like an MCSE. You know the books, but real life can be much different. In short, if you have the time and $$$ to burn, go ahead. But your time can be equally well spent hacking on a system.

Do it, do it, do it. I love this job.

Jeremy

Practicing to be a sysad:

1) Repeat 10 times a day: "this change should not affect end users.

2) Type 20 times a day: "rm -fR ~user"

3) 10 reps: "what did *you* do to screw this up?"

4) Stop showering. Now.

5) Smash your pager, claim it was "killed in the line of duty".

6) Pick any given operating system, and develop an intense hatred for it. You will work with this os for the rest of your life.

7) rinse, repeat.

I went to class.

That's it. I was in a boring-as-hell lower-level CS class, and usually skipped it. One day, I went, though I sat in the back and read some novel or something. Late in the class, a couple guys from the university Consulting Lab (UMCP's faculty/staff computer help desk) got up to recruit. I joined the team a few weeks later, and got hurled into the marvelous world of admin when our VAXstation 2000 (X-windows, 40MB hard drive) crapped out and I had to rebuild it from a 10mb tar file on a remote server (an early NeXT cube, no less :) )

The rest, as they say, is history.

How would you get into it now? Don't really know. Certainly, it'd help to "play" with the stuff at home, but unless you've got 4-10 machines at home, networked, in regular use, you simply won't have the need to do a good job administering the server (and won't hit upon any of the major challenges).

Is 33 too old to start a tech career? From the standpoint of unconcious hiring discrimination, maybe you'll have a problem there. Plus, there's always the "why are you swtiching careers?" question. From the standpoint of being too old to learn -- bullshit. If you're smart, and can learn new tricks, you'll have a fighting chance.

Best advice -- learn to type fast, and find all the online documentation centers (man pages, web, etc.). If you type and can research the problem fast enough, nobody will ever know you don't know the answer ('cause you'll have just gotten the answer). After that, learn perl. Any time you find yourself doing the same thing more than once, spend the 20 minutes (or three hours) to write a script to do it instead. Then the next time it'll take 30 seconds to do, and you'll look smart. :)

Where do you teach english? If it's at a high school, you might be able to help part-time with in-house stuff, though I wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of that got given to students. If you're at a college, try the same tack with the help desk or whatever there... Then, maybe, look for jobs with contractors doing help desk in a UNIX or UNIX-Server shop (if you live in the Washington, DC area, there are LOTS of these jobs). You won't be doing admin, per se, but you'll be seeing the "lighter" side of it, especially the customer-side of things, and if you show enough aptitude and interest, you should be able to ease into a SysAdmin side. Another bonus for gov't contractor stuff -- they're used to "second careers" as military enlisted types retire and start working as geeks.

Good luck!

a common path

Try to become a programmer and fail.

How I became a UNIX Admin

After I was hurt in a parachute accident in the US. Army, I moved to Tampa and started with a contractor answering phones at a support center for a large retail chain.
After a few months of training on my own, listening to processes the analysts were going thru etc. I was promoted to Tech Support Analyst Level 1. I read man pages, looked thru the available documentation on the systems etc. And kept learning. I then progressed to a Level 2 Analyst, and after a few months I was hired onto the company that I was contracted out to.. IBM!
After a few months as a Level 2 Analyst, I applied for a position in Technical Services. Here again I studied the OS we were using, SCO Open Server 5.04. Studied Korn shell programming, Learned PERL, Learned Perl OO methodology, learned hardware specific stuff like SCSI, IO, IRQ's etc.
During all of this time my passion was Linux, so I was also studying it as well. In March 2001 I received my RedHat RHCE, and applied for a position as a Software Engineer providing Linux Solutions for Xseries IBM servers.
By the way, I am a High School Drop-out.
Just goes to show you what hard work can do.

Everyone take two steps back!

Hiya,

True Story: At my small accounting software company Marlon hated hardware the least so he ended up being the one that called when the /var/spool filled up or the SCO refused to talk to the HP 9000. When Marlon left it was decided that Jay had been most seen in the vicinity of Marlon so he started getting the calls, got his name in HP's and UUNET's support databases, etc. When Jay left, well, I had been Jay's roommate for a year... The rest is history.

For management style think 'Lord of the Flies', not Harvard MBA.

-Greg

The right way or the wrong way?

I did it the wrong way.

Me: "I can build the corporate web site. We've got some older PC's laying around here. I have Slackware 1.2, it has a web server. That should do it"

Boss: "I want it to run on NT."

Me: "Why? There are problems all over the place with Windows in general crashing just by receiving a bad packet. Nobody will know the difference."

Boss: "I will know, I want to run NT."

Me: "No. I don't want to spend all my time rebooting the thing, and people won't be able to SEE our website when that happens."

Boss: "It WILL run on NT."

Me: "Fine. Just get me the ad slicks and I'll make them into web pages."

A week later....

Me: "We site is all done. Goto www.xxx.xxx to see it."

Boss: "Great! And it runs on NT right?"

Me: "Nope."

Boss: "GODDAMMIT RICK!"

At that's how it all started....

How I did it...

Greetings,

I may be younger than you, but here's how I did it...

I got my first degree BSc (Bachelor of Science for non Brits) in Applied Physics. I spent three years unemployed doing a lot of computer based voluntary work.

I went back to college, got my MSc (Master of Science) in Software Technology and went to work as a software engineer for the R&D side of a small company. The other part of the company was an ISP. We needed to get some new servers running so myself and one of the other Software engineers were allowed to install SunOs on them. We secured them as best we could, and from there I slowly moved into administration. Before long I was transferred to the ISP side of the company as the web servers moved over (don't ask why R&D ran the web servers). Then I was trained in Cisco Routers, got more involved in network administartion, and ended up moving to the US...

Now I'm in my second job over here both of them have been pure systems administration.

How can you get into Systems Administration? Well, my advice would be to get experience with other flavours of Unix. At least try Solaris X86 (a free download from Sun) and one of the BSD variants. Linux only isn't going to be so useful if they are looking for a Unix SA. HP-UX and AIX experience could also be useful, but harder to get unless you want to buy a workstation from e-bay.

Read at the very least one of Essential System Administration or The Unix Systems Administration Handbook.

Network... Join Usenix and SAGE. Go to local meetings. Advertise on the SAGE website that you are looking for junior positions. Talk to local technical recruiters. Keep an eye on local job postings.

Apply for non-junior positions, try and talk to the hiring manager first, but it's possible that they may not get what they're looking for, and be willing to accept a good junior candidate instead.

Don't worry about your lack of experience, you have most of what you need. As a teacher you should have good communication skills. You should be able to manage your time. You should be used to putting in long hours when needed. You should have problem solving skills. The knowledge of particular versions of Unix is secondary. I'm working on AIX now, it's radically different from other versions I've dealt with. It's still Unix, the other skills are more important.

I wouldn't try and get a help desk job and move over... I've never seen that done successfully.

I hope that this helps.

Z.

Blunder into it!

Good to see another English major in this line of work.

I first started at this company as "Microcomputer Support," that is, Windows and some Mac OS. This shop has been all Windows and VMS since time immemorial, but one of their critical apps was switching from VMS to Unix so they had to do it too. I happened to hear at some event that they were going to have to start working with Unix, and since I had already logged a few years with Linux and BSD, I started to push through channels and ask if I could be involved - that's all I asked. Next thing I know, the Director of Technologies is calling me, asking for an interview, and in a few months, after taking a battery of tests and as soon as they were able to replace me, I moved to my new office as sysadmin. This must have been divine intervention; everything else here goes through lots of channels and gets tested with umpteen Gartner and PWC statements, blah blah blah, but for some reason (I'm sure it was a clerical error) they awarded me the job. Of course, they are paying me about half what an outside consultant would charge, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Having said that, you might be surprised at how boring and thankless this job can be sometimes. I know a lot of people who really have programmer tendencies, who get stuck with sysadminning and burn out on the whole industry.

How Did You Become a UNIX Admin?

So, you have a BA in Philosophy. So what? My degree is in Paralegal Services.
Three years ago, I went from being a married, stay-at-home mom to divoced mother of three. I can't say I'm a true geek at heart. I'm interested in computers but not obsessed. The model is the same for Paralegal Services and Computer Science -- research, discovery and investigation, and analysis -- only the data is different.
I've only been in this field two years. I'm 45; I was 43 when I changed careers, so to speak. I changed the format of my resume to draw attention to what I was learning and the fact that I was continuing to learn and to draw attention away from my lack of work experience. I installed linux on a second partition on my Windows machine at home and learned both Operating Systems. I added a linux firewall to my home network and learned system administration and network security. I learned programming languages and protocols. I put all this down on my resume -- experience is experience. I provided copies of my executable programs when I went on an interview. I joined the local LUG, and as I got to know other members, they pointed me toward job openings, and I was able to use them as references.
Thirty-three is not too old to change careers. Statistics show that people change careers as many as three times during their lives. If this is your heart's desire, you owe it to yourself to go after this.

Just do it

I fell into my job by accident. I don't love it, but it is a paycheck, and my experience might be useful.

I installed Linux in grad school (Psychology) while fooling with some web stuff. I learned just enough to write Perl scripts, move files around, configure interfaces, build Apache, set up virtual hosts, and configure my MUD client. Really minimal.

After grad school I took a job as a programmer for a few months where I did no administration. Then I started working for a pissy little young web development company. They needed someone to write Perl CGIs and they wanted someone with an academic pedigree, which I had. After meeting with the owner I bought a book on CGI programming, and learned how to write very minimal CGIs (with Perl). A couple of days later I was working for them, writing all their CGIs.

At this point they had their own 'administrator', which meant a tech guy they had off-site who could answer their questions. We had to telnet in to a box at the provider to do work. Our company had no "production" or "development" servers; all development work was just stashed under a hidden directory (of course this caused problems when an HTML monkey overwrote files in the wrong directory).

I quickly realized that I could run Apache in the office, and use my box as the development server. Our company also had this problem where we had only 10 I.P. addresses, and greater than 10 employees (part and full time). You can imagine the chaos this caused for a company working on Web work: people were literally stealing each other's IP addresses if they went to lunch or the bathroom, and other people were perplexed as to why all of a sudden their Net connections weren't working properly..

So I set up NAT on a Linux box, and the problem was solved. By this point I had *become* the de facto sysadmin, not by design or calculated career path or formal training, but by accident. I knew how to do some things, and I knew how to find out how to do the things I didn't, and I just went ahead and did them. Once you solve a problem or do something that needs to be done you start building credibility. Just make sure you do it right. Once you start doing some things you will be surprised at how many other things people ask you to do, and how many things you find yourself having to learn how to do.

So my advice to a would-be admin is - anyone can get into the field. Just start doing it. Set up a Linux box at home and host your own domain. Figure out how DNS works. Get a book on CGI and Perl and learn to write some CGIs. Host virtual domains. Set up email accounts and give them to your friends and family, and thereby learn how to administer users and mail and all the headaches that come with it. Design workable backup schemes even if you have nothing worth backing up. All this work *does* count for something, if not full-fledged work experience, it is better than nothing.

Then find a company that is willing to hire someone who is industrious but maybe not too experienced. Often times these are the tight-wads that don't want to pay for a 'real' administrator, but you're not a real administrator yet, anyways, so that's perfect. Look for companies that haven't yet figured out they need a UNIX-like solution, then go in and provide it for them.

Or do pro-bono or volunteer work. Just do something.

Thrown in the water

I was a programmer for a site, hired to do a website. They used NT. I hate Windows. I had heard of "Linux". I installed it. It was cool. I got hacked. I cursed. I reinstalled and learned a little more. I got better. I got hacked again. I cursed and reinstalled and learned more. I de-Windows'ed other machines. I learned more. I bought my own server and learned a shitload about security before plugging it in. It's been up for a year and weathered hack attempts every day. I still fear people who know more than me and I try to keep up. Life is good.

Certification? School of Real Life, baby.

Get a job.

No, really. I admin six boxes at a state agency, and sort of backed into the position. Coming out of college, I had a BA in International Studies, and (most of) an MA in International Affairs (suffice to say it's a bad idea to seriously annoy the profs on your committee). Upon realizing how valuable THAT was, I got a job installing computers in junkyards, then VB programming, then Web programming.

Took a job at this state agency as a programmer, then filled a void when it turned out their UNIX skills were crap.

I do not currently hold any certifications.

It used to be that you could apply for a job with a fraction of the experience stated as "required." I don't know whether the economic crash has changed this substantially, but it never hurts to apply. The worst that'll happen is that they say no. So tip #1 is: just apply, and see what happens.

#2) Don't be a snob. Before I started here, this was an NT/Novell shop, which has (slowly) changed into a UNIX/Novell shop. The migration has gone pretty smoothly, but required some handholding along the way. OTOH, you may have to take on some NT admin stuff en route. Once people see that you don't have to reboot *nix boxes daily, you're in pretty good shape.

#3) Don't ignore your local and state governments. Is it sexy? No. Does it pay well in comparison to other IT positions? No. On the up side, they still have positions to fill, and you may find yourself at the top of a middling crop of non-traditional IT resumes. Being a medium sized fish in a smallish pond has its advantages.

#4) Use your strengths. One of the big problems in IT is that the people who staff the positions can't communicate. This certianly doesn't apply across the board, but the stereotype fits for the most part. I'd think someone who can write effective emails and describe the situation to PHBs would deliver significant value to an organization.

#5) Practical experience over "home use." Can you start something where you are? It doesn't have to be big, per se, just functioning. Email/WWW gateway for your students? I know that getting something into production will greatly increase your value over "well, I set SAMBA up at home, and I've got Apache running on my home network." This'll also give you an idea of whether you actually want to do this.

Good luck.

A few observations (what I did)

Well, I'm from a very similar background as you are. I have a history degree (with minors in CS and chemistry) and have worked as an admin for the past ~6 years. Here's what I've managed to learn and what I've done:

Take a shot at adminning for a small ISP, they usually can't afford to pay an admin. Be prepared to get paid squat, but you should at the least have very flexible hours.

Review your job situation very frequently and objectively. Don't get caught deadending or in a rut.

Don't be afraid to change up jobs after a year. Its hard to do, but it seems like unless the company you work for allows you to advance within, you can only advance by getting out of there.

A CS degree or EE degree does NOT an admin make. I think out of the group I work with only one has that degree (Actually he has both). The rest of us have our degrees across the spectrum.

Apply for some of the jobs that you see in the papers/web. Chances are the ads are asking for the moon while hoping they'll get someone with a telescope.

Just because a company is asking for a CS or EE degree shouldn't scare you off. Alot of times they want someone with any degree. It has to do with the stupid traditions that companies have, but it also shows you can stick something out for 4+ years.

Honestly, if you have some decent programming skills you should at the least be able to get a job as a programmer. If you find one at a small firm, you'll be the programmer and the admin so your dilemma is solved. Good luck.

It's harder now....

My short story is:

1) Started doing PC desktop support
2) Company wanted me to help with the Novell servers, so they trained me. Started playing with Linux on my own.
3) Next job did pc support + novell and learned about IP networking and routers. Did more Linux on my own.
4) Next job hired as a network engineer (manage the routers, switches, etc) and started helping out on the Unix side of things. By the end of the job (4 years) I knew more about Unix than most of the Unix admins and was basically doing Unix admin 50% of the time.
5) Current job doing all sorts of Unix and security things.

Honestly, I got luckly. My 3rd job was a small internet startup which wanted someone who was smart and was willing to train since they didn't want to spend much $$$. Of course this was in the middle of the .com revolution, so finding good people who knew something was really really hard. Now that the bubble has burst, companies know they can find quality tallent and don't have to train people.

My current company layed off most of it's technical staff a number of months ago, and of my friends with 2 years experiance, none have found anything. (Well, one friend moved to Switzerland and just got a consulting job yesterday.) One of them with just under a year experiance, hasn't even gotten an interview. At least here in the Silicon Valley, things are the shits for people who don't have years of experiance.

It's like the t-shirts SysAdmin Mag sells...

...or at least, used to sell: "It's a tough job, but somebody said I had to do it."

Helpdesk

You'd be amazed at how many folks come up from the dregs of their university helpdesk. Unfortunately, as you're already 33, and most have had a job that actually pays well, and you don't have to deal with abusive people, this may not be the best way for you to go.

For me, and quite a few of the folks that I've seen, they get a part time job during college, supervising the computer labs in some way, then once they're seen as dependable and hard working, they might be given a few extra tasks to do by your manager, or they might just been seen as the person that everyone keeps refering questions to.

From there, you either use that as a job reference to go someone else, or if you like working for the university, you wait for a good job opening (expanding the department, someone leaving), and work your way up from there. [I did a little of both -- I left for a couple of years, then came back]

Of all of the folks I've dealt with in the past dozen years or so, I've only seen one person recently make the change over once they were over 30. [Quite a few did so decades ago, but it doesn't seem to be a common thing these days]. Unfortunately, he was a little bit of a black sheep, as he kept making poor decisions which affected other departments, and many of the other system admins wanted nothing to do with him. The person who hired him had also been stripped of all of their hiring abilities. Of course, he didn't try to take the slow route, but went to a certificate course, and then applied for the job.

I would say that the folks who don't come from an all-computer background tend to make better system/network admins overall. I've worked with some great folks with Psych/History/Art/construction backgrounds, and because they don't think in the conventional CompSci/CompE terms, they can sometimes circumvent many of the problems. There have been quite a few CompSci folks that have made spectacular system admins, but there also tend to be so many of 'em in the field who suck, and bring down their average.

So, well, where's that leave you? Unfortunately, there aren't many places to go. You say you're a teacher, but not where. If it's in higher education (college, university, whatever), you might be able to teach a class with a computer slant once a year/semester whatever, come up with a reason to put up your own server, so that you can work it all back into fleshing out a resume. For high school/middle school, you might be able to do some of the same stuff with extracurricular activities...maybe be an advisor for a computer club, etc.

If you're a seasonal teacher (eg, high school, and have 2months off for the summer), or you have enough extra time, you might try moonlighting for an ISP helpdesk, and flesh out your resume from there. Although it might be possible to take some certificate course, and then get some manager to hire you when you have to experience, you'll do better in the long run if you get a good foundation, and build from there.

I got mugged

After getting mugged for the third time, two by knife and another by gun, and surviving happening in on a gang turf war while trying to make a single delivery, I realized that I bet I could get a safer job where I could wear t-shirts and jeans too. I had been dinking with UNIX boxen up to that point and saw and ad at the local library to administer a small system they had (the thing is while it was UNIX getting a shell on it was impossible).
I bullshitted the entire interview including my age.

Just bug other admins...

I became a UNIX admin by hanging out around a bunch of other UNIX admins until they let me have root. Then I started to get rid of them...

Sounds like a great poll question!

That sounds like the title of a great poll to me. Imagine the poll:

How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator?

o Programming too stressful.
o Some script I got off IRC.
o Told to "upgrade the NT servers" (apologies to Shoten!).
o Read "Tricks of the UNIX Masters" over thirty times.
o That's GNU/UNIX administrator, thank you very much.
o Everyone else laid off, also CEO and Janitor.
o Defeated CowboyNeal in hand-to-hand Nealmatch.

another way

As clifford Stoll might say: "I got into *ix via a 75 cent accounting glitch."

You have to do it the old fashioned way

You need to sleep your way to the top. And don't be picky who you sleep with.

Sigh, _why_ do you want to become a SysAdmin?

Before you get too far along the road to SysAdmin-hood, ask yourself these questions;

1) Can I handle high stress? Or, am I willing to trade frequent moments of high stress for moments of huge job satisfaction and the ability to play with tech toys?
2) Are you someone who likes order to your day? As a SysAdmin, even if you are a highly organized person yourself, your day tends to be very fractured. You are having a good day when you come in the morning with five things you would like to work on, and actually get to work on two of them.
3) Are you a 8-5 person? The pro here, is that I can come in anywhere from 6am to 10am, and with arrangement with my boss, even later than that, or like today, I'm leaving at three. The con is, I'm on call 24-7, I'm working tomorrow rebuilding the filesystem on a production server and I rarely work a 40 hour week.
4) Can you handle people getting in your face, being pissed at you, yelling at you, etc. Can you tell a VP, "NO" and make it stick? One problem with being a SysAdmin, is that one day you're a star, the next you're an asshole.

If you can handle all of that you're probably well suited to being a SysAdmin. Learn how to accumulate browny points with upper management and spend them on pay-raises and trips to LISA and InterOp. Become intimately familiar with the O'Reilly book catalog, because you never know when you'll be told: We need this "insert technology here" next week (next week if you're lucky). Also, not something all SysAdmin's do, but one of my preferences; Make friends of other SysAdmin's, don't worry about calling for advice on situations you've never encountered before, and be willing to accept panic'd calls from friends on how to handle various problems.

Because, while I've worked in a lot of tech jobs before I became a SysAdmin (I've been one for eight years now), I've never had a job with more job satisfaction and less boredom. But it's not easy.

Good Luck,
Brad

Here's how I did it...

I did tech support for two years at a small ISP, and after I burned out at that job and found out that programming was really kind of neat, I took up a degree in CS. I spent two years getting my first year done (I didn't take physics or math 12 in high school and I needed both for prereq's, which totally screwed me up) before I found out that while I'm pretty good at Algebra, your algebra needs to be perfect to do Calculus. (ie, I flunked out of Calculus 102) I also found out in the course of this that I would really rather be tinkering with computers than doing mathematics. Unfortunately, mathematics is about half of a CS degree these days (they changed the requirement for physics during the time I was in college. Thank you.)

So after I dropped out of college, I went larval with FreeBSD and an ADSL connection for about a month or two. It was probably the best education I ever had. After spending three months desperately trying to look for work, a programmer friend of mine went to his boss and said "since we're going to need a new sysadmin Real Soon Now, please hire Ernie. Oh, and if you don't, I'm going to quit."

By this time, I had actually gained enough knowledge to pass as a sysadmin, and after being in the job for about 9 months (dot com, and this all happened about a year and a half ago) I had learned enough about learning to be able to adapt to anything that was to come my way.

Now I'm working in another tiny ISP where everyone is doing everything. I get to answer phones, sysadmin, do tech support, and data entry. So does the boss, so we're all working hard to make it happen. It's not a perfect sysadmin job, but it certainly will be as the company grows.

Oh and by the way, I love this job. It's the closest thing to playing with computers that I've experienced. :)