...has been one of the best things I've learned.

Highly used by companies since it is free so the companies jump on it, then they realize they need someone to maintain it, not just set it up initially (really small businesses can just contract with one of many many SIP providers to make it very easy and not have to worry with their own asterisk install).

Many companies are switching to SIP based IP phones.

There are tons of SIP clients you can run on your PC, and plenty of high grade headsets that work with USB ports (Plantronics as one example that my company uses).

So no, no you do not.

But yes, yes you still need a regular phone #/extension that people can call you on from any regular phone line.

I work for a heavily linux based company headquartered out of the Philadelphia area, with our IT operations based in Harrisburg.

I must agree that just hiring someone out of college with no experience is a very risky thing, and has screwed us over a few times. Of course, the people right out of college get hired at $35K/year and lead admins make $60-$80K/year easily, but you have to ask yourself if it is worth that new guy calling you 10 times a night after 2 months of hands on training to ask you questions they should know by now, or is it better to just pay someone more who has experience?

Both methods can work out well, you just need to screen the entry level people extremely hard to make sure they can self manage themselves and provide them good documentation so they're not calling you at 2AM asking you the IP address for something stupid. Reward entry level people who excel by giving them very nice raises after a year of solid commitment.

For the OPs question, the best thing you can do if you do not have experience in an area that a company is looking for is to admit that upfront, but then tell them something else you have experience with that is close to that. If you're doing consulting now, setup as many example services (with something meaningful running on them) on your home network. Key things to focus on would be linux based software firewalls/routers, mysql/postgresql deployments, web based front-ends to easily retrieve information and make reports from your databases (there's several really good opensource solutions for this), apache webserver serving up some PHP, Apache Tomcat serving up some java, KVM or VMWare virtual machines, etc. Anything that you can show off to prove you have some experience with it is good (especially if consulting).

From there, get references from every job you complete to build up your portfolio. You can concentrate in several areas all at once if you are up to it: Sysadmin (as you mentioned), Network admin (managing linux based switches/firewalls/routers/etc), DB admin (obvious), and developer (shell scripts are more on sysadmin side of things; this would be more for heavy development that could be deployed on an enterprise level where you are allowed approximately 2 to 4 hours of scheduled downtime per year).

Also look into learning HIPPA healthcare laws (or similar laws if outside the USA). You'd be surprised how many healthcare related IT jobs there are out there that require *NIX experience. Also, from my personal experience, *a lot* of the current admins for many healthcare companies are utter complete shite (some are very good, but most are horrible), which makes it easy for someone with a good skill set to get in the door and advance quickly (although it may upset incompetent coworkers if you constantly make them look like fools). The company I currently work for contracts with hospitals and such, and you would not believe how many lead admins for hospitals that we have had to hand hold walk through the basic task of setting up a Site-to-Site IPSEC tunnel on the devices on their end (sometimes on devices that we have never personally worked with, but STILL need to walk them through it and appear to know more about the device than they do..).

I figured I'd throw this reply in here instead of burning all my mod points on this thread. :)

Get the fuck out. (Posting from work).

What if 1, 2, 3, and 4 digit /. UIDs were their core members? *tinfoil hat*.. *looks at UID*... wait.. only 1, 2, and 3 digit UID's, that is.

And there's this type of firearm called a revolver that doesn't spit out shells all over the place.

Real gangsters use revolvers for this exact reason. Even without microprinting, shell casings can be tied to the gun that fired them alot of times by analyzing the marks on the shell casing and then analyzing the guns firing pin.. Each firing pin has unique characteristics due to wear and such already, without the need for microprinting.

All this law would do is add extra costs and inconvenience to law abiding citizens, and do jack squat to effect criminals who will either 1) File off the microprinting or 2) Use a revolver which keeps the discharged casings inside it...

This microprinting idea is just idiotic...

Sure, if they get caught with no microprinting, the microprinting won't tie them to other crimes they used the gun with... Only, you know, the BARREL WILL (which has been used to tie guns to crimes for a long time if the bullet is recovered, which it generally is from, you know, corpses)..

Your second point (if not the entire comment) is pretty damn stupid. Do you even know anything about guns?

Microprinting is a complete waste of money and elected officials time debating this stupid idea.

That's why if the BSA walks into my IT department, they get "Here's the door, leave now, you don't have an appointment, we won't give you an appointment, you're now trespassing. Get lawyers involved if you think we are not complying".

Since we use mostly open source software on our servers and all our Windows licenses are legit, if they want to waste the money taking us to court, let them.. We'll be sure to ask for reimbursement of all lawyer fees and time lost when we are found to be in compliance.

Some admins think the BSA is like the FBI where they can just walk into your office and demand to start seeing licenses and what-not. Guess what, they can't do that. I laugh like crazy everytime I hear of an admin caving to them when they just show up unannounced instead of the proper response of "Here's the door, GTFO."

Google is great until you realize your companies possible sensitive IP could be stored in just about any country in the world.

I think Google offers a more secure 'government' service or something. Last time I checked into that, they could only guarantee that data would not be stored in countries that your country is currently on un-friendly terms with (so they won't even offer you a 'your country and your countries allies only' option for where they store your data).

I think it is pretty damn stupid using Google Apps if the business deals with any type of sensitive data what-so-ever.

My company, for instance, deals with citizens private health care records, so Google Apps was instantly out of the question.

We switched to Zimbra and couldn't be happier. For those saying 'Google Prices are great', you can't beat FREE if you have an admin or two at the company with a clue that can administer the Zimbra setup. With 2 MTAs on different ISPs, we've had maybe a total of 10 minutes downtime in the past 2 years, and even then the messages still queued up and were delivered when everything came back up (a zimbra mailstore takes quite a while to reboot, but the MTAs still cache all incoming messages which are then instantly delivered to the mailstore when it is back available).

Your company must not have been utilizing Zimbra correctly then. The only thing I find a bit lacking with it compared to Exchange is shared contact management. Other than that, it's great. My company switched to it 2 years ago and have never been happier (IT is happy and the owners are happy for keeping costs down with a 99.999% uptime running 2 MTAs through different ISPs). Of course Postfix is the MTA Zimbra uses, and Postfix rocks.

My company switched to Zimbra about 2 years ago, all managed in-house on company owned servers. We have 2 MTAs, 2 LDAP servers, and 2 Mailstores (although only currently using 1 mailstore with RAID and backups since it is in a different physical location than the primary mailstore and I believe it requires licensing to make that work properly). It does everything we want it to and is all open source. The webmail interface is great. We still have alot of users on Outlook 2003 and they are about to get that ripped off their systems and be told to use the zimbra webmail or desktop client instead of paying the MS tax. All in all, it has worked out great for us. The company went from hosted email that would go down once a week to now maybe 10 minutes of downtime in the 2 years we have been using Zimbra.

The SIM cards in Verizon or Sprint phones (CDMA based networks) are only 4G LTE SIM cards, so you can't just take your phone to any other carrier because your phone "has a sim card", which is what I think your comment is implying.

Verizon still uses CDMA for all voice traffic, 4G is only used for data traffic currently (the SIM card is only a 4G LTE SIM card, still no cards for their 3G/2G CDMA which is what all voice traffic still uses)...

And how do you know an AC really is the business that gave you the bid?

If I was you, I'd go with with a proprietary solution (especially since you made sure to put 'free' after you mentioned 'open source solution' in the OP).

Since you don't appear to know enough about this on your own (thus Ask Slashdot), I *highly* doubt that even if you found an open source solution that it would be completely "free" to you/your business/your employer. Think of the outrageous support costs you will get when the "free" system takes a dump and you have no clue how to fix it. Debugging and fixing a 'free' system that you cobbled together isn't going to be exactly cheap.

Ubuntu Server is "free", but that doesn't stop my company from paying Canonical for a support contract just incase some outrageously strange kernel bug or something comes up that brings a critical production server screeching to a halt (of course we deal with patient medical data so the definition of critical production server is probably alot different than if the music stops at the theme park). The same goes for our "free" linux (software) based firewall distro we use at branch offices. We liked it so much we bought the hardware from the makers of the FW linux distro (Endian). The hardware from them comes with a support contract as well incase something screws up on the firewall.

Open Source and completely free doesn't always go together in a business environment, doubly so if you needed to use Ask Slashdot.

Another very low /. UID person agreeing with what you said.

As one of the first 3000 registered users of the site (first pointed to your site by you or Hemos iirc in the Enlightenment WM IRC channel).. I must say wthe obligatory so long and thanks for all the fish. Go on to do better things. Slashdot will continue on but never will be the same without you (as well as Hemos)! Who would have thought a little site to share stories with your friends would have exploded so rapidly.