On 6/8/07, Ted Unangst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
i'm going to be different and say 3 months, but probably much less than that.
Not to be an expert, or even a competent sysadmin, in my case. It was 1992, and I was working the VMS hell desk for the school as a student worker. Heard about this new "unix" system they have, so I asked for an acount. Got one, logged in, and couldn't do anything. Went back to the person who gave me an account, and asked for help. She told me to type "learn". And that's how I got started. Do a lot of reading and learning on my own, read RFCs even, when people pointed them to me. Hung out around comp.sys, alt.hackers, alt.unix.wizards. I learn quite a bit, then reached a level of competence as a user. Then, another growth spurt, and I learn about system administration. After a while, I could install/configure a basic system, but didn't have large system/big installation experience. Read a lot more, test things out a lot more, picked up some good books that filled in the holes in my knowledge (on certain things, I still suck, printing, for example). Being employed to do system admin type stuff was helpful, because I now have to learn how to do certain things, and also document them for others - yes, even writing good documentation is a good sysadmin skill [the guy who took over after I left was reading my docs one day, and asked around about me - then said that just from what I wrote, it would have been cool to meet me, heh :)]
you can learn enough vi (or mg) to do basic tasks like editing config files within a day.
And then, practice, practice, practice!!!!
you can learn enough about starting apache, named, or whatever to use the shipped default configs in about a day for each service.
Probably will need a bit more time, if he wants to understand what he is doing, if he didn't have a network/service background. Obviously learning a second service is easier, and then easier for a third. Don't try to play with sendmail, just go postfix or exim :)
needed to learn regex back expressions. yes, to master openbsd takes a long time, but you don't need to be a master to use it successfully. you only need to master the parts you use.
By the time I got to openbsd (around 2.4 or so), I've already been playing with ultrix, osf/1, sunos, solaris and the slackware (never did like rhell, _ever_), so picking openbsd up wasn't an issue. Read the install file, read the manpages, done. One thing openbsd does very well is the, everything has a manpage mantra. And I was so impressed/surprised when Theo took committed code *OUT* because the manpage hasn't been written yet. OpenBSD is a good operating system to start on. It doesn't have some of the things that you may, or may not need, but you can definitely learn a lot from it, and if you go to other OSes from OpenBSD, you'll be coming in strong. Also take a look at usenix/sage's system administration levels, that should give you a good roadmap on the kinds of skills needed. A couple of good books to get you started: UNIX System Administration (purple book, I had the 2nd edition which was red) and any of the books by the guy who wrote Advanced Unix programming. Also go over to Matt Bishop's website, and read the articles/classes he has up. The most important thing is this - it's not how well you can tune sendmail or whatever, but the mindset. If you have the correct mindset, when you encounter a new problem, you'll be able to figure out how to fix it. -- "This officer's men seem to follow him merely out of idle curiosity." -- Sandhurst officer cadet evaluation.
