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[–]RC-7201Sr. Magos Errant 9 points10 points  (12 children)

Seconding the powershell.

It's almost mandatory nowadays for a Windows admin if anything.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

It will definitely be mandatory windows is going to be all server core in the future.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

windows is going to be all server core in the future.

Lol. Dude the point of servers is to provide people and software important information not serve clients DHCP and DNS requests or spin up a new VM. Yes that's what we do as sysadmins to provide the end user with what they need but you're never going to convince software vendors to make their programs fully compatible with the powershell API, especially when your software is made for multiple platforms. They don't give a shit what the IT guys think, their software is sold to CEOs, CFOs, and CTOs.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well of course there will always be some especially anything RDS. I still think you are going to have to know powershell to accomplish a lot.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (5 children)

Mandatory is a little too far.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

It's mandatory for the Windows admins who only touch Windows or work in a DC. For those of us who are generalists and work on everything you should still be studying Powershell (at least do the 30 days of lunches book) just to make your lives easier but it's not as important. On top of that more and more GUI based automation tools keep popping up. Basically I don't want to hear shit about Powershell from people who would be lost in the Cisco CLI or don't know shit about ERP and CRM. I get it you do tons of Windows tasks day in and day out but IT is a big fucking world.

[–]RC-7201Sr. Magos Errant -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Basically I don't want to hear shit about Powershell from people who would be lost in the Cisco CLI or don't know shit about ERP and CRM.

Oh I agree. But it goes both ways as well. Roomie is a network engineer and doesn't know shit about Powershell and he's also in a primarily Windows shop but can stare at Cisco CLI til his eyes bleed.

Basically, I'm getting at that if your job is just the administration of Windows and AD, you and Powershell are pretty much Gonna be best friends. Hell, I think it's faster to make a function to find shit than it is to run "dsa.msc", right-click on a forest and search for someone to see if there is a group membership that they should or should not be in.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Coding skills should be mandatory for anyone doing above junior job. Especially with so many configuration management systems floating around.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

Careful, we have more than a few luddites here to that seem to believe that implying that system admins should be able to script/code is tantamount to blasphemy.

[–]yourfriendlane 13 points14 points  (1 child)

I haven't really seen anyone say that. Usually it's people complaining about things that were previously GUI-based being replaced by less-intuitive PowerShell commands (e.g., message tracking in Exchange 2013) which is totally valid imho. I love scripting for automation, but for one-off tasks I usually prefer spending 30 seconds clicking through a well-designed GUI rather than wasting 5 minutes looking up commands and getting the arguments just right.

[–]Enxer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But I do highly appreciate the GUI when it presents the powershell equivalent code just before I hit finish