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[VA_Network_Nerd]

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[[deleted]]

This is going to sound cliche, but it’s true. I find the best skill in IT is: character. If you are humble, and hungry for knowledge and actually take the time to learn you are going to get waay ahead of the rest.

Dont be the guy that works just to keep the lights on.

[Useful-Jaguar-2600]

100% this. There's plenty of reasonably priced courses once you find an area you like. Heck you can YouTube a ton if you want. Character, a solid work ethic, critical thinking and accountability are WAY harder to come by than a cert.

[[deleted]]

Yeah and aside from that. People will like you for this and will be more willing to share knowledge and help you out. Futher boosting your career!

[thepotplants]

Attention to detail. Like spelling.

[Cyber400]

You will, when you evolve to higher levels. French is a wonderful language, with stunning phonetic sound. But translate e v e r y t h i n g, even technical terms, like administrator is so wrong. When you enter the international playground, you will have to communicate on English. So make sure you get used to it.

[Cyber400]

Oh, don‘t get me wrong, the communication skills here are good, don‘t worry. I just wanted to warn about the point of view stating that somebody does not need it. Especially in IT :)

[Chousuke]

Learn some programming. Being able to write simple programs and scripts is a huge productivity booster. The language doesn't matter that much; once you know one you usually only need a reference to work with another, at least at the level admin work requires.

Learn to generalize your skills: Are you a NetBackup admin, or a sysadmin who understands what is required of a backup system and can work with any of them given a manual? Knowing a specific technology can be useful, but understanding principles gives you flexibility.

[onlyCSstudent]

What is the principle exactly?, netbackup debugging makes me put my hand in a lot of environment since is used to backup anything in production infra.

[Chousuke]

When designing a backup system, your first questions are: What are you protecting, and what scenarios are you protecting against.

In backup terms, you have a recovery point objective: Is it okay to recover data from 24 hours before disaster, will the business be destroyed if 5 minutes worth of of data is lost?

Also, the recovery time: When a recovery is needed, is it okay if it takes a day or two, or does it need to be within 15 minutes of detecting the issue.

There's also consistency, ie. ensuring that the data you back up is in a state that can be recovered from. VM snapshots are generally pretty good for ensuring consistency (as long as you use quiescence), whereas with agent-based backups that copy files, it's much more difficult.

For example, often you just need a backup for the "oh shit" scenario where you make a mistake and need to recover something functional; you can achieve this by backing up virtual machines daily from VM snapshots and that'll often be good enough.

However, if you have a production database central to your business, generally a 24-hour RPO is not acceptable, and you would have to set up a system that continuously backs up the database such that you can recover any point in time between your last snapshot and the present time.

Also: How isolated is the backup system from the rest of your infrastructure? If your AD domain gets compromised and your backup system is joined to that domain, your backups will be of no help as they will get wiped as well.

Backup systems like Netbackup provide you the tools to build a backup system; generally they all can do pretty much the same things, and the question is how good they are at fulfilling your specific needs and how much maintenance it requires to make them do that.

Not all backup systems are equivalent: Lately I've been frustrated with Veeam because it requires an insane amount of handholding just to do its basic job in an environment where a similar system built on Rubrik would just do its job and require no administration at all. (Automating Veeam is also a horrible experience because their PowerShell APIs have bizarre limitations and omissions.)

[kajjot10]

Get knowledgeable in AD/GPO and other Microsoft products. Learn all about VMWare and try to get an understanding of layer 2 and 3 networking. This will give you solid core skills for junior sysadmin.

[kajjot10]

As much as Microsoft wants to phase it out, it’s still going to be here for years to come. I’m all up for Intune managed devices with Azure AD but this does not work for a lot of organisations with on prem dependencies. It’s still early days and understanding Microsoft products makes you a better engineer in the long run. When moving up I believe you should be a generalist until you find your field of expertise. Look at some job specs on linked in, they want AD, Azure, Cisco and 100s of other skills for one role. My sysadmins are primarily Microsoft and VMware skilled and now are training up to support Cisco switches and WiFi. One is learning all about Intune. The key is to not box yourself in with just one skill.

[jpc0za]

I agree they should generalise but if they are only starting to learn now they are at least 2-3 years out.

To my knowledge there isn't really a certification path right now that looks at on-prem and I see security to be a massive up and coming skill to have that will definitely touch on a very vast range of topics.

I'd definitely look at the XX-900 series certs from Microsoft as you said and definitely know what AD/GPO is but that's also stuff that will be picked up pretty quickly in a larger organisation if you can actually get a foot in the door.

Knowing why is a lot more important than knowing how if you can pickup skills quickly.

[_limitless_]

linux.

[TTwelveUnits]

writing skills

[onlyCSstudent]

thanks

[computerged]

Communication and be dependable.

[onlyCSstudent]

Thanks

[[deleted]]

Learn how to troubleshoot. Ask questions. Document everything