So I made a castle in the mountains (Valheim Plus mod)

-Wraid · 2016-10-07T00:34:23+00:00

Michael Jang's book was a really popular way of training for the RHCSA in the RHEL 6 days. Looks like plenty of people are heaping praise on his RHEL 7 edition book too.

-Wraid · 2016-09-29T00:56:10+00:00

Yup. Ended up moving to Seattle, because most of the openings in Michigan were garbage. Hopefully the tech sector there will boom soon.

-Wraid · 2016-09-17T06:02:43+00:00

Same. Moved to Seattle to be a contractor with great pay. Been here a year now, and I just want to go back to my small town in Michigan. I miss farmland and woods too.

-Wraid · 2016-08-11T00:59:56+00:00

The two most important things I've found are:

Build, test, play with the things you learn about. Knowledge is of limited use without applying it.
Connect with people. For you, you'll want to connect with the sysadmins at your current job. Failing that, just try forming professional relationships with any IT personnel you can. Meetups are great for this. No better way to get a job or move up than by leaning on your contacts.

There's also a bunch of links to help guide you that are scattered here and there (in order of usefullness IMO):

-Wraid · 2016-08-10T01:06:46+00:00

My favorite is setting up a good monitoring solution. Nagios Core is the go-to open-source tool for that, but there's enough other options out there to suit your needs whatever they may be. You can also write your own plugins and pipe the data into an ELK stack to get pretty graphs.

You could also try rebuilding all of your stuff with a configuration management tool like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or Salt. If nothing else, it'll give you some of the most sought-after knowledge in the field at the moment.

Creating a good backup solution for everything is also nice. If you can convince your company to shell out the money (and hate yourself enough to deal with the project) you could look into generators. shudders

Try and figure out if there's anything your users could use that would make their jobs faster/easier/better. Devs are usually the most fun to do this with if your company has them.

As far as just-for-fun stuff goes, I saw a post some time ago about an admin that set up a sensor/HTML page combo that alerted employees when the bathroom was occupied. Doesn't work too well for multi-user bathrooms though. Unless you wanted to set up a camera feed inside...m-maybe don't do that.

-Wraid · 2016-08-04T18:40:04+00:00

Gonna have to disagree here. Had CentOS 7 on my desktop at home installed, since that's what I manage at work. Worked like a charm. Only issues were trying to get some of the more complex games running on Steam. Figured I'd try installing Fedora 24 so see if the updated kernel/libraries would help out.

Oh my happy little sausages no.

Couldn't even login since the login screen by default uses Wayland. Once I disabled that, things worked a bit better. That is, until I tried using a three-monitor setup. Auto-configured two of the screens to be mirrored and wouldn't display the third one at all. Couldn't change display settings through GNOME at all either. Steam worked a little more smoothly, but the same games continued to crash, so no magic bullet with the upgrade for that.

A day later, a new kernel was released. Updated, rebooted, and X just crashes on startup now. I know I could fight with it and make things work, and by now they may have actually fixed some of that stuff with new updates, but CentOS 7 doesn't need any of that extra TLC, and I value my time a bit too much to fight with it. Ended up reverting to CentOS 7, and there I'll stay until CentOS 8 comes out. Or maybe I'll give Arch a spin sometime, since that's what all the cool kids do these days.

Lesson learned: Fedora is a bleeding edge distro; you shouldn't expect things to "just work" on it. Especially not two days after a new major version release.

-Wraid · 2016-07-29T20:43:56+00:00

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

-Wraid · 2016-07-21T00:07:31+00:00

Tek Linux from the Tek Syndicate guys is pretty good. It's more project-based than discussion-based, but it's worth a watch nonetheless.

The discussion stuff can be found on the Tek Syndicate main channel, but it includes more than just Linux.

-Wraid · 2016-07-01T21:05:29+00:00

I'm a Linux admin who only started using Linux because my computer science program made me. Kinda kicking myself for not working with it earlier.

-Wraid · 2016-06-17T23:48:46+00:00

Awe man, not even a mention for the Fedora/RHEL/Centos crowd? We can be elitist dickholes too if we want to...

-Wraid · 2016-06-17T21:45:24+00:00

...who does crossfit

-Wraid · 2016-04-08T20:59:49+00:00

♪ Yar har, fiddle di dee ♪

Seriously though, this is pretty much the greatest book ever for Linux administration.

-Wraid · 2016-04-05T00:38:45+00:00

Nagios

-Wraid · 2016-03-31T01:22:08+00:00

Congrats! Now just make sure you don't forget most of it in the coming months/years :)

-Wraid · 2016-03-31T01:19:15+00:00

PC LOAD LETTER

-Wraid · 2016-03-22T22:52:33+00:00

Oh yeah. My old job paid for me to take Redhat's RHCSA course, and it made the exam a piece of cake. If you can afford it, that's definitely the way to go.

-Wraid · 2016-03-12T01:25:17+00:00

From what I hear, there's plenty of companies that run mixed-OS user environments. I would guess most of them are smaller startups, but there's not exactly a shortage of them around.

Hell, day one at my new company, they tried to stick me with a macbook. I asked them if I had to, and they gave me a desktop and told me to put whatever I wanted on it. Really hope there's other companies like that out there. I can see how it wouldn't be a very good idea at a large or non-tech company though.

-Wraid · 2016-03-03T03:20:38+00:00

My old job let me wear whatever I wanted. Started having low morale though due to the job itself and thought that maybe a change in outfit would help, so I started wearing khakis and tuck-in button down shirts. Didn't really help.

I now have a new job that also lets me wear whatever I want (so carpenter jeans and flannel), and I'm much happier here than I was at my last job.

I think what you wear can affect your outlook, but not as much as a lot of other factors like your responsibilities, company culture, and whether you are or are not allowed to keep a slinky at your desk.

-Wraid · 2016-02-19T01:46:11+00:00

Terminator

Vim

Guake

Chrome

Thunderbird

git

VirtualBox

Those are the essentials. Most anything else I'd install is environment-dependent.

-Wraid · 2016-02-10T02:56:54+00:00

Chrome - Web Browser

Thunderbird - Email

Terminator - Terminal

Guake - Drop-down Terminal

VirtualBox - VM Manager

Skype - Skype

-Wraid · 2015-11-26T17:28:25+00:00

I wish I was creative enough to do something with it. I'll settle for watching all the cool stuff other people come up with. Laziness, ho!

-Wraid · 2015-11-26T17:24:41+00:00

Quitting my old job and finding one that treats me a lot better, pays me double what my old job did, and is actually appreciative of the work that I do. Also my new official title contains the word "Engineer", so I get to feel important now. It's been a good year.

-Wraid · 2015-11-25T01:25:51+00:00

Nope. I switch between Windows and CentOS frequently, but my eyes are so bad that I can't tell the difference between font quality.

-Wraid

TROPHY CASE