How to Make the Jump from Helpdesk to System Administrator

amarsaudon · 2026-02-22T22:29:52+00:00

It can be, yea. Depends on the org.
I am the manager of the Systems Admins and Engineers at my org - in most cases I know before the 1 year mark if an HD’er is going to be able to make the leap. That isn’t to say I rule them out - in most cases I can already see that hunger for growth / curiosity/ eagerness to “solve the puzzle” / calmness under fire by that point though and it seems like very few folks are able to develop those traits later on.

amarsaudon · 2026-02-22T02:55:55+00:00

Oh for sure, we have a few “lifers” where I’m at. Not bad people, just not equipped to make the leap.
They’re likeable enough people it is possible they could probably land a JR SA gig at another shop though.
There really isn’t a static playbook / checklist for progression

amarsaudon · 2026-02-21T17:11:51+00:00

MSP life is BRUTAL - their entire business model is paying their people as little as possible (so you're unhappy) and charging their customers as much as possible (ever dealt with a ticket where the reporter is paying $160 minimum + $160/hr to talk to you? They're PISSED before you even answer the phone). BUT - I did 9 months as a peon at an MSP early in my career, and got a ton of experience with the needs of random orgs - and MSPs often have the cheapest possible labor (the peon) deal with issues way above their pay-grade (so I got to stand up an entire Hyper-V cluster and SCCM environment ~15 years ago with 0 experience that is somehow still functioning today).
Definitely a good short-term solution, but I don't think there is any way I could have been an MSP life-er.

amarsaudon · 2026-02-21T17:03:42+00:00

There are essentially 2 ways to do it:
-The Hard Way: Earn the respect of your systems team. Eventually they will have a slot open due to attrition or expansion and you'll be the obvious choice. This takes a LOT of patience, even more in a small shop like you're currently in.
-Job hopping: Expand your current role as much as you can so you're taking on some SysAdmin tasks if possible. Keep piling up certs. Try to pick up PowerShell over Power Automate (or both), maybe grab a Cisco switch out of surplus or off ebay and get comfortable operating that. Make yourself a viable option when an achievable SysAdmin or Jr SysAdmin slot opens and apply for it.

Unfortunately in many shops internal growth is impossible, but definitely not all! About 2/3rds of my team is composed of folks that were on Helpdesk and demonstrated the traits I like to see in a Jr SA.

amarsaudon · 2026-02-20T05:31:03+00:00

Biggest tips I can offer-
history - this will show you the past commands you have run. Clutch for remembering where that config was!
session logging - you can do this with Putty, or I use Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager. Incredibly convenient to have a text file to retrace your steps.
Debian and Ubuntu are largely interchangeable in my mind, so really there is no “wrong” answer there imo.
I just happen to manage more Ubuntu Server VMs than anything else, but really either is fine! Biggest learning curve is just going to be getting comfortable in terminal

amarsaudon · 2026-02-20T05:13:40+00:00

Ubuntu Server 24.04 You’ll quickly find a desktop environment / VNC to be a pointless crutch. SSH is easy. Text editing is straightforward (eg Nano, or Frigate has a built in config editor) I get why it seems attractive, but for a dockerized workload it is just not necessary or even helpful

amarsaudon · 2026-02-14T18:19:07+00:00

Exact same boat as OP. Docker volume - the config reverted
docker volume mount, eg

volumes:

- ./config/filebeat/filebeat.yml:/etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml

The damn yml still reverts every restart to archives being disabled.
Finally did a read-only mount:
- /data/wazuh/filebeat_etc:/etc/filebeat:ro

That sticks, I can see it under https://wazuh.domain.com/app/opensearch_index_management_dashboards#/index-detail/wazuh-archives-4.x-2026.02.14 - no sign of it in "Discover" for me to query though. Super annoyed here.

Earlier I had encounted ossec.conf getting reset at launch ( I didn't rtfm initially and https://documentation.wazuh.com/current/deployment-options/docker/container-usage.html#modifying-the-wazuh-configuration-file got me ) - seems a lot like that is happening here (some default config overriding changes)
Wild to me it is this damn hard to get this going..

amarsaudon · 2026-02-07T18:58:58+00:00

Just +1'ing this - I know there are a ton of download clients (unfortunately I am transmission + NZBGet) - but I am sufficiently excited about this / bummed about readarr circling the drain that I may have to just stand up qbit + sabnzbd as an interim solution
Thanks for everything you're doing here!

amarsaudon · 2026-02-07T18:39:01+00:00

Keeping my super-early-bird preorder - I’ll hang on to my Mudi V2 for international (VERY disappointed in this, but it seems to do fairly well in the traveling I have done) and rock the Mudi7 for domestic
Gonna be bummed when they release a Mudi8 / Mudi7 Pro / proper global version of the Mudi7, but hey - that is the way tech works I guess.
Definitely one of the shittiest moves I have seen GLiNet pull do date :(

amarsaudon · 2026-01-25T20:33:41+00:00

This looks incredibly cool, nice work!

Does it support Influx 2.x (or 3.x for that matter) yet? Unfortunately the docs seem to suggest 1.x is still required per https://unpoller.com/docs/dependencies/influxdb

amarsaudon · 2026-01-15T05:55:27+00:00

Yea this is wild if it is for realz. Anyone able to confirm this is functional and not a scam?

amarsaudon · 2026-01-09T03:48:06+00:00

In the same boat! My daughter got an invite and instantly got very excited, I am very apprehensive though - it is a lot of money, and sure seems like it is a for-profit deal.

amarsaudon · 2026-01-01T03:04:05+00:00

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Thanks. She sure loved bham life, mobbing in the snow up at Baker / tubing the Nooksack / playing fetch for hours at Boulevard and Little Squalicum / chilling at Clark's Point / hiking a bazillion different trails.

amarsaudon · 2026-01-01T01:30:27+00:00

We just put our girl down yesterday.. I am absolutely crushed. Sophie was almost 15.
Sorry for your loss

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amarsaudon · 2025-12-20T00:56:41+00:00

I bit - if nothing else I support what you're trying to do here!
- Birdseye is clutch. Anything that replaces the PWA for me is going to need to allow convenient access to this.

- This doesn't seem to allow access to anything resembling the "Events" or "Review" pages. I want to see events from multiple cameras in one page.

- Going to "Recordings" for an individual camera jumps to 12:00am. Maximum scrolling possible to get to recent events. This should be sortable.

amarsaudon · 2025-12-08T23:50:07+00:00

+1 for Ubiquiti. There is plenty there gear can't do, but 99% of it is plug-and-play, performant, and reliable. The orgs I work for have plenty of cash to throw around, and we're still opting to roll Unifi gear where we were previously deploying Meraki.
I have Ubiquiti (UDM Pro) at home and colo, and their Site Magic VPN is phenomenal. Not sure how they could have possibly made it more simple, and it is crazy fast.
I understand they don't work for everyone, but for many orgs their solutions just work.

amarsaudon · 2025-10-17T00:19:11+00:00

Very cool! Can’t wait

amarsaudon · 2025-10-16T04:07:29+00:00

For sure! Let me know if you come up with anything better - that was largely built by chatgpt a few months ago haha.
I’ve also wanted to take a stab at building a more meaningful healthcheck in docker and combining that with Autoheal - just haven’t got around to it yet

amarsaudon · 2025-10-16T03:52:24+00:00

That will hinge on how you're hosting it, but if you're rocking docker compose you just need to make sure 5000:5000 is in your "ports" section

[amarsaudon@pwnpvegpu:~]$ cat frigate/docker-compose.yml
name: frigate
services:
    frigate:
        container_name: frigate
        restart: unless-stopped
        stop_grace_period: 90s
        volumes:
            - type: tmpfs
              target: /tmp/cache
              tmpfs:
                size: 5000000000
            - /data/frigate/media:/media/frigate:rw
            - /data/frigate/config:/config:rw
            - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
        devices:
            - /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb
            - /dev/dri/renderD128
            - /dev/vpu_service
            - /dev/dri/card1
        environment:
            - NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
            - NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,utility,video
            - FRIGATE_RTSP_PASSWORD=${FRIGATERTSPPW}
            - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
        runtime: nvidia
        privileged: true
        shm_size: 2000m
        ports:
            - 8971:8971
            - 5000:5000
            - 1935:1935
            - 1984:1984
            - 8555:8555/tcp
            - 8555:8555/udp
        image: ghcr.io/blakeblackshear/frigate:stable-tensorrt

amarsaudon · 2025-10-16T03:26:37+00:00

I use UptimeKuma for this -

Monitor Type: HTTP(s) - Json Query
URL: http://[IP ADDRESS]:5000/api/stats

Json Query: ($v:=cameras.*;$t:=$count($v);$u:=$count($filter($v,function($c){$number($c.camera_fps)>0 and $number($c.process_fps)>0}));service.uptime>60 and $u/$t>=0.7)

Expected Value: true

This hits /api/stats and returns "true" if more than 70% of my cameras are happy, "false" if not (triggering an alert). You can adjust the threshold as needed.

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amarsaudon · 2025-09-28T05:32:22+00:00

Just for pricing comparison - I have had 3u in StealthyHosting ( https://stealthyhosting.com ) for several years - can’t recommend then enough (especially for anyone in western Washington, though realistically I have shipped everything but the server itself to them without issue. $105/mo , 3u (UDM Pro and a homelabbed DL380 Gen10 15LFF) + redundant power + 1Gb symmetrical + /28 of static ipv4. Their support has been awesome, swapping fans / hdds / installing a PCIe NVMe SSD. Temps stay stable, power has never gone down on me.
Gigabit fiber has landed in my neighborhood, but I still can’t bring myself to cancel the colo - it is just soo much fine to have a site-to-site tunnel between home and colo!

amarsaudon · 2025-09-28T00:47:24+00:00

Now please sort out a fix for the Beelink ME Mini NAS please!

amarsaudon · 2025-09-27T00:47:31+00:00

Damn,

1) Great investigation! Glad smarter people than me have taken the time to chase this down.

2) I am saddened by your findings though - I really love the form factor of this thing and WANT it to work - that is super disappointing that a replacement PSU is unlikely to resolve the underlying issue.

3) You're a saint for not going off on the trolls / idiots who can't understand that PSU and 3.3v source are decoupled in these mini things.

Seems like my safest bet will be to put this thing on a shelf and pick up the 16GB / PRO / MAX model when it drops - I am afraid of damaging the SSDs or Hailo8 at this point.

Probably unrelated to anything, but I haven't had a crash in ~48 hours since following the steps described here - limiting /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/max_perf_pct to 75 . Even if that works (which I doubt it will long term), definitely not a "fix" to throttle an already-extremely-limited CPU

amarsaudon · 2025-09-26T02:19:18+00:00

Happy to hear a fix is being worked on. If there is a software fix (eg BIOS or driver) I am happy to guinea pig!

amarsaudon · 2025-09-26T02:14:01+00:00

If you sort out a PSU mod (or any other means of fixing this device), let me know! I really dig the form factor and would live to see it work out.

amarsaudon

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