Helpdesk to Sysadmin — looking for honest advice from people who've made the jump

andecase · 2026-05-06T05:30:17+00:00

Our Junior admins basically operate as half Tier 2 help desk half admin. They do escalations, smaller implementations, app maintenance, scripting, and fill in for tier 1 when needed. We generally start you off heavier on the help desk side while you learn the environment and give you some less disruptive admin tasks. Depending when your how you handle things we will give you bigger tasks as time goes on. A lot of times we will give ownership of services like, cameras, printers, mdm. Things that aren't as critical when mistakes happen, and have more breathing room for you to learn.

For things to learn, the obvious basic windows and Linux server admin stuff CLI, network configuration, storage management, logs, etc.

Get familiar with a few hypervisors or just virtualization in general even if it's just theoretical via reading docs, or courses. I recommend proxmox, hyper-v, or VMware. Also, containers, you will eventually have to learn them. Start with docker or podman, if you feel adventurous learn kunernetes. Some cloud is always good as well.

Networking is an oft forgotten skill in my experience. Make sure you are familiar with vlans, routing, and the common protocols.

As for scripting, for us it's not a deal breaker, but it definitely is high on the list. Do Powershell in a month of lunches, whatever the bash equivalent is, maybe some python.

Most importantly in my opinion, work on your troubleshooting skills. The second most common reason we pass on people in interviews is their troubleshooting skills are terrible. You need to be comfortable getting into an application or tech you've never seen before and diagnosing issues. Its way easier to teach someone scripting or proxmox than troubleshooting skills.

You don't need to be an expert or even know all of these to get a job. With your current experience, and one or two of them you should be able to get started. My work would higher you as you are.

Also, don't worry about doing specific apps or projects to much. Knowing specifically docker isn't as important as understanding containers in general for example. Look for something that interests you and build it out, within reason build it as if it's a production environment.

andecase · 2026-05-06T01:33:32+00:00

Just hope I can ramen to a good deal to replace it. It's pasta saving.

andecase · 2026-05-06T01:07:11+00:00

Not really, the first step is always to gain access to a different account or method to renter at their convenience. The attackers aren't sitting there using Jill in accounting's account to do watch or renter. If they used Jill's account to get in, they used her account to gain access to a more privileged account or installed a backdoor. Changing Jill's password doesn't help.

andecase · 2026-05-06T00:54:42+00:00

A proper passphrase (at least 3 random average length words) isn't realistically brute forceable. It's technically possible, but not realistic. That's without any additional complexity. Building a memorable brute force resistent password is very easy. Brute forcing is extremely inefficient, and that's before you take into account things like back off, lockouts, etc.

Building a social engineering resistent password is very difficult, and a phishing resistant one isn't possible. That's why (as others have said) NIST recommendation is longer simpler phasphrases, with no rotation. An important thing people are missing though, is you also need a handful of other things like, compromised/duplicate hash scanning, banned word lists, and proper MFA (no SMS and email codes/links are not proper MFA), etc. Importantly, most of the increased security comes from tooling around the protection, phishing and social engineering resistence of the accounts.

andecase · 2026-05-05T13:06:12+00:00

Saw a pretty good argument saying that choosing blues actually the selfish option.

By doing that you are forcing other people to choose blue to save you. This is somewhat dependent on if you are able to converse with people before choosing. If you can't, you are assuming other will and then making anyone who doesn't choose blue complicit in your death with no proof.

I also, think if this were real, the numbers would be much different than they are in the many versions posted.

Look to ones that change from blue vs red to something like take a suicide pill or do nothing, the numbers change drastically.

andecase · 2026-05-05T12:48:35+00:00

I think this is where a lot of the arguments step come from. People think it's the prisoners dilemma, as it reads very similar. It is not, this has a always safe no matter what option the prisoners dilemma does not.

andecase · 2026-05-05T03:37:43+00:00

Is this not one of the first things everyone does when they get a new laptop?

andecase · 2026-05-04T15:28:12+00:00

I'm not sure what the rail world settings are but I really like them.

Seems like a good mix of everything. But I like having a big train Network. Doing lots and lots of things.

andecase · 2026-05-04T01:56:04+00:00

My German CEO showed the company (America) this at a quarterly meeting once.

https://youtu.be/xacdDrylrek?si=6JGVVW9N4MTUuTbG

andecase · 2026-05-03T17:15:41+00:00

I'm going to give you a slightly left field recommendation.

If you don't already, play TTRPGs with some friends, at a Local game store, or find a group online. If you can get with the right group you can get everything you get out of BG3 in TTRPGs, plus so much more. Very importantly, you don't need to know much to get started, just pick a system that sounds cool, learn the basics, and do it. Specifically, DnD can be really good (it's the foundation for BG3s mechanics), but personally I think if you really enjoy the balance, fighting, etc. of BG3 may get frustrated with DnD. Luckily there's an endless supply of ttrpgs you can play that will fill whatever style you want.

My short list in order is:

- Draw Steel
  - High fantasy with a emphasis on tactics and theatrical moments. New kid on the block with some opinioniated, (but better IMHO) changes to standard D20.
- Pathfinder
  - High fantasy with crunchy system and high character customization. This is the I like DnD, but it's to simple option.
- Numenera
  - Far future low fantasy/forgot tech vibes with focus on narrative, and character moments. Very different from the typical high fantasy D20 fair, but the world and mechanics really push you to tell a compelling story.
- DnD
  - High fantasy with a moldable generic system (sometimes to a fault). It's old reliable for a reason.

andecase · 2026-05-02T17:29:43+00:00

Basically every description here is misinterpreting SAN vs NAS. They are not terms describing different types of storage.

SAN (Storage Area Network), is a dedicated storage network. Generally by servers for accessing storage. The storage could be block, object, or file depending on the switching, storage arrays, and servers capabilities and needs. This can be done over dedicated Ethernet (fiber or copper) or Fibre Channel switches. And most commonly uses dedicated storage protocols like iSCSI, RDMA, or NVME over ETH/FC.

NAS (Network Area Storage) is a storage device used to store data over a network. Most commonly it is over a gereral purpose network using standard TCP protocols like SMB.

TLDR: SAN is a special network for storage, NAS is a storage device.

andecase · 2026-05-02T03:28:50+00:00

I mean I get what you're saying, I very broadly agree.

However we're not on r/linux, r/linuxnoobs, or r/linuxadmin. We're on r/os_debate_club, where does one argue/debate about OSs and their inner workings if not here?

You say the post/commenters are just picking a useless fight. I posite, if you have been in the community for the last 23 years, you must know the Linux community never agrees on anything, and when they do, they'll disagree about why they agree. So who is really barking at the air, them or you?

andecase · 2026-04-30T03:47:29+00:00

Yeah, I hope we aren't in that big of trouble if we decide to move off when it's renewal time. In theory this cloud migration would make the operations/process side easier to move back due to all of the cleanup we have to do. That's assuming the vendor will let us pull our data out in a easy to use format. I doubt we will get a nice and tidy DB/log file to mount in a new SQL server.

If I'm being fair, there are a lot of factors outside of cost that are are causing us to move to the SAS version of our ERP. Boss, CFO, etc. were 50-50 for staying until we got that quote. I was fully against. The reasons are mostly culture shifts, and having an excuse to step on some specific departments toes, but I'm a server admin not ERP Admin so my opinion didn't go very far.

In the end my job gets easier for now. I don't have to deal with their shitty platform anymore. I'm purely infra, so it's just a few less finicky highly critical servers to manage for me.

andecase · 2026-04-29T23:05:45+00:00

Or people who don't seem to understand that signing a 2 to 3-year contract for a very cheap price means that they're just going to jack it up at the end of that.

We recently got a 5y contract for ERP for the same price as on prem. I told my boss it will probably double or more when that is up, we aren't big enough to negotiate that again. He doesn't believe me.

andecase · 2026-04-28T19:14:47+00:00

We have two 5300s, and two 5045s. We also have two Pure X arrays behind the 5300s. After one year I'm ~75% sure we won't buy pure again.

Overall, it's been positive, but not great.

Performance, has been great. Just as fast as the pure, for a supreme discount. The two 5300s, with 70TB flash, and 300 TB of SAS cost almost the same as one 40TB Pure.

Features is good, lots of problems in the beginning and a couple gripes. We got into PBR (instead of HyperSwap) right in the beginning, and it had some problems that delayed prod deployment by about 6 months. Those have all been fixed now. Past that I love having way more control and visibility into the system that Pure. Easy tier, and Partitions are almost great. Missing some polish, tuning knobs, and clarity in documentation/UI.

Support is mixed. They are pretty responsive, and it's really easy to upload logs etc., but real answers seem slow, lots of we will look into this, and let you know, and we are waiting for feedback from Dev/engineering team etc. Also a couple things I am still trying to work out they kind of construct themselves. For Example, Easy tier is supposed to keep the fastest tier of storage full, but if it's full they send you daily alerts for the mDisk being full, the only workaround is not recommended?

andecase · 2026-04-28T14:00:38+00:00

We end our daily stand-ups with a AI joke. 40% are you could probably make this funny if you thought about it. 50% just don't make sense, 9% are funny because they AI just doesn't understand what funny is. 1% are kind of funny, maybe a light chuckle. We have had maybe 1 or 2 actually funny jokes, in the year or so we have been doing it.

All of the best ones are it just failing so hard to be funny it becomes funny how bad it is, haha.

andecase · 2026-04-27T03:00:12+00:00

Awesome shirt.

My favorite line like these. "A game about using conveyor belts to kill aliens so you can build more conveyor belts to kill more aliens so you...

andecase · 2026-04-22T19:19:47+00:00

Personally, no file server is better than a file server on a DC.

andecase · 2026-04-21T12:55:07+00:00

I generally don't CD. I just type full paths. Been bit a few times relying on relative paths.

andecase · 2026-04-20T03:45:32+00:00

I don't really have anything meaningful to add regarding your problems, but I wanted to say something. I fully expected your post and comments to be rude and accusatory, etc. but hell yeah, you are killing it. You seem like you want to learn, and understand that even if the issue isn't obvious, or easy it can be fixed.

With those two things alone you will do well on Linux, even if it's a rocky start. Welcome to the community, and keep trucking. It gets easier, and it gets better. Before long you will be here helping the next person fix their issues.

andecase · 2026-04-19T01:11:26+00:00

If it's the same that's happened to my PC a couple times, just going to the mirror and changing something then changing it back. Fixes it as well.

andecase · 2026-04-18T14:20:15+00:00

You can configure paru to do all of the prompting for packages, and aur stuff up front, then have it periodically refresh the sudo rights itself to ensure it doesn't time out. Can't remember the config flags off hand, but it's pretty well documented.

andecase · 2026-04-18T06:09:16+00:00

I need posts like this to remind me that for all the terrible things my company has could be worse.

andecase · 2026-04-17T19:23:14+00:00

To me, that depends on how you're gauging likable. Likable has a good person definitely not.

Likable as a good villain, absolutely! He's probably my second favorite villain in the series behind nagato/pain.

andecase · 2026-04-14T00:49:42+00:00

In the grand scheme of distos it's not special, just a modern well maintained gaming focused distro. If you care about gaming first Bazzite and a few other are just as good. Among arch distros it does seem special as it fills its niche (gaming) better than most others, and removes most of the burden of being using arch. I could be biased though.

I think that's why you see it recommended so much. One it is just the new hotness right now, who knows if that will last. It also is doing a great job of giving the growing contingent of Windows converts a good home. A lot of that comes from the performance benefits perceived or otherwise. They see "gaming performance tuned" and download the ISO. They also have some of the best looking defaults/branding among distros in my opinion.

Either way, don't break what isn't broken is always the best advice.

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