I recently gave a friend a resume to pass along for a linux sys admin position. It was a strange experience, thinking of myself as a systems administrator. But as I went through to tweak my resumee for the position, I realized that I’ve done quite a bit of it over the years (as any web developer must).
Back in ‘96 I helped set up and maintain a FreeBSD web and file server. I maintained our teams email accounts on it (configuring and maintaining IMAP in the process), managed the Apache web server and a dozen or so perl CGI scripts. I also managed the FTP services, and even re-compiled the kernel to add in AppleTalk support (didn’t sleep much that night! shudder)
Later on I helped set up a linux webserver running Apache, tomcat, and CVS for a team at Compass.
More recently yet I managed a Mac OS X server running CVS, the usual net services (ftp, ssh, etc) and WebObjects. I also spent a lot of time automating the major boring stuff with a little help from my friends.
Finally, I’ve got opus, my own linux box, running here behind my firewall, automating stuff like processing my server logs.
Gee, who knew? I still have a lot to learn, and I’m glad for opus ‘cause it gives me a platform to hack on.
It turns out I did not get the position (they used someone internally), but it did give me a new appreciation for what I’ve learned over the years, and how much more I can learn - which gives me hope!
