Every new field we explore starts with the same basic question: “Where do I start?” Many of us worked with home computers before moving into the world of professional IT. The lucky ones enjoyed a smooth ramp-up. As the field continues to expand and consumer-grade systems require less knowledge to use, that transition becomes rougher. Furthermore, companies have long viewed technical staff as somewhat interchangeable, so they dislike hiring employees that require foundational training. Once upon a time, many companies would assign new hires to front-line help desk roles and allow them to grow into other roles. Nowadays, most treat IT positions like treadmills; an employee starts, works for a while, and then quits or gets fired. Employers expect applicants to show up with the skills necessary to succeed in the job. That means that if you want to improve your chances of finding a satisfying server administrator job without years of hopping through entry-level positions until you find an employer that will train you, you need to take matters into your own hands. You can take the formal education route, if you have the time and money. Either way, having a home lab will never hurt you. Let’s look at some tips to help you get going.
Continue reading “How to Build a Home Lab for Learning Server Administration”How to Submit an Effective Trouble Ticket
This site focuses on systems administrators, but everyone at every level, technical or not, needs to report problems. As the first point of contact, your trouble ticket (or e-mail, or problem report, or service ticket, or helpdesk request, or whatever your organization might call it) sets the tone for the future interactions necessary to get that problem solved. When you submit an effective trouble ticket, you increase your chances of skipping unnecessary intermediary steps and reaching resolution faster.
Continue reading “How to Submit an Effective Trouble Ticket”DNS is the Problem
For our blog’s inaugural article, we chose one of the most common, yet vexing problems that new administrators encounter: DNS misconfiguration (domain name system). Many of us stumbled our way through these problems in the early days of TCP/IP emergence as the dominant network stack. We mainly knew of DNS from working with our Internet service providers at home. That knowledge was incomplete, so we could not fully understand the situations that greeted us in business environments. The struggle was so pervasive that I once saw someone say, “The answer is DNS; the question is irrelevant.” Over twenty years after I learned the rest of the story (the hard way, of course), new administrators still make the same mistakes.
Continue reading “DNS is the Problem”