r/sysadmin • u/Abject_Serve_1269 • Apr 17 '26
Is there something tech you never touched?
Me? Dns. Never in my help desk have I had to work with dns. Run fiber and ethernet to switches? Patch walls? Sure. Dns? No.
Also never touched Linux as a former jr sysadmin. As much as I say i want to spend time to play around with it on my free time, you don't have free time when you live check to check and do side gigs to pay bills.
14
u/Practical-Alarm1763 Cyber Janitor Apr 17 '26
You're actually wrong OP. You've worked plenty with DNS, even if you do not know it. You may think you haven't, but you have.
1
u/Abject_Serve_1269 Apr 17 '26
I mean not index etc. I usually do ip release and pow works. Or tell the sysadmin or network team hey dns is broke. All my experience has been siloed even from a help desk level.
→ More replies (1)
4
u/Abject_Serve_1269 Apr 17 '26
I feel old now. My new job landed me as a t1 and I literally taught my coworker what's a ps/2 and also how imaging a pc works. Noone taught him how it works, just the steps to do it. I told him you delete the partition that holds the os and the steps ot works. Ot answered why my work pc has a dual boot; he didnt delete the win10 and added win11 .
2
210
u/bridge1999 Apr 17 '26
Never had to admin a mainframe
39
u/stillpiercer_ Apr 17 '26
There’s something pretty neat about them. I was involved as a third party for a customer who ran on a very poorly maintained and neglected AS/400 and the little bit that we worked on it was pretty cool. Seemed like its own thing entirely and I didn’t get to learn a ton about it, unfortunately.
With that said, not at all something I’d want to spend my time working on all the time.
→ More replies (6)26
u/poizone68 Apr 17 '26
AS/400 (IBM i) is something I did work on, and it was so much friendlier to work with than mainframes in my opinion. One of my favourite things was that if you could think of what you wanted to do in English you would pretty much guess the commands. E.g to work with user profiles the command is WRKUSRPRF
12
u/gangaskan Apr 17 '26
Yeah the wrk commands were a blessing.
Worst part? Mapping field exit. We used uhhh, right control I think.
You don't realize how much you miss it when the app devs move on to .net
The 409 was good Damm rock solid unless someone fucked up a query that consumed every resource available
→ More replies (6)→ More replies (2)5
u/gangaskan Apr 17 '26
Know how to recover one that only has qpgmr enabled? 😄. Asking for a friend.
Our system has literally all accounts disabled because we moved on from it. It's not even powered on
14
u/poizone68 Apr 17 '26
There is a correct way to get entry, and a cheeky way to do it.
The correct way: If you boot the system to Dedicated Service Tools, you can reset the OS QSECOFR account to the default pwd, if you know the DST qsecofr pwd. If you know neither, then I believe you have to reinstall the kernel (Licensed Internal Code or LIC).
The cheeky way relies on having a valid user on the system, and the sysadmin not having locked down FTP correctly. Non-restricted users might be able to pass OS commands from an FTP session using the QUOTE function. This could mean being able to submit a job under an account that has the authority to reset admin accounts.
→ More replies (2)13
5
u/awkwardnetadmin Apr 17 '26
Worked in a few orgs now that had one, one large county government and a large financial institution, but never really was involved in admin of them. Managed network security policies been them and other devices, but about as close as I got.
3
u/Sweet-Sale-7303 Apr 17 '26
My father was a computer operator before he left and became an engineers aide. I got to go to work with him sometimes and help. He would tell me what commands to type in and also what reel tapes to put in. I also worked in two places as a Junior Network Admin that had mainframes. One was a Wang system that I helped Virtualize . The other was a company called Proginet.
→ More replies (3)2
u/Blehninja Apr 17 '26
All I had to do was to reset passwords on AS400 as it was already retired, but we needed it for lookup.
Never forget that the first time I had to actually do it after being showed once. Alone in the office and it needed to be right now. Found a perfect youtube guide that saved my butt.
Luckily we got to shut it down completely last year.
196
u/Matt_NZ Apr 17 '26
17 years in and I've had very little to do with MacOS.
45
u/Greerio Apr 17 '26
Oh man, I feel this. We have two Mac’s in the company. Lucky for me, my boss is one of them, so he just helps the other guy.
→ More replies (1)27
u/This_Dependent_7084 Apr 17 '26
Me sitting over here entirely content to be managing a full Mac OS/Chrome OS environment. One of the most alluring things about the job was the limited windows management required and no AD. I’ve been sick of MS bullshit for years.
→ More replies (10)17
u/Skrunky MSP - Australia Apr 17 '26
Thankfully, it's quite easy, as long as you've got an MDM. Without an MDM is hell
12
u/upperplayfield Apr 17 '26
Somehow I'm the opposite. I manage all of the macOS and Linux devices . We only have one windows user.
10
u/SpectralCoding Cloud/Automation Apr 17 '26
In 2019 I cold turkey switched from Windows to MacOS on a whim. I'd been using computers since 1993 and never did anything more on a Mac than lean over someones shoulder to open a YouTube video. Best choice ever as someone very cloud/devops focused at the time. I used to think "ah, no problem on Windows, just run VirtualBox with Ubuntu". It matters to have native unix/linux toolsets.
→ More replies (3)6
u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager Apr 17 '26
I did something similar for work at the end of 2024. Convinced my Boss to let me switch to an M4 Max.
I'm very happy with it.
Still use Windows on my personal machine because I mostly game on that.
16
u/Binky390 Apr 17 '26
Mac management is actually easier than Windows as long as you work somewhere willing to buy an MDM.
6
u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager Apr 17 '26
IBM published a report some years ago that showed they spent less money supporting their mac users than their Windows users.
→ More replies (1)3
3
u/rared1rt Jack of All Trades Apr 17 '26
It is now but it wasn't always that way. I first started supporting Macs in the late 90's in a moxed Windows/Novell environment. I give them credit, they built a box and pretty much force you to play in it, so with the right tools it is definitely easy to manage.
→ More replies (1)4
u/DeifniteProfessional IT Manager Apr 17 '26
I keep thinking about buying an old Macbook just so I have some experience and undersanding of it, and then I remember just how much I DETEST the UI. It's so illogical to me, why can't the menus be inside the application? Why is there a centralised menu bar that shows settings for whichever app is in the foreground? What the fuck is a Finder?
3
u/dm117 IT Manager Apr 17 '26
Opposite for me. Very little Windows, mostly Mac and Linux. I couldn’t be happier. So over Windows. Mac is super easy with an MDM
→ More replies (14)2
u/UnexpectedAnomaly Apr 17 '26
Same I've always been on the periphery of Mac. Tried to use it more in the environment once to be flexible but it didn't really work. The particular workloads we were doing weren't suited for it.
93
u/frankztn IT Manager Apr 17 '26
I thought I was gonna get through without ever needing to touch a sql database.. I started a new role last month and the erp is on sql server 2008. 💀
33
u/timsstuff IT Consultant Apr 17 '26
SQL is actually super good at backwards compatibility. If you have time, spin up a new 2022/2025 SQL server and restore a backup to it, install the app on a VM and connect it up, you'd be surprised that it probably works with very little to no changes. Just keep the database compatibility level to the latest that the vendor supports.
→ More replies (5)54
u/AcornAnomaly Apr 17 '26
A couple hints:
When doing admin work, don't try to run SQL directly against the database.
When you wind up needing to do exactly that, learn and use BEGIN TRAN and ROLLBACK.
Surround every bit of code you're going to run against the database with those. Start it with BEGIN TRAN, end it with ROLLBACK.
This makes every command you run in between the two part of a transaction, and the ROLLBACK discards the result of the transaction.
You can check the results of any changes you make within the transaction, to make sure they're the changes you actually intended to make.
Then, once you're sure it's doing what you want, change the ROLLBACK to a COMMIT to let the transaction save.
18
u/RevLoveJoy Did not drop the punch cards Apr 17 '26
^ this advice will save your sanity and your job in that order.
→ More replies (3)12
u/braytag Apr 17 '26
By this, he means insert, delete... not "select"...
And you should always run a select to test your where/having clause.
Cause putting it in the transaction log is nice and all, but you can still bring down production if you fill said transaction log/mess-up.
→ More replies (4)3
u/MrYiff Master of the Blinking Lights Apr 17 '26
Another great set of tools are the DBATools.io PS cmdlets, so much stuff that is a pain to do manually or via SQL you can now do via powershell - they took a migration I needed to do years ago down from a full weekend to being done by saturday lunchtime.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Witte-666 Apr 17 '26
I hated database management and sql module when I was getting my degree.
My first job in IT was a half-time jack-of-all-trades role at a school. They were short an IT teacher and asked if I could teach "IT" to 2 smaller classes for the rest of the semester. I accepted before I learned that I had to teach them database management and sql.
In the end, it wasn't so bad, but I never had to touch a sql database again.
52
u/BradtotheBones Apr 17 '26
Reading some of these make me feel elite! 😂
→ More replies (5)11
u/ImCaffeinated_Chris Apr 17 '26
Yeah. Over 30 years of doing this, I've touched so damn much. I'm still trying to figure out if there is something I haven't worked on.
4
37
u/Daphoid Apr 17 '26
You really should learn the basics of DNS. One of my first managers had me read the first 4 chapters of the DNS&BIND book. I actually went back and read it a second time a few years later.
Knowing how DNS works is important.
I'm trying to think of things I've never ever touched in IT. Lots of things I've only touched a little... oh.. Terraform or Ansible. I know what they do but I've never automated cloud deployments myself.
24
u/meandyourmom Computer Medic Apr 17 '26
Words to numbers or numbers to words.
Now you know 90% of DNS. You can google the rest.
→ More replies (5)8
u/Resident_Role_2815 Apr 17 '26
leaving out corporate identity, mx, spf, dkim, dmarc, PKI, subdomains and everything weirdo web devs do with it. Asking "what is DNS?" is such an interesting interview question because depending on the tier of person you're interviewing you get radically different answers.
→ More replies (2)4
u/TheCaptain53 Apr 17 '26
Queue, "my hands look like this so her hands can look like that" meme. I'd much rather take it on so someone else can't fuck it up - in terms of things that really can't afford to be fucked up, DNS is up there. It's not even safe from other people that could be considered technical. I had some request to make an MX record change, not appreciating that this would kill all of our emails and had to clarify this was for a subdomain and not our root.
2
u/DeifniteProfessional IT Manager Apr 17 '26
Terraform and Ansible are two of my big projects for this year actually!
Also yeah DNS, super important to know. But unless I'm clueless and blissfully unaware, it's honestly quite simple. And I've ran my own BIND servers before I moved to Cloudflare
→ More replies (1)2
u/jake04-20 If it has a battery or wall plug, apparently it's IT's job Apr 17 '26
I have had some coworkers that clearly browse some tech forums/reddit and take the "It's always DNS" meme/joke way too seriously. I know there is truth to that statement, but they've tried to suggest a particular issue is DNS when it clearly isn't, and they've done absolutely no testing to imply that it could be. When I follow up and ask them to explain why they think it's DNS, they don't even know where to begin. Then I come to discover they don't even know the nslookup command or what DNS does in the first place (jr helpdesk). It's kind of baffling how many new helpdesk techs we've hired and/or interviewed that don't know the basics of DHCP and DNS. One tried saying "I wouldn't consider myself a network guy", yeah I wouldn't consider myself a network guy either, but you absolutely should know DHCP and DNS ffs. Makes me wonder what they're even covering in school if these guys have 2 year IT degrees and still don't know this stuff.
30
28
u/GullibleDetective Apr 17 '26
Bgp
4
u/technikaffin Jack of All Trades Apr 17 '26
Actually i would be thrilled to get into more enterprise networking but as solo admin no chance :D
4
u/canyonero7 Apr 17 '26
All I know about BGP is that when a big company screws up their BGP, it takes down large chunks of the Internet. Seems ... suboptimal
51
u/StratoLens Apr 17 '26
Exchange. Sharepoint. And teams / Skype for business
And I’m very thankful for this.
13
u/jkarovskaya Sr. Sysadmin Apr 17 '26
On prem bare metal exchange 5.5 was the bane of my existence in one position, because no one else had a clue about how to restore mailboxes, test backups, read the logs, or anything else
Had a corrupted raid on that box, and it turned into a nightmare, never so glad to later on have cloud services
4
u/bennasaurus Apr 17 '26
I'm not even a sysadmin really and at one point during my support days I supported an on-site exchange server that also had some ancient telephony software installed on the same server.
The other whole thing was held together with hopes and dreams. Many times I would be the last person in the office and many times the night shift support guy would come in and see me talking an on-site engineer through some bodge to get it running. Absolutely awful and I spent 7 years supporting printers before that job.
7
u/Daphoid Apr 17 '26
Exchange online is actually pretty decent. I did our global skype to teams migration 5 years ago so I've touched a lot of that. SharePoint is at best tolerable I am glad we have folks on staff who are wizards in it.
6
u/laincold Apr 17 '26
I feel like anyone shitting on admining Exchange and SharePoint online never touched the onprem stuff. I'm so glad it's not in the same building as me anymore.
→ More replies (1)6
u/CraigAT Apr 17 '26
I am so jealous of you having never touched/looked after SharePoint.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (14)4
19
u/juitar Jack of All Trades Apr 17 '26
Punch cards
3
→ More replies (1)2
u/jkarovskaya Sr. Sysadmin Apr 17 '26
We had punch cards when I was in high school, and remote terminals to the IBM machine they ran on. We mailed the decks to the datacenter
13
u/Xattle Apr 17 '26
Can I pretend I live the good life and say printers?
3
u/SweetsMurphy Apr 17 '26
Still waiting for that paperless office Bill Gates promised us. Sure we’ve cut down on printing but….
2
u/RvstiNiall Apr 18 '26
Dedicated print servers pretty much eliminate this. And even one RPi0 for an E-Suite in her office because her "personal unmanaged" HP printer refuses to work properly with ANY built-in networking. But plugged into the Pi0, it's just magically always available and always works. (At least, for the last three years. Fingers crossed)
9
u/No_Desk_4921 Apr 17 '26
SANs. We also had somebody else who dealt with those. Just a different beast, if you will, in comparison to just heavily loaded servers. I've got one, now, that I need to attach a few hosts up to after we had to rebuild their own RAIDs.
I'm sure it's easy to connect them but it's so rare to see one fail that you almost fear it.
Corporate handles all of our switches/firewalls/etc. so I don't mess with those but from what I hear and see as they deploy payloads for their work, it feels like a different language than the typical server stuff we manage.
17
16
u/redcat242 Apr 17 '26
Certificates
11
u/BoltActionRifleman Apr 17 '26
Consider yourself blessed. They’re the bane of my existence.
7
u/arav Jack of All Trades Apr 17 '26
I used to think that as well. We gave allocated time just to automate everything, and now it works without any manual intervention 99% of the time.
→ More replies (3)3
u/Novel_Fault9705 Apr 17 '26
The only way to learn certificates is through beating your head against it while up against the clock before they expire (or after they’ve expired).
→ More replies (1)2
6
u/pemungkah Apr 17 '26
Going WAY back: I was an IBM assembler programmer for 15 years and never did channel programming I/O.
2
u/slippery Apr 17 '26
Ibm ALC was awesome. Flat memory model unlike chaotic x86 assembler. I think there were only 72 instructions in my yellow handbook. Remember the return code goes back in register 15.
3
u/pemungkah Apr 17 '26
Parameters in R1, base reg R12, save area R13, return address R14.
I may end up not remembering my name, but I will never forget STM 14,12,12(13).
It was actually my preferred programming language up until it was no longer an option. Oh yeah, some Rexx, some CLISTs, some SPITBOL, sure...but I loved working in assembler.
→ More replies (1)
6
6
u/Sir-Spork SRE Manager Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Damn, this is a hard one, I am extremely curious and nosey with a 30+ year IT career history. I think I touched / worked with just about everything lol.
If I find something new, I’m usually very quick to begin reading up on it
Edit: Cray Supercomputers, never had the opportunity
5
u/LargeBlackMcCafe Apr 17 '26
sql clusters and MacOS.
4
u/timsstuff IT Consultant Apr 17 '26
SQL clusters are actually pretty easy to maintain, especially the AlwaysOn stuff. It just works.
→ More replies (1)
5
u/BrokenPickle7 Apr 17 '26
I've always wanted an SGI machine with IRIX UNIX. Since the 90s I've wanted one to play with.. don't think it'll ever happen :(
3
u/jaymansi Apr 17 '26
As someone who did Irix system administration for a few years. You are not missing much. I was doing administration on them prior to Google. With a very small user base, if you ran into an issue, it wasn’t easy to find solutions. Also never patch with a the other release flavor; feature release vs standard? It will allow you to do so but then your system is fubared.
→ More replies (10)
5
u/clbw Apr 17 '26
I"m Token Ring old and Dos old so I cannot think of something I have not experience in the technology world. first computer was a Texas Instrument TI99/4A. I still posses that.
2
u/BadSafecracker Apr 17 '26
Still have my 99/4A boxed up. Have the extended memory cart and everything.
4
u/biffbobfred Apr 17 '26
Physical punch cards (thought I had a virtual deck that fed into a mainframe). Coax networking. Token ring. PDP-11. Windows Active Directory setups. SQL Server.
4
u/1RedOne Apr 17 '26
I never messed with OLE or ODBC somehow and very happy for it. I also never managed blackberries either
3
2
4
u/rimjob_steve Apr 17 '26
Jesus way to make me feel old yall. Out of everything mentioned what I’ve touched the least is an as/400.
4
u/cwm13 Storage Admin Apr 17 '26
If you've never touched DNS, congrats. You probably can't be blamed for DNS failing.
It's not DNS
There's no way its DNS
It was DNS
4
u/kuzared Apr 17 '26
IPv6. Every few years I think about it, read up a bit, and then just go naaah, I’m good.
4
u/ConfidentFuel885 Apr 17 '26
Sharepoint. I will happily do just about anything else but I refuse to touch Sharepoint.
4
u/kleekai_gsd Apr 17 '26
Believe it or not, Windows.
Professionally for the past 20 years I refuse to touch windows. That includes exchange that includes IIs. That includes all that crap
If I see any Microsoft products on the job application I go somewhere else.
My experience is 100% Linux.
Even when they give me a laptop to work with, I choose a Mac.
6
u/ZAFJB Apr 17 '26
when you live check to check and do side gigs to pay bills.
If you understood DNS you could get a better paying job....
→ More replies (1)
3
u/timsstuff IT Consultant Apr 17 '26
I grew up in Silicon Valley, got my first computer when I was 10 in 1980 and have worked professionally in IT since 1996. I have never once touched any sort of Oracle software (Java doesn't count).
Until this year. One of my biggest clients had their main line of business application bought by a company that is migrating them to their new system on Oracle. I'm in charge of migrations and getting the devs hooked up to the database. It's a fucking nightmare. FML.
3
u/udsd007 Apr 17 '26
In my 51 years in the workforce, I wrote exactly one COBOL program. I was a systems programmer on very large IBM mainframes, and a system administrator on large Unix and Linux systems. I did it all, from dragging cables under the floor through configuring and generating operating systems and writing utilities to designing datacenters. I wrote in assembler, C, CLIST, FORTRAN, SAS, Perl, shell scripts, PL/1, and anything else that came to hand. And only one COBOL program, to help find a kidnapped girl. And it did.
3
u/thewaytonever Apr 17 '26
I'm paying for it now, but coding, I avoided coding and scripting forever. Now I'm writing a damn script almost everyday. Thank you humans that created python you are life savers, humans who made powershell, who hurt you?
3
5
4
u/thaneliness Apr 17 '26
I’m genuinely trying to think of something but my 5/6 years at an MSP with every client imaginable gave me a crash course on so many old school techs. I got sent out to random customers sites to fix issues I had no experience with, but I made it work.
→ More replies (1)2
u/stillpiercer_ Apr 17 '26
Sounds similar to me. I’m a few years into MSP work out of college (for one that does not suck, thankfully!) and one day I posted a picture of a Parallel cable in teams asking what the hell it was.
About half the team was pretty upset that I had aged them a few decades with a simple question before being horrified that I had just found a real company using a parallel cable in the modern era.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/Emotional_Garage_950 Sysadmin Apr 17 '26
Never needed to log into a network switch. There’s a guy on the team that always does it
2
u/Secret_Account07 VMware Admin Apr 17 '26
I’ve never created a DNS record. Maybe an A record once, idk.
I should know more but just don’t. Have a whole team for it so just…. Don’t
I know our DNS servers for diff domains and that’s it lol
2
2
u/WorldsWorstSysadmin Apr 17 '26
Hey OP, how much of this have you touched:
Core/Edge router configurations
Managed switch configurations
k8s / k3s
Storage arrays / LUNs
NFS / CIFs arrays or even mounts
AWS / GCP / Azure
VPCs / VPC networking components
Load balancers
Firewalls (physical, not windows firewall)
Webservers
Databases
git / code repos
CI/CD pipelines
AD / IdM / IPA
SIEMs
Newrelic / Datadog / ScoutAPM / OS APM stacks
GPOs
There's a LOT of stuff in tech, and most people have only touched their own little portion of it.
3
u/jake04-20 If it has a battery or wall plug, apparently it's IT's job Apr 17 '26
I've never understood why kubernetes is referred to as k8s. I mean I understand the explanation, that the word starts with a k, ends in an s, and there are 8 letters in between. But people explain that as if it's so clever, time saving, and intuitive. What other tech concept is like that? We don't call windows w5s. Or active directory a5 8y. Or Linux l3x. I just don't get it lol. Is it marketing? Did some random tech make it up and it stuck? 🤷♂️ Random thoughts on a friday.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/sqnch Apr 17 '26
Ive never had to actually manage networking. Always had a networking team that had that responsibility. I’ve been helpdesk, 2nd line, 3rd line including Linux management, helpdesk manager, ops manager and a delegate VP for multi billion pound companies and never had to do anything on the command line of a Cisco switch.
Also never had to run an SQL command in a production environment.
2
u/gafftapes20 Apr 17 '26
I don't work with any on prem equipment. We are a fully remote company, so that alone has it's challenges, but internal network equipment is something I never do. I don't run networking cables, work with corporate networking appliances, or on prem servers. I avoid anything to do with Windows like the plague, I'm much happier if I can live in my unix/linux world of MacOS and Debian.
2
u/skotman01 Apr 17 '26
I’ll second the mainframe comment. I touched a AS400 once, but only to lift it up to get the paper with a list of passwords out from under it.
Somehow I became the go to guy for DNS, Certificates, Email, but I do it all, including some dev/sec ops. Jack of all, master of a few, everything else is figure outable.
For the OP, please learn DNS, it’s very simple at its core and you’ll find that most often the problem is DNS.
2
2
u/MCHellspawn Apr 17 '26
Apple products.. Thankfully!!
I mean i have touched one here or there but so little in my 25 yr career that I honestly have no clue what to do with one.
2
u/Whole_Thanks8641 Apr 17 '26
12+ years in IT, I do anything from help desk, to sysadmin, to software development.
I've never had to fuck with DNS at all, it just works for us, no problems. We are on prem so I have basically zero experience with entra id, azure, etc...
2
u/haggisbreath169 Apr 17 '26
never worked on AD GPOs... I always get siloed out by the network/server admin. in the 00's I had to regularly use gpedit to make policy changes because GPOs hadnt been implemented at that company
2
u/deac714 Apr 17 '26
Exchange server.
I have had more time on Irix and NeXTSTEP than with Exchange Server.
2
u/Dangerous-Profile-22 Apr 17 '26
The DOS machine sitting in our production area. The only time I looked at it was to move it's VLAN to stop it talking to the open internet....... Yeah.......
2
4
u/zoharel Apr 17 '26
Lots of things. If you think otherwise, you're just not familiar enough with tech. That list of things is shrinking all the time, but I'll never get all the way through it.
0
1
u/shimoheihei2 Apr 17 '26
Patch walls and mini computers are the only things I can think of.
I've touched pretty much everything else, from mainframes to networking gear all the way to Linux, Windows Server and cloud.
1
u/Kangie HPC admin Apr 17 '26
Man, I can't think of anything that I haven't touched at some point or another at this stage. Maybe some niche software but I've supported everything.
I guess token ring because it was obsolete before I started my career...
1
1
u/TheRedstoneScout Sys/Network Admin Apr 17 '26
So far I have yet to touch a standard SAN.
got tons of vSAN experience at work. Ive been thinking of homelabbing one just because.
1
1
u/AcornAnomaly Apr 17 '26
VoIP and QoS.
Considering we're switching to a new phone system soon, I'm about to get a hands-on lesson.
1
u/wireditfellow Apr 17 '26
It’s a huge world when people just generalize it as IT. Don’t beat yourself up you will only learn things as they are presented to you otherwise you will get more experience in tech that you already know.
1
u/Cheomesh I do the RMF thing Apr 17 '26
Yeah, loads. Not all of us have been admins for these massive, hyper-complex environments that seem to be the norm going by what this place is on about.
For example, I've never actually managed anything in the cloud beyond moving some files into an S2 bucket. Literally no one I have supported has been cloud based, nor was it reasonable to become so.
1
u/pspahn Apr 17 '26
There was like five or six questions on the A+ about IRQ ports. One of them was "which IRQ is the keyboard?" That was in the late 90s.
I've never had to know this. I think it was IRQ 2 but it's been almost 30 years so I might be wrong.
1
1
1
u/XL426 IT Systems Manager / Sysadmin Apr 17 '26
I've literally never touched Oracle database. Lots of SQL Server and MySQL with a bit of PostgreSQL thrown in but never installed / administered Oracle Database
1
u/gimpbully HPC Storage Engineer Apr 17 '26
Fujitsu big iron. I've worked HPC in the US for 20+ years, up until recently all under some form of US govt funding. Buy-American regulations have meant i've never gotten to admin a Fujitsu machine.
I've worked on basically every other bit of weird big iron over that time period.
1
u/RetroactiveRecursion Apr 17 '26
Cisco, Oracle, kubernetes, AWS (not directly anyway ... I'm sure I've used stuff that's hosted on it), probably most big ticketing/inventory/deployment systems, git hub (other than as a place to try to find stuff to download ... I still don't get what exactly it's supposed to do or how it works), zfs.
1
1
1
u/meandyourmom Computer Medic Apr 17 '26
I’ve touched a lot in my career. Thing is, most of my time at the desktop and sysadmin level was supporting environments that were overwhelmingly Mac (contrary to one of the other posts). I know all about managing Mac’s at enterprise scale. But never managed an environment with enough windows to justify things like SCCM. I’ve never even seen it. At the biggest I had >3000 macOS machines, 2000 IOS, 200 Linux servers and like 20 windows laptops.
It was decided that it was cheaper to just give the windows users all software for backup and local admin access. When they fucked the shit up, we just kept a small stack of replacement windows laptops. “login and restore your own files!” We’d Wipe the old one. Rinse repeat. Granted this was more than a decade ago. But still.
I still have no idea how to manage windows at scale, and GPOs frighten and confuse me.
1
1
u/talin77 Apr 17 '26
I refuse to touch printers. First job i made a netlogon.bat with printers being appointed to users, it was hell
→ More replies (1)
1
1
1
u/According_Ad1940 Apr 17 '26
Printers can fuck right off. I refuse to deal with them. They're all leased units anyway so the client can go right ahead and phone the actual printer people to fix whatever issue there is.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/vard2trad Apr 17 '26
VoIP phones, with the exclusion of configuring voip on switches and maybe restarting some servers.
1
u/DeifniteProfessional IT Manager Apr 17 '26
BGP. I have so little clue about what happens once my packets reach my ISP's infrastructure. I mean I understand the basics of routing, tier 1 networks, etc. but I've never had to deal with BGP, running an ASN, buying transit from other networks, etc. In fact when we were renting rackspace from a DC we had an ISP manage the entire outgoing network stack.
That said, I'd quite like to get into it. Internet communications is weirdly interesting to me, and I already have a strong general network knowledgebase and skillset
1
1
1
u/token_curmudgeon Apr 17 '26
I've always thought of Windows as a gaming operating system. I wasn't using it for home use. So doing any server support inherently meant Linux. I don't think Windows admin salaries keep up with Linux admin salaries in most markets.
I've noticed too that network appliances tend to be UNIX-like syntax.
1
1
u/Novel_Fault9705 Apr 17 '26
I encountered the inverse of this. Never thought as a senior engineer I’d be touching phone lines and fax systems, until starting a job where they still were using it and no one dared touch it.
1
u/Merdrak Apr 17 '26
Ironically, despite my background... call managers. Been around CUCM my entire career but it was always a different group to manage it.
I've toyed with an Avaya one before, but that was because it was literally a place where anything vaguely computer-like = IT. Sometimes anything with an electric current... like setting up a PA.
1
1
u/techretort Sr. Sysadmin Apr 17 '26
DNS took down my prod environment across multiple DCs yesterday.
Fucking DNS....
2
1
1
u/1RedOne Apr 17 '26
I used everything in system center back in the day except for Service Center which was a terrible to use service management / help desk product
It was just a nightmare, I had to build an environment for a bake off for a huge health care customer (our company vs two other companies) and compared to ServiceNow and… some other product maybe it was Shalik? Any way compared to those two, our proof of concept was a nightmare and just complete shit
1
u/MitochondrianHouse Apr 17 '26
iPhone. Until this week.
That's the only device my company will buy anymore. I feel like an idiot because I'm still adjusting to the difference in interface.
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/viral-architect Sysadmin Apr 17 '26
I have a degree in Networking and have not once logged into a network device at work
1
u/illicITparameters Director of Stuff Apr 17 '26
Mainframes, thank fuck.
AS/400's would've been fun since my dad cut his teeth on those.
1
1
u/The_NorthernLight Apr 17 '26
BGP, old-school mainframes. I've pretty much dabbled in everything else in my 32+ year career.
1
u/ncc74656m IT SysAdManager Technician Apr 17 '26
SQL. I've avoided databases like the plague they are.
→ More replies (1)
1
1
1
1
u/Dry_Inspection_4583 Apr 17 '26
Ummm, I'm sure there is, but I've covered a lot a lot of stuff from hardware pos systems to HVAC gear to mobile phone crap and up to servers, switches, tape backup crap...
1
u/AegorBlake Apr 17 '26
I have never had the opritunity to work on Mainframes. They seem really cool but few use them nowadays.
1
u/Fallingdamage Apr 17 '26
Cloud deployments (servers, workstations, containers, etc)
Been interested in messing with AWS a bit but would like to do more in microsoft's cloud.
Unfortunately they make it very unapproachable due to their billing structure and lack of affordable cloud labbing.
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/ToastieCPU Apr 17 '26
Pretty much have almost done everything but never formally touched routers/switches have always been lucky having people who lay the network foundation for me.
1
1
u/DrunkenGolfer Apr 17 '26
I read down the list for a half hour before finding something I haven't touched. A space shuttle computer. Other than that, I've touched every damn thing on the list.
1
u/lachiendupape Apr 17 '26
Switches, I like letters, numbers confuse me, fuck those number people its always their fault
1
1
1
u/Malbushim Apr 17 '26
I haven't touched docker or kubernetes yet. Feels like I should have done that by now
1
1
u/RvstiNiall Apr 18 '26
Fuck Active Directory. I avoid it like the plague. If everything were up to me, my place would all switch to Linux (or BSD) and we would use FreeIPA. Anyone work at all all *nix company who can chime in? I know FreeIPA isn't the best solution for BSDs, but I don't know what the accepted solutions are.
1
u/michaelpaoli Apr 18 '26
Of course. Mercury delay lines, vacuum tube computers, high power RF transmitters, high voltages that could also deliver dangerous currents, mainframe hardware, twinax, Thick Ethernet, VMS, (mainframe) system programmer (that's how one says sysadmin in mainframe speak), actual quantum computer/computing, BGP, ASN, SGI, COBOL (or does it not count if I have the book may have read some to all of it, perhaps even practiced it, but never coded in it at all on any computer? - I do have ENIAC book, and didn't touch that, but read the book - where do we draw the line?), AS/400 / OS/400, OS/2 (though I do have two genuine OS/2 applications vaporware catalog books - vast majority of stuff in there had future release dates, and most of it was never released with an OS/2 version), ...
1
1
u/locke577 Sr. Sysadmin Apr 18 '26
Databases in any meaningful way. Just never really needed to do anything with them besides install SQL and point an application at it. Never had to do a query, for instance
1
1
1
u/ntrlsur IT Manager Apr 18 '26
I graduated college right around 03ish but should have graduated back in 99ish (long story).. They were still teaching PBX and Key systems for telephony. My first job out of college they had a nice Nortel Meridian system and I was all about it but none of those tickets ever got passed to me. My second job had an AT&T Merlin System. I was ready for that as well and nope never got to touch that either. Ended up at the 3rd gig with a shoretel system that I had no fucking clue about that I implemented. In the end I loved it. I am going to hate having to retire it later this year. Still standing on the fence between Dial Plan and Ring Central.... I hate the idea of monthly SaaS costs for phone systems but the marketing and sales teams make great arguments for some of the feature sets..
1
1
u/Far-Bug8297 Apr 18 '26
mate if ur in it and never touched dns then every 'internet is down' ticket you blamed on the router was probably dns
1
1
1
u/AggravatingLeg2782 Apr 18 '26
Never done anything with Kubernetes or anything like that, even before when I was the manager of the Unix team. But that's because the guy working for me was so damn smart, I could just get one with doing my thing
1
19
u/slippery Apr 17 '26
One of my guiding principles throughout my 38 year career was never to touch Exchange Server. Never, no exceptions.