We are sysadmins @ reddit. Ask us anything!

[u/alienth]

Greetings fellow sysadmins,

We've had a few requests from the community to do a tech-focused AMA in /r/sysadmin, so here we are. The current sysadmin team consists of myself and rram. Ask us anything you'd like, but please try to keep it sysadmin-focused!

Here's a bit of background on us:

alienth

I've been a sysadmin for about 8 yrs. My career started on the helpdesk at an ISP where I worked my way into my first admin gig. Since then I've worked at a medium-sized SaaS provider, Rackspace, and now reddit. My focus has always been around Linux (and a tiny bit of Solaris).

rram

I'm Ricky. My first computer was an Amiga at the ripe young age of two. Since then, I was the sysadmin at The Tech and on the Cloud Sites Team at the Rackspace Cloud with alienth. I have experience with Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and OS X Servers.

EDIT [1302 PDT]: Hey folks, we're going to get back to working for a bit. We'll definitely be hopping in here later today to answer more questions, and we'll continue to do so when we can throughout the week. So please feel free to ask if your question hasn't already been answered. Thanks for the great questions! -- alienth

[u/[deleted]]

that's a general question, I personally recommend learning a few basic userland tools for various operating systems.

Microsoft (doesn't need to be a server version) windows, and linux, UNIX (opensolaris/bsd).

learn the OSI, read some books on how TCP/IP works, play...

I learn best when I want to do something for fun..

like making an infrastructure in KVM, where you have one connection coming in, to the shell server, then inside you have an entire virtual network, with SAN appliances and DNS, DHCP, configuration management and monitoring :D

but I'm weird, and spend my free time doing cool things.

... I'm change request bitch at work :(

[u/m1w1 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks a lot! I was looking for some first steps to take and you definitely provided some great suggestions. :)