note
ZZamboni
<p align=right><i>It's a dirty job, but someone told me I had to do it<br>--<a href="http://www.usenix.org">Usenix</a> fridge magnet</i></p>
Apart from the others' suggestions, if you are going to administrate
a large network, I would suggest brushing up on your TCP/IP.
Understanding how things work helps a lot in diagnosing many
problems.
Pick up <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/tcp2/">TCP/IP Network Administration</a>
(another O'Reilly book), which has a very good overview of
TCP/IP in general, and some useful network administration
techniques.<p>
Another good book is the <a href="http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=0130206016&vm=c">Unix
System Administration Handbook</a>, which has the nice feature
of pointing out specificities of different versions of Unix along
with the more general descriptions.<p>
I would like to stress the advice about staying (starting now)
up to date on the latest happenings, particularly in security: subscribe
at least to BugTraq and to the security mailing lists of the
vendors whose OS's you will be administrating, <b>and
stay up to date on patches and fixes</b>.<p>
Another useful thing is having a good set of tools at your
disposal. For example, for tracking user requests, where I work
they use <a href="http://www.math.duke.edu/~yu/wreq/">wreq</a>,
which works out quite well, although I think they had some
trouble setting it up (I'm not the sysadmin here, but I talk
to them a lot). There are other similar systems, I'm sure
several will come up if you search in Freshmeat.net.<p>
Read <a href="http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/259/">The Egoless
Admin</a>, a recent piece on Freshmeat with some good pieces
of advice. Also read <a href="http://members.iinet.net.au/~bofh/">The
Bastard Operator From Hell</a>, of course :-)<p>
And remember that no matter what you do, Systems Administration
is a thankless job: when everything is working, you are
completely transparent (as it should be!). But when things
go south, it's all your fault. But it's a job that is its own
reward: there's nothing more satisfying that having everything
working perfectly, automated, and well-tuned.<p>
Good luck!<p>
<p>--<A HREF="/index.pl?node=ZZamboni&lastnode_id=1072">ZZamboni</A>
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