Reddit reviews The Practice of System and Network Administration

Here are my nominations:

• Time Management for System Administrators
  
  
• The Practice of System and Network Administration
  
  
• The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition
  
  
• The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems, Volume 2
  
  
• The Complete April Fools' Day Rfcs
  
  I haven't read them all through but have started on the Time Management book. So far so good.

> do I need any base knowledge before taking the course

Man that's a loaded question. The other fun thing is coming from a home support environment w/consumer electronics to business level hardware/applications is often miles apart. Because SCCM or an answer file is not like installing a game or driver on a relative's computer.

Any kind of administration is an open-ended, always learning endeavor. once you get a handle on a technology it's replaced or improved upon. I have the old NT certifications that are completely irrelevant in the face of Active Directory. Even the old PDC/BDC paradigm is shelved. So just take the course and everytime you encounter a concept, technology, software, or acronym you don't know - research it. Follow the comments here in r/sysadmin. You'll see an original post that you have no clue about and the comments will just take you further down the rabbit hole.
I'd say if anything, get The Practice of System and Network Administration. Maybe even CompTIA's Security+ because while it's referring to best practices for security it touches on a wide range of administrative concepts.

1. Read Practice of System and Network Administration
   
   
2. Implement all of his suggestions.
   
   
3. Read this site
   
   
4. Implement all of his ideas, albeit with modern tools. (Puppet, kickstart, AD, git, nagios, etc.)
   
   
5. Train someone new.

The Practice of System and Network Administration by Tom Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan and Strata R. Chalup. Each sysadmin at my current employer is bought a copy. It's not only useful, it's also interesting.

This book is impressively complete:

The Practice of System and Network Administration https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201702711/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_8ucRyb9S0Z0ZH

if you're just getting started, the absolute best thing you can do is read this book cover to cover: http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration/dp/0201702711 it's a really easy read with a great overview of the thought process of a sysadmin and a great general overview of the job. beyond that, try to get a job in a helpdesk or network operations center and learn as much as possible.

also, you want to look at MCTS in whatever you interested in and not MCSA anymore because that's the newer version. http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcts.aspx

Over than forgetting about personal hygiene as a lifestyle choice :), you need to learn networking, how to compile programs, how to read code, how to write scripts in a few languages. bash, awk, sed, perl, etc., something about LDAP (I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that), some Samba, NFS, DHCP (definitely), PXE, TFTP, port forwarding, SSH.

Some virtual machine stuff. Some Windows stuff (yes really). Some Mac stuff.

You have to learn to overcome printing (a true demon from the seventh level of hell :).

Then, you need to grok the Practice of System and Network Administration. No seriously, buy this book. Sleep with it by your bed. Nothing will raise you to True Guru status than that book.

What it gives you, is perspective. It lifts you up above the technical details to the why of it all. Gurus are teachers. They teach the philosophy.

I started in 1993 with a pile of slackware diskettes and a desire to have a Sparcstation when my boss only gave me a PC. I don't think anything today can provide the kind of hot, crucible experience of getting the system up, X running and the networking configured + dial-up for home.

One of the better books I've read is The Practice of System and Network Administration. It has nothing particular to do with Linux, but lays out how to set up and run an IT department. When I worked at smaller companies early in my career, I used the book to guide the development of systems and processes using Linux.

For example, have you tried to set up a network installation server using kickstart or Debian preseed to allow you to automate server configurations. What about using kvm to practice setting up different kinds of infrastructure servers without hacking your main box? Then maybe use that new bit of infrastructure to try and automatically create custom images for deployment on Amazon Web Services.

This takes a couple of older kickboxes and $20 on Amazon to learn a ton about systems deployment and management. Volunteer to help bands or schools or community groups set up email, web or media distribution. Read lots of code, find and fix lots of bugs, and just enjoy soaking in all the cool stuff you can do!

> * this book^1 is required reading, period.

1 (Amazon link to the first edition)

Is there a reason for the first edition suggestion or can the more recent second edition be more appropriate?

For certifications get a MCITP Enterprise Admin, see here for more info: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcitp.aspx#tab2

That should keep you busy for a while :)

As far as university, I wouldn't worry about classes too much, none of them are really going to teach you what you need to know for the day to day sysadmin tasks.

For books, just buy and read this, don't ask questions: http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration/dp/0201702711