Getting into a Unix role

Martin Smith martin at rakupottery.org.uk
Tue May 30 15:02:38 BST 2006


Paul Truran wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking about for a new job at the moment, and would like a bit of advice.
>  I've working purely in the Microsoft world up to now, 1st 2nd and 3rd line
> support for about a decade now.  However, I am quite interested in getting
> into the Unix side of things.  I run my own FreeBSD server at home for stuff
> like mail, ftp, remote access, SQL and various other stuff, and have also got
> quite a bit of experience with various Linux distros, Solaris x86 etc.  I am
> by no means a Unix expert, but I know most of the basics by now, and have
> start playing arround with shell scripting recently.  However, there seem to
> be little to zero entry level Unix roles going.
> It seems they all want x years experince in this, or y years administering
> that, which obviously I lack, as I have no commerical Unix experience at all.
>  Anyone have any suggestions about how I might make a start in this field, or
> am I doomed to the Wintel world forever?  I'm not expecting to stroll into a
> Unix admin job, but it would be nice if there were some jobs that would give
> me a path towards that.  Ideally I would like a role with both Windows and
> Unix skills needed, but I have never even seen such a job advertised.
> Any help, advice or suggestions are welcome!
>
>   
Paul, you are going to have to use all your available wit to invent 
something, and I don't think you will ever get completely away from the 
big bad world of M$.....
I look after a number of small charities, (as well as a few commercial 
organisations), what I have done, and this is over a 3 or 4 year period 
is to introduce FreeBSD mailservers and fileservers into their offices.
For mail I use postfix - amavis - clamav, this has the marvellous side 
effect of making it possible to remove stuff like Norton from the 
desktop machines, thus freeing up millions of cpu cycles etc. If the 
machine available is good enough I will add a samba server to it, these 
machine are virually nil maintenance apart from adding and removing 
users, this enables me to get a good night's sleep every night.
Of course they will still call me when winxp plays up, which it often 
seems to, its dns is particularly iffy IMO...
So maybe you could do a mailshot or similar to some local offices, 
something like "Do viruses and worms make you sick, we have the solution"
It may or may not work, good luck....

-- 
Martin Smith





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