What are general sysadmin tasks on a given day?

[18358414]

The place I'm working at is talking about having me take on sysadmin tasks with a bonus, but I don't know exactly what "tasks" they are referring to and haven't received any description.  It's a decently-sized building with WIFI access points, printers, copiers, about 300 or so computers, and frequently people ssh into the computers in the office and sometimes the office computers send commands to remote servers and what-not. 

 

Just curious (I haven't had much info from them), on a typical day, what should a person with the title "sysadmin" expect to do? 

[LtStaffel]

Must disclaim that I am not a sysadmin, but from my (rather extensive) research into the field:

 

Assuming you are currently at a help desk or IT support kind of position, you can expect to be doing the tasks that normally other (less skilled than yourself) help desk people escalate up to sysadmins because they don't know how to fix/do them. You can also expect a lot more networking in general and more management of servers than employee workstations.

 

Pros can correct or support me.

[Pixel5]

in an ideal scenario you would have up to date software and hardware as well as good tools to manage them, this would mean you sit at your desk and wait for problems to fix.

in this time you usually already start planning out future hardware or software changes so you have them ready when you need them.

 

the more realistic scenario is you take over a giant mess from whoever has done this before you and need to clean everything up, you realize you need money to replace hardware in order to fix problems but you dont get the money so you work around the problems for months until its unfixable.

 

this cycle will repeat constantly until you are fed up and leave the company only to find out at the next job that its the same thing cause nearly every company sees the IT as cost and not as the base of all their operations.

[TacoSenpai]

Also patch tuesdays

[stewie650]

It depends the type of work your organization does. For example, my sysadmin duties entails managing Linux servers, conducing data migrations, data backups, standing up new environments, and triaging any issues/outages. As a sysadmin you should also have an understanding of security and general networking so you could troubleshoot issues that you could encounter. As a sysadmin you generally don't deal with APs, or printers or anything like that since that is more of a helpdesk type role or Level 1/Tier 1.

20 hours ago, 7he404guy said:

requently people ssh into the computers in the office and sometimes the office computers send commands to remote servers and what-not. 

 

This part has me worried since you are allowing your internal computers to communicate to remote servers. Generally speaking if you need to communicate to remote servers for whatever reason you should do it over VPN and not directly over the Internet. However, I don't know how your network is configured so you could already be doing that.

[Tribalinius]

10 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

in an ideal scenario you would have up to date software and hardware as well as good tools to manage them, this would mean you sit at your desk and wait for problems to fix.

in this time you usually already start planning out future hardware or software changes so you have them ready when you need them.

 

the more realistic scenario is you take over a giant mess from whoever has done this before you and need to clean everything up, you realize you need money to replace hardware in order to fix problems but you dont get the money so you work around the problems for months until its unfixable.

 

this cycle will repeat constantly until you are fed up and leave the company only to find out at the next job that its the same thing cause nearly every company sees the IT as cost and not as the base of all their operations.

a bit cynical but, man, it's on point and reflect a lot of companies point of view when it comes to IT cost. "Windows 98?! Why would I upgrade my perfectly working PII 200MHz running that crappy serial connected punch clock I paid 500$ 20 years ago!?"

I'm starting to see a shift in companies mentality though, especially with younger presidents/CEO. They are starting to notice that for 5G, they need to be ahead of the curve or else they will be left in the dust of their competitors. They are starting to realize that the 1980's way of doing things is going away.

[AngryBeaver]

5 minutes ago, Tribalinius said:

a bit cynical but, man, it's on point and reflect a lot of companies point of view when it comes to IT cost. "Windows 98?! Why would I upgrade my perfectly working PII 200MHz running that crappy serial connected punch clock I paid 500$ 20 years ago!?"

I'm starting to see a shift in companies mentality though, especially with younger presidents/CEO. They are starting to notice that for 5G, they need to be ahead of the curve or else they will be left in the dust of their competitors. They are starting to realize that the 1980's way of doing things is going away.

Wait until you see the security side. I just pissed off a ton of developers because I dumped a handful of 2003 servers in to a isolated vlan. As I explained to them there is no valid reason to use such an outdated OS and I was not going to allow the risk of having them in our environment. They were not necessarily forward facing, but they were close enough. The whole our applications don't support newer OS's means that the software in question probably is full of security holes too.

 

Now when it comes to sysadmin it really depends on the company. Smaller companys the sysadmin will be wearing a lot of hats, vs a larger company where things are more departmentalized. In general as a system admin you will be responsible for all the workstations and servers. Keeping them up to date, optimized, etc. You will also be probably fielding issues generated by your helpdesk. You might have to do networking from a machine perspective, but in general you won't normally need to touch routers/switches/etc. That normally falls on network administrators. 

[WkdPaul]

1 hour ago, AngryBeaver said:

Wait until you see the security side. *Snip*

It's even worse when you take over the shitty job that was done before you got there!!

 

I work for a 3rd party support company, we took a new client a few months ago, the IT guys that had the contract before us were fucking clowns!!!!

 

The domain controller was fully open to the internet, and all users had access to RDP into it ... No VPN needed, and most users had their password as "never expires" ('cause 'membering all those is hard) and some were even admins (like regular, non-IT employees).

 

We did an audit, turned all that around, enforced VPN and tighten security. Of course, the "regular users" that lost admin privileges and those that now had one more step to do (VPN, or make a new password) were PISSED! But thankfully, their head of IT has a head and a back bone and is backing us up on all those changes.

 

@7he404guy : expect to deal with backups, server maintenance, meetings with management, meeting with suppliers and service  providers, support VIP users, consult with the helpdesk tech to help them out, or fix whatever they couldn't fix with a system or user, etc ....

Edited September 7, 2018 by wkdpaul

[wasab]

I wonder who is the tech admin who manage the LTT forum. 

[bcredeur97]

it can be tough work. Have to balance both security and user convenience. They do not really go together.

 

Things are getting better though. Slowly.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, wasab said:

I wonder who is the tech admin who manage the LTT forum. 

@colonel_mortis ? 

[AngryBeaver]

22 hours ago, bcredeur97 said:

it can be tough work. Have to balance both security and user convenience. They do not really go together.

 

Things are getting better though. Slowly.

Comes down to your CIA triad. Confidentially, integrity, accessibility. If you compromise on one then you are not doing it right. 

 

@wkdpaul

 

I just pissed off a ton of people on the server team. The SaaS on those machines was no password protected... so they were able to uninstall it at a whim. Guess how big of an issue that was when I ran a compliance query. Then with linux being what it is the guys even with password protection were able to nuke the folder for it. So that took a server task that scanned for agents that went dark and sent out a nice email notice.

 

This was 2 months ago. We are now down about 3 server guys who just didnt take the warning I sent them seriously.

 

Security is always going to have pains. People just dont think it is necessary or think it keeps them from doing their job. So of course we get lots of emails from other teams trying to pass us issues before doing their own due diligance only to have us toss it back. We use to solve the issue for them because it was often times faster, but we had to break help desk , desktop support, and the network team from trying to blame everything on a dlp tool.

[Froody129]

8 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

Comes down to your CIA triad. Confidentially, integrity, accessibility. If you compromise on one then you are not doing it right. 

 

@wkdpaul

 

I just pissed off a ton of people on the server team. The SaaS on those machines was no password protected... so they were able to uninstall it at a whim. Guess how big of an issue that was when I ran a compliance query. Then with linux being what it is the guys even with password protection were able to nuke the folder for it. So that took a server task that scanned for agents that went dark and sent out a nice email notice.

 

This was 2 months ago. We are now down about 3 server guys who just didnt take the warning I sent them seriously.

 

Security is always going to have pains. People just dont think it is necessary or think it keeps them from doing their job. So of course we get lots of emails from other teams trying to pass us issues before doing their own due diligance only to have us toss it back. We use to solve the issue for them because it was often times faster, but we had to break help desk , desktop support, and the network team from trying to blame everything on a dlp tool.

I feel like when everyone said "the money is in tech" those people got the wrong idea . IT seems to be divided between people who really know what they're doing and people who really don't 

[AngryBeaver]

15 hours ago, Froody129 said:

I feel like when everyone said "the money is in tech" those people got the wrong idea . IT seems to be divided between people who really know what they're doing and people who really don't 

From what I have seen... you either need to be in an executive position. Development, Security, E-discovery... to really make good money. There are some exceptions like red hats and a handful of other engineering roles. The problem is those roles are in the decline and will be harder and harder to get as cloud solutions take over the market more and more each year.

 

So that is why the main three I suggest are Devops, Secops, and E-discovery. Things like help desk, and desktop support are good for getting your experience, but there just isn't a ton of money in it. You can make a solid livable wage, but it will be in the average to slightly above average range. Then you have network admins and sysadmins, they pay a little better, but once again they don't have the high pay ceiling of the other three. Plus a lot of companies still try to make them wear most of the hats without the pay associated with them. 

https://thebestschools.org/careers/best-information-technology-jobs/
 

Is pretty accurate. I know they are going off of national average which throws off the numbers due to cost of living differences around the country. I think that the security analyst number is off some though. That is because a Security Analyst can be entry level as well as high level. So people taking these jobs for 25ish out of college tends to skew the numbers. I don't even see Security Engineers mentioned, which are just the other side of the coin compared to an analyst. One of the biggest advantages to security right now though... is there are a lot more jobs out there than talent and bodies to fill them. It isn't uncommon for someone in my area to know at least one or 2 InfoSec contacts at most major companies in the area.

[Doxial]

"how to convert to PDF"   

[WkdPaul]

On 2018-09-08 at 7:42 PM, Froody129 said:

I feel like when everyone said "the money is in tech" those people got the wrong idea . IT seems to be divided between people who really know what they're doing and people who really don't 

The annoying part with the "people who really don't" is when they're somehow able to get a manager position (one of our client's IT director is completely useless and is a micromanaging idiot), that's the fuckin worst!!!

[AngryBeaver]

5 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

The annoying part with the "people who really don't" is when they're somehow able to get a manager position (one of our client's IT director is completely useless and is a micromanaging idiot), that's the fuckin worst!!!

I think part of it is the school system to blame. On one of my capstone courses there were people (2) in my class that made it all the way through the program without knowing how to do anything basic. When I say basic, I mean they were unable to even install an OS. Then after having people help them couldn't figure out how to enable basic things like DHCP on the server OS.

The problem was that they were in the same group and there were 3 other people in that group. For this class the group members all received the same grade and you didn't have the option to change the group up. So these 2 students were able to some how obtain a degree without knowing even basic things. So from my perspective it reduces the value of every degree from that program.

[BallsOfSteel]

- Look up job postings for sysadmin roles.
- You will get a general sense of what it means. (It's a generic title, varies depending on the place, situation, all of that.)
- Make sure that they / you modify the job contract and make sure to list all you have to do. Because they will try to force more and more, and that contract is your only chance and go-to safe haven. You can point it at it and say "my job does not list that". And so on. Trust me, it's a slippery slope, and you can easily become "the IT guy" who has to do it all, for no extra pay.

[WkdPaul]

On 10/09/2018 at 9:06 AM, AngryBeaver said:

I think part of it is the school system to blame. On one of my capstone courses there were people (2) in my class that made it all the way through the program without knowing how to do anything basic. When I say basic, I mean they were unable to even install an OS. Then after having people help them couldn't figure out how to enable basic things like DHCP on the server OS.

lol You almost described a course I had way back on Windows Servers!

 

Difference is, I realized on the first day one team member was completely useless and I was a total dick to the guy : he wasn't listening during lectures, and would ask us questions about things he should have known (OS install, server roles, etc.. stuff we had seen previously and that we were supposed to put into practice during that course).

 

I would just reply "I don't know" to any of his questions, and would simply reply "no" when he would ask me for help, only to then turn around and help our other team members.

 

The others thought I was rude AF to that guy, and I would simply tell them that I was there to study and learn, not to do it for someone else that looked like didn't care, and if didn't care about leaving, I shouldn't care for him.