New Sys Admin Job – Where to Begin?

documentation

I'm looking for some general advice here. I've decided to take my first job in a lead sys admin position…I don't start until next month, but in the meantime I'd like to prepare for the position.

For those of you that have walked into this role at some point in your career, what were your primary objectives on Day 1?

The end users for the company use a mixture of 4-5 different distros of Linux in addition to both Windows and Mac. This is obviously a cumbersome environment to support so I'll likely see if I can limit the users to a single distro of Linux, in addition to Windows which will have setups controlled by AD, and all Macs configured on a single version.

Ensuring they have a good backup solution in place is where I think I'm most likely to concentrate my efforts immediately. After that though, I'm not sure what the most important objectives should be. What do you guys think?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Best Answer

I'm surprised that there are so many jaded answers here. Here's my $0.02.

  • First, relax. You're in your first more senior gig and have all sorts of new challenges.
  • Second, buy and read Limoncelli's The Practice of System and Network Administration
  • When you start, remember that you're an outsider looking in. That's cool because you're coming with no baggage -- you can assess and observe to learn about the environment. Just remember that you don't know everything, and act that way. Don't be a "soup nazi".

When I did something similar at a small company, here's what I did:

  • Observed and dug into everything for a couple of weeks.
  • Identified and started stabilizing applications/systems that were going to be troublesome soon. In my case, our main database had a critical issue that would have completely crashed it.
  • Started a "security audit" to cover most everything IT. I ended up finding all sorts of interesting stuff, including a modem bank that was being used by former employees as an ISP. (This was back in 2000.)
  • Assigned various tasks to the folks on the team as "deliverables" and started learning about how they worked.
Related Topic