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Comment on Ask HN: How did you get your first job as an sysadmin?

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I feel like I got a relatively easy start, so I'm not sure how helpful I can be.

A friend I made (through Counter-Strike of all things) put in a recommendation/I applied.

The rest is history! I did SysAd for about 8 years and eventually moved onto SRE/Architecture

Prior to this I was a hobbyist, setting up LAMP stacks to power my feeble attempts at learning PHP. I had never done any IT work professionally.

I learned pretty much everything meaningful on the job. Expectations as an L1 were very low. Be aware of services, protocols, firewalls, things like that - and think twice before you act.

For someone looking to get started with Linux, I recommend the material for the 'Red Hat Certified System Administrator' course.

It does a very good job at teaching one to fish. Less rote procedure, more 'how to read the manuals'

Certifications in general haven't done much for me. With that said, more than once somebody has mentioned my Red Hat certs

Thanks! Judging from what you see, which one is slightly more useful, Red Hat or Debian/Ubuntu? I assume Debian also has those certifications?

I'm looking forward to transferring to a DevOps from a Data Engineer btw.

You'll Find Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu all over - depending on the needs/wants of the shop. General familiarity is good, but there's no harm in specializing.

Just realize that outside of package management (and some quirks that allows), Linux is Linux.

Distributions are all made of roughly the same pieces, they vary slightly in how/where they place them

For example, the things here tend to hold true - being one of many standards:

https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

Thanks, guess I don't need to worry about it.

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