Hello!

I wanted to reach out to the community as I just got laid off at my job as a Windows/VMWare system admin. I currently have an opportunity to take on a role as a Linux/Xen admin but the company is reluctant to hire me as it has been about 7 years since I was heavily engulfed in the *NIX world. They are bringing me in for a technical interview next week to see how I measure up. Until then, I really want to sharpen my skills, and so am looking for a project to work on that'll give me all the basics and some advanced knowledge to bring it all back to me.

Any suggestions on a project(s) are welcome!

Antoni

Just took my VMware VCA exam and got certified!

Since the company that I interviewed with is running Zabbix, maybe I should try that.

Thanks everybody for these fantastic ideas!

Looking at getting my AWS certs but wondering which is the most sought after. Google didn't give me much to go on, so I figured I'd ask the community.

Antoni

Good morning... Off to finish this Zabbix server

Linux 4.5 was released yesterday with alot of minor but sweet goodies

http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.5

Absolutely ridiculous.

I'm enjoying a croissant and an espresso at a cafe, after being stood up by Amazon for my technical phone interview I think big companies need to understand that EVERYONE'S time is valuable, not only their's.

So glad to live in Canada where we don't have to deal with the complexities of the healthcare system. Almost everything is taken care of.

@MattSpeller Thanks for the kind words! Yeah at my last job, I used to wear a bowtie every Wednesday (bowtie wednesday) to spice things up in the dep't. This next opportunity should be killer!

@Dashrender Point taken.

@coliver You're right, it hasn't changed much. Just with businesses virtualizing as much as they can, the amount of hosts that are being used are being increased. That's where I see the financial impact.

The pricing in general. Although I am really fond of the feature set that Microsoft has provided on their latest OS, I don't find it necessary for them to gouge their customers. Just sayin.

Absolutely ridiculous.

@larsen161 Agreed. You might also want to configure S3 to move the data to Glacier after xx number of days and automate the procedure. Not sure if you need access to the data after it's been backed up, but adding replication to another AZ might be worth looking into as well.

I use https://www.wetransfer.com/ myself. I don't need to transfer huge files and when I do, I use a Dropbox link. I got a TB with them, so uploading and sharing is no biggie for me. I must say, though... transfer.sh is pretty cool.

@scottalanmiller I am a Mac user and I find the user experience much more pleasant on a Mac as opposed to any flavour of Linux. I've also run into issues where software or drivers for that matter are just not available or work right. My 2 cents.

@LAH3385 You can also look at Softchoice. That's where I get all my wares from shameless plug

I highly recommend you talk to your TAM that is taking care of your account to suggest a proper offsite backup solution. Using VDP, you could try architecting an offsite solution to look something like this:

Just a thought as VDP has it's limitations.

Sounds like the problem may lie with the job itself. Doing a degree on top of that would be extremely challenging!

I am a Sysadmin as well, and currently going through an ovehaul to prove myself more appealing to the current market. I found the regular route quite stale so I took some online courses and started studying cloud and devops stuff. It's amazing how much traction you can get if you're willing to start at the bottom again. With all that experience and the new on the job experience, I'm sure within a couple of years, you can put yourself in a really good position that you would enjoy