[wellylug] Finding Linux Skills

[Dagan McGregor]

On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 01:33 +1300, Neil Ramsay wrote:
> Good evening WellyLUG,
> just to throw in some loose change...
> 
> As a graduate I have not found a good listing of Linux/UNIX jobs,
> which makes me believe there are not many out there.
> It is also not clear what skills should be learnt - especially as
> Jethro notes you need to be self-directed.
> In terms of experience, does the industry expect industry experience
> or can running a small LAN (4-5 computers) count as experience?

 There have been a number of job listings for UNIX roles on Seek in the
last few months, but they tend to be for 'senior' type roles.
 
 Firstly, perl scripting is widely used, so a knowledge of perl is good
(at least being able to read/comprehend what a script is doing).

 Second, learn how to maintain the major services like DNS, web server
(generally Apache), a mail server, NFS, Samba, and firewalls.
 Or at least know the basics of these, and where to look for documents
to help do more complicated tasks.

 Third, know what to use, and where to look, in general troubleshooting.
And expect to be answering the odd question or two around this as test
of how well know you know the tools available to you.

 I've seen jobs that request 2-3 years of 'enterprise' UNIX/Linux
experience, but 'enterprise' can vary greatly. If you know what you're
doing in keeping servers running, the tools won't change, just the
number of users affected ;)

 If you have time and money, I very much recommend training courses and
certification. Solaris, Red Hat, and LPI certs are all worthy
investments.

 Cheers,
 Dagan