The Accidental SysAdmin

I’m not kidding myself. I am no Linux guru. I get by. I get by way better than anyone else at my company–no offense all. It is a small business and that often means the person who knows more about computers is the defacto techie. Well, I’m much more than that, but in all likelihood less than whoever is running your network and servers.

I work at a small medical equipment and supply company in Texas, Aria Medical. We have 20-30 employees. I manage about 15 Linux boxes, a Linux server that handles e-mail (postfix with SpamAssassin, MailScanner, Pyzor and ClamAV), SugarCRM which uses Apache, PHP and MySQL, file serving duties, backup automation, disaster recovery, about 10 Windows boxes including one QuickBooks server and one Mac OS X. There is also a phone cabinet. I’d love Asterisk PBX to be in there, but I don’t have the time to handle phones, too. Our Web site is off site and I don’t want to take that on either.

I didn’t start out here trying to be the sysadmin. I was working at USAA (a financial services company) working my way up the ranks of their property and casualty insurance department. I got an opportunity to join Aria Medical–where my wife works as the webmaster and SEO/advertising whiz–as a techie lackey. My motivation was it was a casual work environment, I’d work with my wife, and I’d get to tinker with computers all day long, instead of just at night. Long story short, eight months later the IT manager becomes the GM leaving a hole. I was the most qualified at the company and there I was–barely able to use vim and running a system. Grepping was still a string of code I didn’t understand and made me think of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and grokking. Sed? Awk? Not even blips on my radar.

I had the former IT guy around for a while, but then he moved on to Hawai’i. He set up the server, and at some point toward the end of his tenure with the company got his RHCE, so he knows what he is doing. I could lean on him, even though he really wanted me to figure stuff out on my own. At some point I had no choice.

I’ve made my share of mistakes. I’ve made some that could have been really bad if a decent backup system with multiple layers was not in place. No, nothing like trying rm -rf / because someone posted it on Digg or /.. That is what this blog is for–the tales of my trials, tribulations and triumphs as a newbie sysadmin.

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