Hello everyone, you will probably be hearing a lot from me in the coming monthes and years, I am new to the Unix world and will be the new Solaris Sys. Admin at my company soon. They are very good about sending me to training, I've already been to the Intermediate Solaris Admin class and will be attending more training soon. I am kind of clueless as to what I should expect in my new job. Can anyone give me some clues as to what my major tasks may consist of. We will being running all Sun gear, 2 V880, a V440 and a V240 and a couple of tape devices and a disk array. We will house around 250,000 records on an Oracle 9i DB and are will be running a 3rd party app for about 200 users to browse and manage that DB. I am sure in the beginning or our transition I will be very busy, but I'm kind of curious as to what I will be doing after all the hoopla of migrating systems. A few things I know of are user administration and backups and such, anything more than that I'm clueless as to what I will be responsible for. Any help from you seasoned veterans would be and will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance guys.

semper fi,
chad

hello and welcome to unixforum!! :D

unfortunately, it's a little difficult for us to tell you what your job will entail... but if you are going to be the overall sysadmin for solaris, then one thing you will definitely have to do is patching.

Apart from that, i don't know i'm afraid. You'll have to ask your employer...

oh, and i deleted your post in the General forum, because it was identical to this one. Please read the site rules and guidelines (there's a link at the top of the page).

Rather than start a new thread to introduce myself, I though that I'd reply to this one. I'm a little weird. I've been a Unix System Administrator for a bit over 20 years now. And I was a programmer before that. I still see myself as a programmer.

To address ingrawc's question, I can sum up my job in a single sentence: I keep my company's Unix systems continuously available and provide assistance to the people that use them. But I must now expand on that....

If anything goes wrong (or seems to go wrong) with a Unix system, I (or another member of my group) will be expected to fix it. Users basicly treat me something like this forum. They ask questions and they expect answers. This means that I do a lot of reading. You can't know it all but you must try to know it all anyway. Never stop learning. Some stuff to more important than other stuff, so...

"Solving problems" includes rebuilding a box from scratch. Having good backups is most important thing you can do. But you need to know what to do with them too. Suppose you come to work and find that your system was hit by a meteor or something. You need to know how to recover. Your boss will be standing by the smoking shards of the system and will want a time estimate for recovery.

After backups are under complete control, the next most important thing would be to learn shell scripting. And with Solaris, ksh would be the shell of choice. Writing scripts is how you get things done. Closely related is the program cron. You will find that you need to write shell scripts that are run periodicly by cron. So learn these tools.

And there's all the stuff you learned in that class... adding users, making filesystems, etc. At a more advanced level, there is kernel tuning and system security. Unless you have a separate networking team, you may also find that you are also expected to be a network engineer. And even with a separate networking team, a lot of TCP/IP knowledge will be important.

These are the big things that occur to me right away. There's more of course. I still don't know it all. :P