Ask Slashdot: How Did You Become a Linux Professional?

First time accepted submitter ternarybit writes "By 'Linux professional,' I mean anyone in a paid IT position who uses or administers Linux systems on a daily basis. Over the past five years, I've developed an affection for Linux, and use it every day as a freelance IT consultant. I've built a breadth of somewhat intermediate skills, using several distros for everything from everyday desktop use, to building servers from scratch, to performing data recovery. I'm interested in taking my skills to the next level — and making a career out of it — but I'm not sure how best to appeal to prospective employers, or even what to specialize in (I refuse to believe the only option is 'sysadmin,' though I'm certainly not opposed to that). Specifically, I'm interested in what practical steps I can take to build meaningful skills that an employer can verify, and will find valuable. So, what do you do, and how did you get there? How did you conquer the catch-22 of needing experience to get the position that gives you the experience to get the position? Did you get certified, devour books and manpages, apprentice under an expert, some combination of the above, or something else entirely?"

use it to build my own products

[roman_mir]

I am using Linux to build my own products, I suppose this means I am a 'Linux professional' just as much as a professional in all the other things that I am using in my products. My normal systems are built with either Fedora or Ubuntu at this point, with OpenBSD used as firewall, PostgreSQL, Java, Tomcat Apache, Apache server. Everything else is just various Java stuff.

How do you become a 'professional'? You use it in a way that allows you to sell your product or service, that's what a 'professional' really means as opposed to an amateur. Amateur doesn't mean that the person has less skills, it just means he is not using it in his work.

I studied instead of playing video games

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent much of my childhood reading instead of playing video games. I received my first programming contract when I was 16, did some telco programming after that, lazed around for a year then went to work as a system administrator. I'm still a sysadmin, in a devop role, where I earn 45USD an hour. I'm probably going to grow further than this, as I've been doing it for 7 years. I believe my next goal will be to reach 55USD an hour.

Far as education is concerned, I've no college degree, no certs, the fact is I dropped out of high school since it was keeping me back.

Easy

[ccguy]

How Did You Become a Linux Professional?

By installing the first one in a non-linux shop when I was asked to install some service, once it was in used I mentioned it in some meeting with some big dog. No one had the balls to acknowledge they didn't know.

Long story...

[Sique]

It starts with my first account at the university for a computer lab running AIX V3.2 and HP UX 7.1.
It continues with me taking a C programming course, then diving deeply into MUD programming.
It goes along with Linux 0.99.4, which a collegue of mine showed to me running an MWM like window manager.
It sees me helping acquaintances compiling kernels for Slackware based distributions on their respective boxes.
It has to do with my second position as a firewall administrator of firewalls running on Solaris and later FreeBSD based machines.
It gets me to owning my own Solaris box along with a Linux box running several Linux distributions installed on top of each other.
It accompagnies me to a short stint as a system administrator at a research institute for distributed computing.
And now it sees me administer phone switches based on Linux and applications plugging into the phone switches and running on Linux too.

Re:Knife professional

[ldgeorge85]

Exactly. I agree here. I had been using and developing on Linux for years before I got a job that was in any way related to Linux. I finally broke down and went into a hosting provider looking for work, and because of my Linux skillsets I was able to get a position working with a (at the time) new 'Cloud Platform'. My actual job there didn't involve too much Linux, day-to-day, but without my experience I could never have kept things together when it was falling apart. As I went along, the Linux skills got used more, but my job role was more about keeping the applications up and online, which just happened to involve some Linux skills here and there. I have since left there, and I actually got hired on by the developer of said 'Cloud Platform', where I worked as both the lead support engineer and then as a software developer. I got to use my LInux skills a lot more there, but still my job role was more about not just Linux but all the other pieces that went into the platform. A lot of it was proprietary and I had to learn that stuff. I also had to get into kernel development and debugging. Really, most of the day was spent just trying to help others understand how to use the product in general and trying to keep the systems online. I did, and do, end up using Linux skills a lot, but it is now entangled with so much else. Sadly, it is almost like saying you are a Windows Expert. 'Okay, well, in what area? DB, IIS, Exchange, coding, games, etc?'. Linux skills are just the starting point, unless you just want to do basic SysAdmin. So, as for advice, I would suggest either trying to find a specific niche of IT you find interesting and start delving into it. Most likely your Linux skills will massively help you out getting things done. There are so many areas from which to choose. The other direction is going into a SysAdmin type role that has good growth potential, but that is hard to really guage. Good luck!

With patience and practice

[JoeCommodore]

I started with Linux use early 2000s, went through a couple years of labor and frustration installing, re-installing troubleshooting, etc. until it became my primary OS. One of the best things UI did was grab one of those fat Linux Bibles and read it cover to cover (the one I read was the Red Hat Linux 8 bible) - not all of it will stick, some will be not useful now, and largely it makes a great sleep aid, but it will give you a general picture of how things work in Linux.

From there start setting up a test system where you can try out the more serious stuff like setting up a web server, FTP, shell, ssh, etc. Maybe try out LTSP, etc. Once you get to the point where you can confidently do something useful (business wise) then see about migrating it to work. Show your boss you could do x with Linux, faster cheaper and without licenses, and that you can write out what to do if it crashes and your not there. Once you get the chance, make it work and also show it to your peers. Once things are rolling on Linux, you've become the Linux professional. Now you're there, you have to keep up on all that stuff - and there's always more to learn.

Take the sysadmin job

[penguinbrat]

It's the 'foot in the door' - once your on this side of it, it's up to what you do with it.. Once your in, script your job to make life easier for you, while also doing everything 100% with out failure (assuming your scripts aren't full of bugs) - you will get promoted into another position - or simply ensure that you keep your job. If you don't get promoted, jump jobs - its basically ALL experience that gets you the higher end positions, nothing else, certs help with the bigger companies, smaller ones (where I prefer) want experience more than anything. Jumping jobs, ensures you get the varied experience. Multiple steady jobs as a sys admin, could land you the Sr Sys Admin in a smaller company.

Also, don't stop with just installing systems on new hardware, thats easy - try to get your hands on the 'old' stuff that barely works, and I'm talking Pentiums - nothing in the last decade. back when I was a teenager, my mom was given around a dozen plus systems for a project she was working on, she tasked me with seeing what worked and what could be done with them. I was able to get around 7 systems fully working, only some had no drives. Between them all, I got into networking (obviously), diskless nodes, DNS, various services, the kernel/modules/configurations, etc.., etc.. Because the amount of resources I had to work with was very limited, I had to really do my homework to get everything going AND usable. A few years later, my first 'good' job I scored because I knew what some strange boot codes from LILO were when simply no one else did, and I could get the critical systems going again (I was contract initially) - I only knew that info from the countless issues I ran into on that old hardware, and getting it all working.

When it comes to your employer verifying that you can walk the walk, and not just talk the talk - it's done one of two ways, and sometimes both - they will either verify from word of mouth (previous employer/references) or during your 30 day/3month 'probation' period.

I was the only one who had any exposure to Linux!

[Paracelcus]

So after the plastic mannequins posing as managers discovered that "Lye-nux" was in use by some enterprise that they read about in some shiny trade publication and was therefor "sexy", I was anointed "project leader" to build and configure a mail server and a separate file server.

I used retired machines (lots to choose from), (if I remember correctly) a Slackware 6 CD, and did what they wanted, when I was called into a meeting and asked how much I would need to buy the equipment and software I told them that it was done and ready to begin testing whenever they wanted.

This really pissed them off, (not to have to spend huge sums of money) they felt cheated somehow and after I had successfully demonstrated that the setups I created worked reliably management decided to scrap "Lye-nux" and spend $500,000 on high end Sun equipment instead!