Do you know how to do this stuff?

Always going to be the exceptions though, I don't know anyone near my age with near as much as experience/skill as me, MSP here too. Think this will be the cockiest thing I've ever written but at 21, thanks for asking:

  • Redesigned our network from ground up including VPNs, switches, colo, firwalls, etc

  • Redesigned our hosted infrastructure, previously it was VMware (Without HA features) with the most ridiculous SAN layout I will never admit to being a part of, moved it to Hyper-V and reformatted many very large raid5 arrays (Nothing against VMware, still manage a bunch of it, just no $ approval for features)

  • Planned multiple upgrade paths for that same infrastructure when planning new clients, moved everything to AWS for $$ and scale reasons

  • Migrated (Well, abandoned and started fresh) all our clients' remote backups that didn't work half the time to much more reliable, cheaper, and faster software/configurations

  • Implemented a security policy

  • Started documenting things, rather than having everybody re-invent the wheel every time they worked on a new client issue or screwing the company if hit by bus

  • Countless AD/email/hardware upgrades/migrations

  • Only one to whip out wireshark/telnet here when there's a networking issue, I am the last person anything gets escalated to

Stuff I've picked up: - Linux/Unix(SCO) - Scripting (Python, Perl, PS) - Dealing with Vendors - Web Design (Ours + a few clients, did this on my own before) - Database management (Many, from MSSQL to FoxPro) - Patience - Alcoholism (Not entirely IT's fault, University too) - DNS

Hate the title debate as much as you, mine is just Systems Administrator, no certs, degree in progress, definitely had more "skill" than others with more specific titles in their organizations. Need to move to bigger networks soon, but still learning a lot here.

/r/sysadmin Thread Parent