Tech Book Junkie!

I was a bad girl today. I had a little money left over after the weekend, so I dived in to my favorite geek book site O'Reilly & Associates. Nearly $200 later, I have on order several books that should prove useful in making me a senior sysadmin, rather than just a mid-level one.

The few areas where I consider myself to be a little weak in my sysadmin foo are:

• Day to day DNS admin - I can do stuff, but don't get into the guts routinely, and don't grok the zen yet.
• Mail admin - I know postfix, and some qmail, but not the gnarly nightmare that is sendmail (I've been avoiding it).
• Backups - at the simplest level, I do fine, but I don't have a lot of practical experience managing complex backup and restore systems, much less jukeboxes and such.
• Serious Security - I know the basics, but really don't have a lot of hands on fiddling with firewalls, NAT, and all of that.
• Proprietary tools - I don't know all of the Legato, HP Openview, Clearcase, Veritas, Oracle Enterprise, PeopleSoft, etc., type stuff. I haven't worked for the kind of big companies that can afford these proprietary type "solutions".
• Heavy Networking and Routing - I can set up the basics, but I'm not a network wizard, which a lot of places bundle in with Senior Sysadmin.
• Gnarly NFS, NIS, and LDAP magic - I seldom have dealt with any of these - either the network was to small to care, it was already set up and running, or it was under the domain of the security ghods.
• Network printing admin - I haven't ever had to fart with more than one or two printers, and those only once or twice.

I'm sure there are more, and as my home network expands I'll be exploring some of them.

The only worry I have is that as a Tech Support Engineer, I'll get shunted into the support area in the future. I don't really want to go there long term - I am not enough of a people person for that. I like my users in small batches, and I don't want to get pigeonholed into a phone support corner. Yuck!!