I am a long time UNIX system administrator and open source advocate. In recent years my primary focus as been on Linux & FreeBSD systems administration, networking, telecom, and SAN/storage management. I love building infrastructure, tying systems together, creating processes, and bringing people together in support of their technical efforts.
When I can, I try to contribute back to the open source projects either with patches, or by helping others in technical support forums.
Authored Comments
Very nice list, thank you. It is a great template for new sysadmins to use as a starting point.
Just replying here on the Ansible part:
>> Ansible may be overkill for a single-user computer
I would strongly encourage sysadmins not to skip learning something because the effort for 1 machine is too high. That is the kind of behavior that keeps us locked into lots of low-impact manual tasks we need to remember to do over and over.
I would encourage people to start learning Ansible for their 1 or 2 machines, and using those to practice your skills. Ansible's wonderfully easy playbook syntax automatically creates great documentation for you on what you did, and eventually leads to shaving significant time off otherwise menial and mundane tasks ... not to mention that whatever tasks you develop for 1 machine can usually be easily reused on other machine.
I love it! An regret all the time I put learning it off because the issue at hand was "too simple".