Why a Sysadmin?

Originally published on my old blog on 14 May 2011. Lightly edited; notes added in 2026 are marked.

I never intended to become a system administrator; it just kind of happened. What follows is a rough account of my history with computers since around 1995. I've left out the specific companies I worked for and with, and any systems I owned before 1995 (of which there were many, but no PC compatibles). This isn't a perfect account – some details are lost in the mists of time – but I hope it gives you the gist of it.

I started out as most people do: I acquired a computer. It wasn't much – a Pentium 90 with 8 MB of RAM, a 2 MB Diamond Stealth DRAM graphics card and a 1 GB Maxtor hard drive – but in 1995 it was pretty high spec. I started with DOS and Windows 3.11 on that machine but soon upgraded to Windows 95. I was happy. It let me play games and run Turbo Pascal and some other development tools, and I learnt a lot about computers.

About two years later I bought a Pentium 233 MMX laptop (a 233 MHz desktop CPU, 2.1 GB hard drive and an 800×600 display), and while it wasn't perfect, it helped me along the path. This was around the time PC World and PC Plus started putting the odd Linux distro on their cover disks. I tried a couple, including Slackware, and could install them easily, but could never get X to work on my laptop.

About a year later I had acquired a couple more computers and a 3Com rackmount hub. I played with networking and learnt a lot, but it wasn't enough…

I bought my first full Linux distro from Staples in Leicester; it was only luck that they had a single copy of SuSE Linux 6.3 in the store. I brought it home and installed it. Even then it just seemed to work out of the box (at least on my hardware), and the only thing I couldn't get working was my ISDN adaptor. I worked around it by using Sygate to share the internet connection from my Windows 98 machine to the Linux box. It worked well (besides the odd random crash on the Windows machine), but my mother decided she liked mahjong on the Linux server and sat there for hours playing it…

I was fairly happy with SuSE for a couple of years, upgrading from version to version until I moved into Leicester. Then I switched to FreeBSD 4.7 and got an always-on connection. This was a massive change, and even over the next couple of years, as more and more powerful machines came my way from decommissioned systems at businesses I worked with, I still used my 300 MHz FreeBSD box for IM, IRC and basic web access.

Problems with FreeBSD 5 on my hardware meant I switched over to Fedora Core 2 (after trying SuSE and a couple of others from friends at university), and I liked what I saw of how Linux had moved on while I'd been away. It wasn't polished, but it was community driven and it was evolving fast. I stayed with Fedora for a while and managed some dedicated servers in Germany running it – which is what would lead me away from Fedora…

While Fedora is very good, the short lifespan of each release means a version can go from release to end-of-life in around 18 months. That makes using it for business a PITA. Business systems aren't expected to need reinstalling often, and doing so is painful and problematic, especially when it also means upgrading to a new OS version. We found this out the hard way…

We had a couple of Asterisk servers (version 1.0 came out around this time) hosted on those machines, and for business reasons we weren't willing to take them offline for a full reinstall (we'd had issues doing a version upgrade before). When FC4 hit end-of-life we limped along, manually recompiling our own packages for what we deemed critical fixes. That became unsustainable very quickly. Hats off to every distro maintainer: it is a very hard job and I don't envy you.

We moved to Debian and CentOS shortly after this – around 2005, I think. Debian because I was using it at home by then, and CentOS for the familiar Red Hat and RPM structure, which made our scripts simpler to port. I was comfortable with both, and I still use both (and Ubuntu) daily on different servers.

2026 Note: 20 years later, I have mostly kept with debian and ubuntu since then. CentOS slowly faded from my tech stacks until they changed it from a RHEL clone to a completely different beast.

As with most sysadmins, becoming one was never the goal. I just acquired the skills as I built solutions to the problems of the companies I worked with. I have been a PHP programmer, VoIP engineer, cable monkey, installation engineer and network engineer, among other things. All of them gave me skills that made me who I am today, and wearing so many hats has given me a better understanding of the systems I look after.