Any tips for a new UNIX Sys Admin??
 

I’m starting my new job as a UNIX System Administrator in a couple of weeks.

Very nervous as it’s a change of career for me. My experience is with hardware running UNIX Operating Systems.

I passed two technical tests to get the job, but still feel really nervous!!

I am going to be working on Solaris, SUSE and Red Hat systems.

I appreciate this might be a bit ambiguous, as the role varies between companies. But any tips from seasoned pro’s might be helpful!!

Get in and do everything, don't half-ass it, be careful (take backups) but don't be afraid of doing your job. It'll be stressful (or to put it another way, fun) and time consuming til you learn the tricks, but you will. Use Google. If your company doesn't have a support agreement with RedHat, Novell, and Sun, you're going to need it for patches. Use their knowledge bases and patches if you do.

Setup a testing environment and implement new things till you become confident (Virtual environment more than enough to do something)

Don't try and bullshit your way through. Most tecchies are OK with people learning new skills and are happy to help. We've all been there. Even if you've been doing it for years there are always new things to learn -- comes with the territory.

Enjoy yourself! Probably the guys that took you on recognised your potential and generally relevant background rather than expecting you to hit the ground running. If they are smart they will have given equal weight to how they think you will fit in with the team. If you see your new opportunity as a shared learning and mutual supporting adventure along with a chance to enjoy the company of your new colleagues then you will be off to a great start :)

You may find this useful for RHEL: http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ion/index.html
There are some Suse books as well at the home page for that site: http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/index.html

(free online readable)

Spend some time everyday reading the logs!

This will help you develop a baseline for what is normal on your systems AND when something goes wrong /var/log is your friend!