Hi

I currently work as an operation technican at a company and i have now been at the operations center for about 2 years and its time to pick a subject that i will be specializing in. I've been working with mostly redhat based systems, but also administrated solaris systems a little, ive done what i know before escalating problems to specialized solaris people.. what i know is basically a little about zpools, solaris zones/containers and how solaris handles it memory, with other words, not a lot.

Im thinking about choosing solaris as the subject to specialize in, is that a good ideà or does it seem like an ideà which is not good at all ? It looks like linux is much more popular these days and it seems like solaris is struggling with trying to compete with linux... so, is it really worth choosing solaris as a subject to specialize in or should i just choose redhat instead ?

I guess it should be an easy task for me to choose this, but im really stuck, i just know which one to choose..and i've been stuck on this for a while now.. i can also choose to work with application servers or apache, bind, ldap etc. What would you choose ? Im very interested in seeing what you answer. I know i should choose what i would like to work with, but i just dont know what to choose.. all subjects is pretty interesting and what i pick i kinda have to work with too.. its not that easy to go back and choose something else (if i can should any else after having choosen this subject which i dont know)

Thanks for all answers.

Linux is extremely popular, and will only get more popular in the future. That said, Solaris is still widely used and is preferred by some organizations.

Personally I am not sure I would devote myself to Solaris completely, but undeniably it is a field worth working with and learning about.

Hmm, yes, i guess i dont want to devote myself only to solaris either since i do really like linux and want to continue administrating it (but i also want to try out something new).. so its not easy to choose between the two if i have to.. probably dont get to specialize in both (doubtly)

Hi.

Solaris has a pretty large install base, particularly in telecoms, banks and government, and those places will need Solaris admins for a long time to come. In fact, everywhere I've worked in IT has been a Solaris-on-Sparc shop.
On the other hand despite being Solaris certified and all my commercial experience being on Sun boxes, I prefer Linux as an OS and I'd like to move away from Solaris and into Linux, at least for a while.
A quick shufty around the Internub seems to indicate that Solaris admins are generally paid more than Linux admins, if that's an important factor to you.

To be honest, I'm not sure it matters that much which you specialise in - I got my first Solaris job off the back of my non-commercial experience with Linux.

Dave

I'd concur with that. At work (public library service) we have two Solaris boxes, and two Linux ones. The job adverts I'm looking at frequently say "Linux or Unix", and until you get very specialised, there's enough overlap to mean that experience on one *nix is useful on all the others. It's only when you have to work with Windows (as we do also) that you really have to change your way of thinking.

Solaris will hopefully become hotter when IBM eats up Sun. Interesting to see if AIX will move to Solaris or the other way around. Too expensive to have so many UNIX and Linux flavors, they will probably settle on one eventually.

Fortunately I'm seeing a light inversion of trend and many clients I'm working with are using Solaris. A public administration here in Spain just bought a good number of Sun servers to consolidate resources and applications into Solaris 10 containers and many of them were running on the mainframe or on Linux.

Hmm, interesting answers, thanks.