Information Technology or IT provides a lot of positions for technical personnel. System Administrator is the most popular position or role in the IT except Programmers or Applications Developers. In this tutorial, we will try to explain the System Administrator role and its duties.
What Is System?
The system is a general term to refer to complete hardware and software which can run applications on. Actually network devices like a switch, the router can be named as a system but they are generally not referred to as a system. Systems have different hardware like X86, X86_64, Spark, Itanium, ARM, etc. Systems also have different operating systems like Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, MacOS, Unix, etc.
What Is Administrator?
The administrator is a role that administrates given devices. The administrator is different from the manager because the administrator generally refers to a technical role.
What Is System+Administrator?
System Administrators are generally responsible for different devices, servers like web server, database server, file server, etc. System administrators are generally responsible for Data Center, storage, access to the system room, etc.
System Administrator Duties or Role Description
A System Administrator in general will have following responsibilities.
- Installing, maintaining and troubleshooting workstations, servers, OSs, software applications and other computing systems
- Creating user accounts and assigning user permissions
- Setting up system-wide software
- Executing anti-virus mechanisms
- Creating backup and retrieval policies and assigning bulk storage
- Creating file systems
- Monitoring network communication
- Updating systems upon release of new OSs or software
- Implementing computer, network and security policies for system and network users
- Strategic planning for service and system outages
- Light programming or scripting
- System-related project management
- User training and management
- High-level technical knowledge and technical support experience
- Hardware and software system security, such as protection against hardware theft and abuse, malware/spyware and unauthorized use of systems and components, including firewall and intrusion detection system(IDS) maintenance
Linux System Administrator
Linux system Administrators mainly expected to be familiar with the Linux command-line tools. The Linux system administrator also should use different Linux distributions like Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Debian which are used in the Enterprise area.
Windows System Administrator
Windows System Administrators generally uses Active Directory and Domain with different Windows Server versions like 2008, 2012, 2016. Windows Systems administrators generally use GUI for system administration but currently, Powershell became the main stream in Windows system administration.
What Is Devops?
DevOps is a new term that is used for System Administrators with Application Development or Advanced scripting capabilities. Today IT environment contains a lot of systems with similar types in bulk. Configuring them one by one is a daunting task and DevOps techniques like orchestration, automation, and scripting make it easy.
Network Knowledge
Today IT systems connected to the intranets or internet in order to provide services. So system administrators also administrate their systems network configuration. This requires the System Administrators to know some networking in order to configure and troubleshoot the system network configuration.
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