When you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, no one will say, "I want to be a sysadmin." So how did I end up becoming one?

Starting out

It was within the cold, white walls of the data center, hearing the humming sounds coming from the server cages, with the thick legacy Unix manuals lined up neatly in one of the control rooms, and in the distance, the sysadmins at their workstations working in shifts 24x7. This is how I vividly remember starting as a Linux sysadmin a good 15 years ago.

OpenStack's Identity service, Keystone, verifies the user's identity and provides information about which resources the user has access to.

The Keystone project provides authentication, authorization, and other services such as delivering the service catalog, as this diagram shows:

Engineers, sysadmins, and DevOps roles' job responsibilities include answering dozens of emails, upgrading hundreds of servers, and patching all the systems in your data center or favorite cloud.

For decades, periodic password changes have been a staple of system security. The idea is that if someone gets your password, they can gain access for a limited period of time. It's usually easiest to have the system prompt them rather than relying on users to remember to change their passwords. However, regular user accounts may be set with passwords that never expire and therefore never prompt users to change them.

Sysadmins use an untold number of command-line tools, and you probably regularly use the three discussed in this article: grep, sed, and awk. But do you know all the ways you can use them to manipulate text? If not (or you're not sure), continue reading.

The virtual shell, or virsh, is a flexible command-line utility for managing virtual machines (VMs) controlled by libvirt, which is a toolkit and API to manage virtualization platforms. It's the default management tool for Linux kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs), and it also supports Xen, VMware, and other platforms.

Automation is a big part of a sysadmin's job—any time you can avoid manual intervention means you can save time and decrease the risk of human error. Ansible is one of the most popular tools for automation, so if you want to learn new ideas and best practices around automating IT, AnsibleFest is an excellent place to start.

Regular readers of Enable Sysadmin know that most of us are big fans of Ansible. We particularly like using Ansible roles to design reusable code effectively. A playbook follows a specific execution order when it runs, and there are several ways to control the order in which your tasks run.