System Admins

IT infrastructure encompasses the software, the hardware, network, and services required for an organization to operate in an enterprise IT environment. 

 

Without an IT infrastructure, 

employees wouldn't be able to do their jobs and 

the whole company will crumble before it even get started. 

So organizations employ the help of someone like 

a systems administrator to manage the company's IT infrastructure. 

System administrators or as we like to call them sysadmins, are the unsung heroes in organization. 

 

They work in the background to make sure a company's IT infrastructure is always working, constantly fighting to prevent IT disasters from happening. 

Notice all of the really hard work that sysadmins put in. 

So show a little appreciation for your sysadmin by 

celebrating System Administrator Appreciation Day worldwide. 

 

Yes that's a real thing. 

In all seriousness, sysadmins have a lot of different responsibilities. 

Any company that has an IT presence needs 

a sysadmin or someone who handles those responsibilities. 

The role of a sysadmin can vary depending on the size of an organization. 

As an organization gets bigger, 

you need teams of sysadmins. 

Their responsibilities may be separated out into different roles with 

job titles like network administrators and database administrators. 

Companies like Facebook and Apple, 

don't have a single person running the IT show. 

But in smaller companies, 

it's usually a single person who manages the entire company's IT infrastructure. 

 

As you start to scale up to large organizations, 

you also need to level up your knowledge of systems administration. 

You need to pick up skills that allow you to automate 

workflows and manage configurations or computer settings automatically. 

 

 A sysadmin is responsible for their company's I.T. 

services. Employees need these I.T. 

services so that they can be productive. 

This includes things like email, 

file storage, running a website and more. 

The services have to be stored somewhere, 

they don't just appear out of nowhere. 

Any thoughts on where they're stored? 

If you answered servers, you're correct.But the term servers can have multiple meanings.

 

A server is essentially software or 

a machine that provides services to other software or machines. 

For example, a web server stores and serves content to clients through the Internet. 

You can access the web server through a domain name like google.com. 

An email server, provides email service to other machines. 

 

And an SSH server provides SSH services to other machines and so on and so forth. 

We call them machines that use the services provided by a server, clients. 

Clients request the services from a server and in turn, 

the servers respond with the services. 

A server can provide services to multiple clients 

at once and the client can use multiple servers. 

Any computer can be a server. 

I can start up a web server on my own home computer 

that would be able to serve my own personal website on the internet for me. 

But, I don't really want to do that because I have to leave my computer 

on all the time in order for my website to be available all the time. 

Industry Standard Servers are typically running 

24 seven and they don't run dinky little hardware like my home laptop. 

They run on a really powerful and reliable hardware. 

Server hardware can come in lots of different forms. 

They can be towers that sit upright, 

they look very similar to the desktops we've seen. 

Those towers can be put in a closet or can sit on the table if you want them to. 

But, what if you needed to have 10 servers? 

The towers would start taking up way too much space. 

Instead, you can use rack servers which lay 

flat and are usually mounted in a 90 inch wide server rack. 

If you needed even more space, 

you could use blade servers that are even slimmer than racks. 

There are other types of form factors for servers but these are the most common ones. 

You can also customize the hardware on your servers depending on the services. 

For example, on a file server you'll 

want more storage resources so that you can store more files. 

What about connecting to our servers? 

Working in a small IT organization, 

you could potentially deal with a handful of servers. 

You don't want to have a monitor, keyboard and a mouse for each of these servers, do you? 

Fortunately, you don't have to thanks to something we learned in an earlier course. 

We can remotely connect to them with something like SSH. 

Even so, you should always have a monitor keyboard on hand. 

Sometimes when you're working your network might 

be having issues and SSH won't be an option. 

A common industry practice is to use something known as a KVM Switch. 

KVM stands for keyboard, video and mouse. 

A KVM Switch looks like a hub that you can connect 

multiple computers to and control them using one keyboard, mouse and monitor. 

 

you can go out and start buying 

server hardware and setting up services for your organization. 

Or maybe not. 

You don't actually have to buy 

your own server hardware or even maintain your own services.