I had always wanted to work as a sysadmin, and know the joy of having tens or hundreds of computers at my beckon call to bend to my will. Eventually I got my wish. I was hired on to a small ISP and Manged Service provider which was bought about a year later by Uniserve Corporation, one of the mid-sized ISPs in Vancouver. I was responsible for anywhere from 30 to 50 Linux, BSD, Solaris, and windows servers.
The systems team I was a part of was in charge of dealing with spam filtering, maintaining the IBM blade server and SAN which housed the mail cluster, doing break-fix work and supporting the other teams. In this time I dealt with client communications, server room maintenance design and setup, and learned the intricacies of working in a 24/7/365 environment. I also stretched my web design skills and helped design and develop a client management and bandwidth tracking system for one of the major movie studios in Vancouver. This is akin to the “you must log in to surf the net” systems that hotels and airports have.