Beowabbit

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages.

So, as I have mentioned, I will be moving to MIT towards the end of this month.

That means my group has an open Unix/Linux sysadmin position. Want one?

I work in a group of four full-time permanent people: my boss (Director of Technology), myself, a Windows administrator, and a network administrator (all three of whom also do some Linux/Unix stuff as well). I support roughly a hundred Ubuntu workstations and roughly 50 servers (mostly various recent flavours of Ubuntu, but Solaris is still deployed here and there). I think it’s a pretty typical academic-computing environment.

My boss is a serious (and fairly well-known) Perl hacker, and he might enjoy having another one working for him (and you could certainly learn an awful lot from him). He’s also very technical; at least as much a sysadmin himself as a manager (although he spends way more time in meetings than the rest of us do), so he would be available as a resource to lean on.

I don't have the formal job description handy, but off the top of my head I would say this job would require at least a couple years’ Unix or Linux system administration experience (I had about 5 when I was hired, plus some helpdesk experience) in an environment with centrally managed desktop machines and servers and some sort of centralized directory/authentication system (à la LDAP/NIS/NetInfo/Kerberos/AD) and centralized fileservice (à la NFS/AFS/CIFS).

Mail- and/or webserver administration experience would be a big plus. Other plusses would be experience with automated deployment of machines, virtualization (we use Xen and VMware currently, but KVM and/or OpenVZ/Virtuozzo experience would be useful), some familiarity with Solaris or other non-Linux Unixlike systems, and a detailed understanding of Ubuntu or another Debian-derived distribution. Since we’re a small group, and we fill in for and help out each other, some Windows and/or network administration experience would probably be a help, as would OSX experience (mainly for laptop support). (BTW, we’re a Cisco shop for networking hardware, and our fileserver is a NetApp. We also use BlueSocket boxes.) I don’t think any of those would be a requirement, though, for somebody who had a fairly solid understanding of some Linux distribution in this sort of environment.

If this sounds interesting to you (or to someone you know), ping me, and I’ll put you in touch with my boss.