Where can I find a good IT internship? and what would be the ideal roles?

July 1, 2006 7:04 PM

What's the best way to look for a UNIX systems administration internship or apprenticeship? and what would be a realistic company to look at?

Ooh, this might be the worst type of begging for a first time AskMeFi poster. I love this place so apologies in advance.

So, I know about SAGE, and I could find other Listservs. I've been rather liberal using monster/craigslist/and other sites also to send HR people questions about taking on interns. I just started sending out those inquiries though last week, so I am not getting desperate yet, but I really don't want to waste time either.

My ideal situation is doing Unix/Linux (or mixed) sysadmin work somewhere relatively demanding (datacenter maybe?) while I study for my LPI, and later RHCE. I am CCNA, MCSE, Project+, and Security+ currently via studying the last seven months in a cont-ed program and busting my a**.

Also, how important is company prestige or brand name going to be? I know IT people respect people who know what they are talking about and can fix problems, but on the other hand, at a big company won't I have more challenging work to do? I won't be very busy resetting passwords at a small real estate firm.

Do I need to be in SF? If I'm going to work for free then I'd like to save money on rent and that will be impossible there.

I've been working pretty hard recently to get my MCSE, Security+,CCNA, and Project+ based on what I already knew about these things, but I really want the work experience while I'm getting my more "serious"
certs. Sorry this sounds like a cover letter, but I'm not sure how much background I need to give here.

Also, to clarify, my cont ed program does have some placement help but I am in Montreal, their placement is local, and I don't think I am staying here because my francais c'est tres mal. ou tres fou mal? =P

posted by lslelel to work & money (8 comments total)

First off, have you actually done any *nix administration? Ever built a linux box? If not, do it. Build it, break it, fix it, break it, fix it until you know it. In my opinion, a classroom isn't going to teach you intuition, which for me, is at least 80% of being a great sysadmin.

You can know what you are talking about without knowing what you are doing. If an IT person recognizes that you know how to -do-, you'll get respect. If you fling techy words about with nothing to back it up, they'll think you're a paper tech (got all your certs, but you don't know a damned thing)

UNIX administration isn't a generic thing. There's The Linuxes, *BSDs, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, OSX to name a few.

For an internship, your best bet will be academia.
I've been the IT manager and senior sysadmin at companies large and small over the last 16 years. I've had requests for interns, and I've always turned them away. I wouldn't let someone so green go to town on business critical systems.

The size of the company doesn't really matter when it comes to challenges (unless you want your challenges to be the beauracracy and red tape large companies typical hit you with).

Big names typically like big names.

Certs mean squat (well, megacorps like them...and companies that let HR do all of the footwork).

Why are you set on being an intern? As an intern, chances are that you won't get paid. Why not look for a junior admin position instead?

My apologies if this has come off as harsh, but having had to interview WAY too many potential sysadmins who really didn't have a clue has made me a tad bitter :)
posted by zerokey at 10:06 PM on July 1, 2006 [1 favorite]

What zerokey said. Learn Expect, by the way.
posted by evariste at 10:32 PM on July 1, 2006

What evariste said. Expect is a great tool to have under your belt.
It can also be good to be familiar with perl.

Also, don't expect to know everything. Don't try and pack your head full of every last little switch for every single program. Man pages can be more of a lover than a friend.

If you have a choice in shells, I would go for bash. It incredibly flexible (except for the occaisional whitespace issue - this is where perl comes in handy).

Some of my favorite utilities that make admin work dreamy: screen, splitvt and multitail (I know there's a ton more that I use, but these are the three that immediately float to the top).
posted by zerokey at 11:00 PM on July 1, 2006

If you have a choice in shells, I would go for tcsh. You can actually script it ;) (this is a holy war, though, and to some degree depends on your OS. linux dists tend to ship with bash as default, bsd distributions tend to ship with csh/tcsh. its a historical difference)

If you want to get experience without completely jumping in, admin a server for a non-profit that actually has some infrastructure needs (ie, they're not on shared hosting). Adminning a server is a pain in the ass, and if you've never done it before you'll realize that pretty quickly. Doing a good job means tracking the vulnerability lists & watching whatever software you have installed, as well as your OS, for new versions.
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:26 PM on July 1, 2006

s/bsd distributions tend/the 3 big BSDs ship with/
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:27 PM on July 1, 2006

Run linux as your desktop operating system. If you have windows as your only OS right now, partition your disc for three OS's. Windows, some linux distro, and Linux From Scratch. Putting together your own linux distro from scratch, compiling everything by hand, will force you to learn a rediculous amount about *nix.
posted by phrontist at 9:50 AM on July 2, 2006 [1 favorite]

Oh, and until you have the LFS bit up and running, use the linux distro for everything.
posted by phrontist at 9:50 AM on July 2, 2006

Hey everyone thanks for the help.

The only good thing about taking a cont ed program is having access to a lab, and in addition to the certs I mentioned above, I've been tooling around in bash, studying Python, and I am going to try to learn some OSCAR/ROCKS basics even though I wont be able to test a real environment myself.

I dual boot on my PowerBook, but honestly trying to get the other certs out of the way has put a huge dent in my ability to experiment with the real OS's.

I guess I will try to find a helpdesk job for now at a school, and I am actually thinking about enlisting in the service although I might be getting to old at 28.

And I will look into Expect thanks for that.

I don't mind harshness btw at all =) Cheers.
posted by lslelel at 10:21 AM on July 2, 2006