30 Days of Geek #12: What area do you want to expand your skills into?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Two words: System Administration.

At the moment, that’s the main area where I really want more skills. I can do a bit, but I want to do much more. I’ll consider myself well on my way when I have finally set up a UNIX-based email server from scratch that’s capable of hosting multiple email addresses on multiple domains.

It’s not strictly geek related, but I also want to develop much better skills in the people area, both socially and in the management area. Being a polyglot or a polymath wouldn’t be bad either.

My eventual goal in life is to know everything about everything, have been everywhere, and have done everything. And have lots of fun along the way.

30 Days of Geek #3: What does your day job involve?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

I’ll answer this question in two different ways.

My “job” is working as a computer technician for a computer shop based in Hobart, Tasmania. I only work on Saturdays (at the moment, it used to be full-time), so that leaves me quite a bit of the week free for other pursuits. My work involves three main parts:

  • Fixing dead computer hardware. 90% of the time it’s a dead power supply, which is an easy fix, but occasionally there are some amazing problems that just shouldn’t happen. And those are a good fun learning experience.
  • Fixing broken Windows installations. 90% of the time it’s a virus, which is an easy fix, but occasionally there are some amazing problems that just shouldn’t happen. And those are a bastard. Most non-Microsoft application developers are stupid and lazy, it seems.
  • Dealing with customers on the phone. This is both the best and worst part of my job.

I’m fairly lucky with my work, in that I get paid to learn. 🙂

The activity that I spend most of my week doing is system administration. I don’t get paid much for this (not yet, anyway), but I’m continually learning and one day I’m going to have 1337-h4x0r skills (no, really). I have the feeling that system administration is where I will probably end up in my career.

IMAP, Webmail, and the pain of Sysadmin

Last night I succeeded in setting up on my server the IMAP protocol (with the help of my sysadmin friend Hamzah). It turned out not to be too difficult, once I fixed my silly configuration mistake (setting the mail directory to /var/mail instead of /var/spool/mail). I’ve still got a bit of configuration to do, mainly editing a few security settings and such. It seems Debian comes almost configured correctly out of the box. This seems to happen with quite a few packages.

Before setting up IMAP (which is, for those not in the know, an email protocol), I was accessing the mail on my server using POP3. POP3 works well, but only if you are always using the same computer all the time. Since the email messages are stored on the local machine using POP3, it is hard to track them across computers. IMAP stores the emails on the server, and each local machine uses the IMAP server as a reference.

Now that I am using IMAP, I can access my mail from virtually anywhere, without having to drag around my laptop. In the near future, I’m hoping to set up webmail on the server as well. I might even write my own, depending on how adventurous I feel. I mean, how hard can it be?