Evolution of a SysAdmin: Triangle Linux Users Group Meetup

By: Craig Jackson, DevOps Support Engineer, NetActuate

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The Triangle Linux Users Group (TriLUG for short) was founded to share and advance Linux and other Free (as in Freedom) and Open Source Software, hardware, and practices through education, outreach, and community ­building in the North Carolina Triangle between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. TriLUG has proudly served this local technology community for over 25 years. 

On June 12th, I had the pleasure of attending a TriLUG Meetup and presenting a talk on my journey as a SysAdmin — starting as a hobbyist in my youth in the days of dial-up to a DevOps Support Engineer at NetActuate. In the middle, I spent a few years away from the work of the internet, and when I came back, I discovered a landscape transformed — where scripts became pipelines, servers became containers, and SysAdmins became automation engineers. Let’s just say my journey has been a continual path of rediscovery, bridging old-school fundamentals with modern infrastructure requirements.

While I lead technical calls with clients on a daily basis, giving live presentations to an in-person group still gets my nerves going! So, I took plenty of time to prepare and practice for my talk and was very pleased to find the audience at TriLUG, warm, welcoming, and ever curious to learn and share perspectives. My kind of people.

Talk Summary

System administration has changed dramatically over the years, but the core mindset hasn’t. Tooling has certainly evolved from single-user shell accounts and hand-configured Linux boxes to modern, abstracted platforms like Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code but the foundational principles still apply. You still have to observe, configure, secure, automate, and communicate. I once logged directly into machines and tweaked init scripts, I now write Terraform to declare infrastructure and use Ansible to automate configuration across a global network. The challenge today I think is not trying to learn every new tool that pops up, but looking at the layers beneath and thinking clearly through complex systems.

The biggest shift I’ve seen is the move from reactive firefighting to proactive automation. When I first started, being a SysAdmin meant watching for failures and being ready to dive in when things broke. There was a sense of pride in knowing how to fix things manually, often under pressure and with very little documentation. Today, we need to think through concepts like resilience, scalability, and repeatability and that’s where tools like Ansible and Terraform come in. As part of my job, I write playbooks and modules that enforce desired state across dozens or even hundreds of nodes. This allows us to move faster without sacrificing control. But this also means that modern infrastructure engineers need to understand both the systems and the automation frameworks that manage them. You can’t rely on tribal knowledge or undocumented fixes anymore. Your infrastructure is now code, and your operational knowledge needs to live alongside it.

Beyond the tech, one of the biggest insights I’ve gained is the value of community and persistence. Whether it was in IRC channels when I was a kid, shell account communities, or today’s Slack workspaces and open-source repos, the relationships you build matter. If I could offer one piece of advice, it’s this: be curious, be kind, and don’t be afraid to live at the edge of your understanding. That mindset has served me well, especially when I came back into tech after years away from it. What I had was an ability to teach myself, the patience to fail repeatedly, and the willingness to reach out and ask for help. That’s what helped me land a role at NetActuate, where I now help customers deploy global infrastructure and design resilient systems.

The tech will keep changing, and so must we. What doesn’t change is the satisfaction that comes from seeing something complex work the way it should. If you’re in this space, or thinking about getting into it, I encourage you to embrace adaptability, continuous learning, and the shift from "keeping the lights on" to becoming an infrastructure architect and an enabler of innovation. That’s how we grow.

Get Involved 

There are a plethora of online and in-person communities for developers, SysAdmins, engineers, and everyone else. It’s better to learn together. 

TriLUG gave me plenty of useful feedback and perspective on my presentation, and for that I’m deeply grateful. For more information on the TriLUG in North Carlinan, such as how to join our email list, head over to http://www.trilug.org.

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