Thankfully for the world, I’m no longer involved in IT - I pursued, briefly, a career in serving food instead of bits. Less stressful they said. It’ll be fun they said…
The IT guys I worked with would set some computers and end-users as the expendable cannon fodder advance testers: they would get auto-updates, and if no issues cropped up, the rest of the end users would then receive that week’s patches. Not sure how many they’re managing at the moment; when I left their employ, they had just upwards of 1500 end users across 23 client companies.
Getting redundancy set up is IMHO, the single best thing you can do. For home servers - and I suspect most readers of this topic have one - setting up a RAID 5/50 is key. I intend to set up a home server this summer for diff-based backups of desktops and general media storage.
Most IT PFYs are self taught and learned their craft by cobbling together solutions on shitty handdowns. I am one such. One of my guiding principles is the 90% functionality rule: if I can get something functioning correctly 90% of the time, I am satisfied. Bailing water, that’s what I do. Designing actual solutions and networks and stuff? Above my paygrade. Maybe one day I’ll have the time and funds to set up a proper test lab and take time to learn all proper and such.
I imagine that you’ve had to write some patches for the software bb 's built on yourself and develop some scripts to make sysadminning a little easier. Have you a github?
