Over the last couple of weeks, I've been doing too much research and tinkering, and not enough documentation of it on here.
A web hosting company donated several servers to the space last month. We had a server or two before, but now we have enough to actually get a proper server rack going, and have services both internally as well as on the warzone. Members were allowed to grab one and start playing, if they wished, and I was not going to let such an opportunity pass me by.
My original intent was to use the server as a sandbox, but before I knew it I was actually contributing to the infrastructure of the space. I got Xen running on the bare metal, and one of the more experienced server administrators at the space suggested I get a Nagios server running to monitor our network. So, I spent some time delving through the documentation and deploying that, and I'm now responsible for it. I'm still tweaking it, making sure that it's monitoring the services that exist on each piece of equipment on our network. I've realised I really enjoy using Nagios. I've also set up a new DHCP server for the space's internal network, and will be helping to set up an LDAP/RADIUS authentication server.
As someone who is just trying to start out in this field, and has done a lot of reading about system administration, I find it exciting to have access to real servers, and real server administration tasks. These may be baby steps for the more experienced, but as someone who has never done anything but read about this stuff before, I'm invigorated that I can actually do any of this. I can do as much reading about it as I want, but I don't internalize it the same way unless I'm actually getting my hands dirty with trial, error, and deployment.
