My new job: Linux System Engineer 리눅스 시스템 엔지니어로 다시 태어나다!

I never would have imagined 5 years ago when I first starting tinkering with Linux as a hobby that I would end up working as a Linux Engineer in IDC's (Internet Data Centers). Over most of the past 15 years, I have been a free agent wearing the different hats of college prep tutor / college admissions counselor for Korean kids hoping to study abroad in the U.S., as well as doing freelance translation and interpretation work.

At some point during the past couple of years, I came to the realization that I actually enjoyed experimenting with Linux and programming more than I enjoyed the work I did for a living. Thanks to a basic level of Linux know-how gained from troubleshooting my own desktop Linux installations, an IT service company in Teheran-ro, Korea's "Silicon Valley" has decided to take me on as a junior system engineer.

On my first day on the job I accompanied a senior engineer on a service call to an IDC run by one of the big 3 telecom firms in Korea. My only Linux experience thus far was with consumer hardware, but I was greeted by this:

This is a terminal for an HP Proliant DL580 4U rackmounted server with 256 GB of RAM connected to a SAN (Storage Area Network) consisting of dozens of terabytes. You can see from the screen that the server is running RHEL 5, which we upgraded to a more recent 6.X version. Two more pictures:

I had never used the command ethtool -p before, which causes the PCI network interface light to blink so you can identify which cable is attached to which network interface, i.e. eth0 ~ eth15

I also had never seen PXEBOOT to make a new installation before, so today was a learning experience. I have so much to catch up on over the weeks ahead... I am currently preparing for my LFCS exam (similar to the RHCSA, but allows a choice of CentOS, OpenSUSE, or Ubuntu). While I'm in my training period I have to be careful not to blow up any servers through careless mistakes; racks full of high-end servers are worth more than my entire annual pay!

But it's pretty cool to realize that the entire South Korean mobile phone network depends on Linux to operate!