STEM · Full roadmap · ~120 min read · 35 steps
🛠️System Administrator (Aotearoa NZ)
Own and run real infrastructure in Aotearoa: servers, identity, sovereignty, automation, and recovery
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Unit 1
Start here
Course overview
What a system administrator actually owns
You are accountable for systems, not just tickets
The Linux filesystem hierarchy
Every directory on a Linux server has a job
Users, groups, and ownership
Every file is owned by a user and a group
Permissions: chmod and chown
Read, write, execute for owner, group, and others
Unit 2
Package managers: apt and yum
Install, update, and remove software the supported way
systemd and managing services
systemd starts, stops, and supervises everything
Processes and resource use
See what is running and what it is eating
Cron and scheduled jobs
Run tasks automatically on a schedule
SSH and key authentication
Remote access done securely with keys, not passwords
Unit 3
Reading logs under /var/log
The system already told you what went wrong
Shell scripting for real tasks
Glue commands together so they run themselves
Windows Server roles and features
A Windows server becomes what you install on it
Active Directory: forest, domain, and OU design
The structure that holds your users, computers, and rules
Group Policy and GPO design
Push settings to thousands of machines from one place
Unit 4
DNS and DHCP server administration
Names to addresses, and addresses handed out automatically
FSMO roles, replication, sites and services
Domain controllers share work and special jobs
Virtualization and hypervisors
Many virtual servers on one physical box
VM lifecycle, snapshots, and resource allocation
Create, size, snapshot, and retire virtual machines
Storage: RAID, SAN, NAS, iSCSI, and LVM
How servers get reliable, expandable disk
Unit 5
Identity, access, and least privilege
Give the minimum access needed, and no more
Containers and the cloud, with the NZ regions
Lighter than VMs, and now real data centres in Auckland
Data sovereignty, the cloud-first policy, and where NZ data lives
For NZ data, where it sits and whose law it falls under is your decision to get right
Infrastructure as code and configuration management
Describe the desired state, let the tool enforce it
PowerShell and Bash automation in practice
Scripting is how a small team runs a large fleet
Unit 6
Patch and update management at scale
Patching a fleet on purpose, not one box at a time
Monitoring and observability
Know it is broken before the users tell you
Backup and disaster recovery
A backup you have not restored is a guess
Security hardening, the NZISM, and CIS benchmarks
Shrink the attack surface, against a standard you can be audited on
The Privacy Act 2020, notifiable breaches, and the NCSC
When personal information leaks, the law gives you a clock and a phone number
Unit 7
Māori data sovereignty when your systems hold NZ data
Some of the data on your servers is taonga, and that changes how you treat it
Capacity planning
Solve next quarter's problem before it is a crisis
Common mistakes that bite sysadmins
The failures are predictable, so learn them cheap
The culture and career side in Aotearoa: on-call, postmortems, and where the job leads
How NZ sysadmins work, get paid, and grow
Where to go next
Where to go next