Setting up a perfect System Admin Workstation



What's a perfect system admin workstation?

It is a workstation for system admins to achieve the following..

  1. work across multiple servers with ease
  2. enable automation without much effort.
  3. allows inline documentation of your scripts
  4. backup all your scripts and sync across machines where you want to use them automatically. This sounds like a tall order right?,  and
  5. allows you to work across different environments from a single interface - Windows, Mac, Linux, local, remote, cloud, Cmd, PowerShell, bash
Can you setup such a workstation under 30 minutes... yes you can... and here are the tools you need
  1. git - this is the most important of all - download from here. make sure you enable virtual console and windows.
  2. Visual Studio Code - very good developer code editor. We are going to use it to create a System admin environment.
  3. WSL 2 and Ubuntu -- this allows you to do scripting in Linux environments right from windows.
  4. Windows Terminal - install this from windows store. This is an alternate shell
  5. PowerShell Core - optional component. allows you to test some of the cloud scripting with ease.
  6. Python - install from official source or anaconda. It's your choice. If you don't intend to use Python, please install the barebones package from Python.org.
Once you install these, open VSCode and install required add-ins
  1. Python - even if you don't use it this is required for lot of what you do in the background
  2. Jupyter notebooks
  3. SQL server Admin
  4. Azure Admin Pack

Next article on - how to setup automations [on it's way]..

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