find opensource project for sysadmin

I am a beginning Linux sysadmin and I would like to contribute to open source to obtain new skills and help other people if possible. I found this SF question and googled how to join the CentOS or Snort infrastructure teams with no success. It likes better to be a programmer to contribute to open source.

Could someone help to understand how to start and what should I learn to be involved in a project as sysadmin?

Solution 1:

Programming skills, or at the very least scripting skills, are needed for the most visible of contribute-upstream roles in these projects. A lot of work goes into making things like startup run faster or more efficiently, and that requires no little bash-scripting to make happen.

One area where sysadminly skills do come in handy is in support forums. Get good at these areas and start helping other people. This is contributing to the community, it may not feel like it, but it does make the entire ecosystem nicer to live in.

Another area is to participate in testing development builds. This will require some hardware or at least VM space, but provides very needed feedback to development about what's working, what's not working, and provides you a lot of troubleshooting experience. That kind of troubleshooting is a great way to get to know your project better. Do it long enough and you'll get your skills honed enough to start contributing patches to fix problems, or maybe even pick up a somewhat rare but very useful (to the community) skill like manual RPM packaging.

Solution 2:

You can to track to various packages of your favorite distro (or a BSD) and review the security updates from the upstream. Send bug reports for packages with vulnerabilities and test the side effects of this in the other packages of system.

Use a virtual machine for all testing or you will break your system :)

Learn how make packages and the philosophy of the project. You will need show your value for the other members of the projects (for months or years). Also learn shell script for automating your work.

Solution 3:

Here is how you can contribute as a sysadmin to GNOME.

Solution 4:

You can volunteer as a tester and documenter. You'll need sysadmin skills to set up testing (and you'll probably learn scripting). A sysadmin viewpoint can be very helpful in writing documentation for system utilities, services, and applications.