In my mind there is nothing better that a technician can do to enhance their career than being able to find information out for themselves. I have mentioned it in previous posts, and will probably continue to do so as it is a theme of mine.
At a minimum reading the manuals or "RTFM" as the well known acronym goes (Read The F**king Manual for those unfamiliar with it) for the products you support is a must. Not all vendor documentation is created equal but the bigger players tend to have professional writers employed, so that goes a long way.
Most if not all documentation will be in soft copy or online, gone are the days of the product coming with printed manuals. I remember back in the day a couple of friends buying the Borland C compiler (ah you don't hear that name too often these days). It took two of them to carry the box home given the volumes of manuals supplied. Now that is value for money. But these days the documentation will be in a sub directory on the installation media, available for download from the vendors support site, or purely online (ala Microsoft server product documentation).
Knowing how the product you support works, from at least the vendors point of view is a good start. Coupled with day to day use of the product will allow you to maintain and support it. Following on from the vendor documentation are the many a varied books on a given subject. It used to be that you would trundle home with the latest 1000 page tome on a given product and add this to your bookshelf, and in some cases actually even read it. These days e pub is king, a Kindle is pretty cheap option, yes it ties you into the Amazon ecosystem but with products such as Calibre you are not necessarily tied down that much.
Having a core library of books on your electronic book reader of choice is a great idea, as a Windows System Administrator I have books on Active Directory, Windows Server, SQL Server and Exchange on my Kindle application among others, but having a good all round go to library is a must have these days. Couple that with vendor documentation in PDF form and Adobe Reader or similar for your device and you are all set.
Being able to figure out what is what on a given server, taking a lie of the land as it were if you are new to the job or the job involves supporting various client set up is good, I have lost count of the times I have fired up MSInfo32 to check if the server is physical or virtual (tip look at the manufacturer), or in the case of VMWare you can normally tell from the system tray if the tools are installed (but not always).
I will be expanding on this theme of self reliance and finding things out for yourself and various tools, utilities and techniques involved. I will leave you with one thing. If you are a Windows server or Active Directory administrator I encourage you to look at NLTest, one of my favorite utilities, you can find out a tonne of information with it.
