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My dear Derleth, something you need to know about me: I am a system administrator.

I have administred/used/installed/maintained: SuSE, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines. And I have probably forgotten a couple in the list above (Caldera comes to mind - waaaay before it became SCO).

So, yeah, I have used RPM and .deb based Linux distributions, thank you very much. And, yes, as you guessed, I started way back in 1995, when Slackware was pretty much the only game in town. Debian did not really exist yet and Red Hat was just crappy in those days. Slackware was - and still is - stable and coherent compared to pretty much all other distributions.

And that's just the free UN*X. I have also administered/installed and maintained HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Tru64 machines.

Except for the *BSDs and Slackware, frankly, most of them suck. Big time. Which is why I am typing this past 1:00am on a (very early) Sunday morning after spending an entire day installing AIX 5.3 TL8 SP6 servers in a production environment.

Give me Slackware anytime, please. Red Hat is a mess after two upgrades, Debian packages are maintained by a bunch of clueless hippies and n00bies, SuSE just plain sucks (yast meets smit, smit meets yast), Ubuntu is for point-and-click losers. And don't get me started on so-called "professional" UN*X such as AIX, please.

For instance, here is one reason Slackware is superior to all of these lame pieces of fluff: except maybe for Debian, it is the ONLY Linux distribution that won't install an X11 server by default. Here is a hint: you don't need a freaking X11 GUI on a production machine!!

(By the way, never ever mention the name "Gentoo" in front of me unless you really want to get a good ol' whack from my handy clue bat(tm).)

Anyhow, I am sorry if this sounded trollish - don't get me wrong, Red Hat and Debian and Ubuntu and [insert fave distro here] are perfectly acceptable, heck even Solaris or HP-UX are not that bad, but when it comes to simplicity and stability , Slackware is still the best Linux out there.

Slackware sucks. But, as far as I am concerned, it sucks a little bit less than all the others.

unzip|strip|touch|finger|mount|fsck|more|yes|grep|awk|awk|awk|sync|umount|sleep;

It's an old old old old old joke but what the heck, I'm an old old old old old unix hack.

And I'm a shell user of many years as well. Unfortunately, I believed http://www.adminspotting.org/ long before it was ever posted. And no, I'm not going to give you a prettified link to click on to go find it. That's called hubris. If you'd ever bothered to read about the BOFH you'd know that. It's a skill our kind all cultivate, like a Jedi Knight pulling his light sabre into his hand using only his mind.

"...Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate."

We are a dying breed.

And as the dumb-assed thumb-tribes continue to neglect the technologies that will serve the next generation, they empower the very organizations who will lord it over them for a life-time. Is it any wonder that large companies like Time-Warner, ComCast, and AT&T can afford to be audacious pecker-heads if they so choose? If you don't understand it, you'll just have to pay the bill and pray that it keeps working. Or you could read MAKE Magazine and the Anarchists Cookbook and build your own light sabre....

And just for the record; MAKE Magazine is a pale and shallow comparison to the homebrew and amateur radio scenes of the late Seventies and early Eighties.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm old. I have to go yell at those damned kids to get them off of my lawn.

Any language is only as good as the programmer using it.

I use a LAMP stack for the most part, many of the security holes in php aren't due to the language itself but the developers of the various webapps.

That being said, this requires a repost of the ol Adminspotting thang.

Choose no life. Choose no career. Choose no family.
Choose a fucking big computer, choose disk arrays the
size of washing machines, modem racks, CD-ROM writers,
and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high
caffeine and mental insurance. Choose no friends.
Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose
chairs for your office in a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose SMTP and wondering why the fuck you are logged
on on a sunday morning. Choose sitting in that swivel
chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web sites,
stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose
rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in
some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an
embarassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates
spawned to replace the computer-literate.

Choose your future.
Choose to sysadmin.

Why are Slashdot folks, and why is IT in general, so negative and pessimistic?

Experience, mostly. After having been lied to, screwed, blued and tatooed you get cynical. You get handed crap and are expected to make it work. You are seen as a cost center, when your contributions can be very useful to an organization. Managers insist on treating IT as a factory assembly line 'reach for the lowest common denominator' type job when it is a knowledge based skill based job.

When POS vendor hardware or software fail, the vendor blames the IT department. When the IT department is incompetent, they blame the vendor.

You give everything, weekends, relationships, holidays, mental and physical health and then get laid off anyway. See also http://www.adminspotting.org/

And MS is one of the worst. They promise it is easy. And it is easy, if you don't actually want to solve any serious problems. It's OK for for a few minmal classes of problems (web shopping cart, hierarchial accounting system) but not so great for actual business problems. The reason so much COBOL is still out there is that most programmers still haven't progressed far from COBOL.

ERPs are great, if you can change your business practices to fit the ERP. Which is totaly backwards, the software is developed to fit the business, not vice versa. Consultants for the ERP de jour swoop in, pick up fat pay checks and then leave the IT departments to hold the bag.

There is no good reason for Vista. Windows server 2003 and XP could serve for another 20 years under a nice incremental improvement process. But no, MS is going to once again pull the rug out from under us. A whole new class of security holes, new libraries, new incompatibilies and if you were dumb enough to pay for certs, a whole new set of certs. SQL Server 2000 was around for about 7 years, that gives you a reasonsable ROI. Changing every 2-3 years leaves you no ROI as by the time things stabilise, you have to change again.

I'm done. 9 months from now I will be in another field. Have fun, suckers....

(Damn, 3 glasses of wine and I am ranting and raving. I am getting cranky in my old age...)

So then, choose not to be afraid. Choose something else.

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace you. Choose your future. Choose life.

Alternatively, ... choose this.

Also worth mentionning:

you're one of us

Check it out: Adminspotting.

This had to be said.

Choose no life. Choose sysadminning. Choose no career. Choose no family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose hard disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why the fuck you're logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate.
Choose your future.
Choose sysadmining[1].

[1] It might fuck you up a little less than heroin[2].
[2] ObFootnote.

Ah, you must be one of the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate.

Please read Adminspotting and decide if you are ready to be sysadmin.

http://www.adminspotting.org/

Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery
Subject: ADMINSPOTTING
Message-ID:
From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary Barnes)
Date: 28 Jan 1997 14:49:18 -0000
Organization: Ripoffs R Us
X-No-Archive: Yes

Choose no life. Choose sysadminning. Choose no career. Choose no
family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose hard disks the size of
washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers and electrical coffee
makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose
fixed interest car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no
friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel
chair for your office in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose NNTP and
wondering why the fuck you're logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose
sitting in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web
sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away
at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup,
nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers
Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate. Choose your future.
Choose sysadmining[1].

Gaz
[1] It might fuck you up a little less than heroin[2].
[2] ObFootnote.
--

gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary "Wolf" Barnes) "Do not ask any lady to take wine,
until you see she has finished her fish or soup." - Hints on
Etiquette and the Usages of Society