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The Usenix Association. They don't take sides. They promote technology and open standards while remaining vendor neutral. They promote all aspects of advanced technology, but are especially supportive of open source solutions. No organization has done more to legitimize us over the last twenty-five years.

• Most Improved Kernel Module: FreeBSD's Linux emulation module.

• Unsung Hero: In descending order:
  • Kirk McKusick, for his more than two decades of tireless service and personal sacrifices for our community.
  • Gurusamy Sarathy, Perl project release manager, responsible for bringing fork(2) to Microsoft ports of Perl and a million other things to make Perl code truly robust and portable between Microsoft and Unix platforms, a true Godsend for those of us forced to co-exist on both.
  • Malcolm Beattie, for trailblazing the Perl-to-C compiler, the Perl external byte-code interpreter, the first Perl/Tk implementation,threading in Perl, and safe blackbox compartments for mobile agents in Perl.

• Best Newbie Helper: Mike Stok from comp.lang.perl.misc. He is patient and kind, never chiding nor arrogant. He has been doing this job for many years.

• Most Deserving Open Source Charity: The Usenix Association. They don't take sides. They promote technology and open standards while remaining vendor neutral. They promote all aspects of advanced technology, but are especially supportive of open source solutions. No organization has done more to legitimize us over the last twenty-five years.

• Best Open Source Advocate: Larry Wall. He doesn't rant against anyone, tries to help everyone, and gives his code away for use by anyone, even Microsoft users. He doesn't restrict his good works to things that only benefit his friends. He doesn't preach, but lives by example.

• Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy: The newest version of the randomizing X screensaver. It's really great in a room full of people on acid.

• Best Unix Desktop Earcandy: The following entry in one's .Xdefaults file:

  *visualBell: on

• Best Desktop Theme: ShinyMetal

• Best Open Source-Related Book: In order of highest to lowest, all worthy of the award:
  • Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern.
  • Damian Conway's Object-Oriented Perl.
  • Elements of Programming With Perl by Andrew L. Johnson.

• Best Perl Module: Damian Conway's Class::Multimethods module for traditional OO in Perl.

• Best Apache Module: mod_perl; how can there be any question?

• Best Open Source Text Editor: The vim editor (vi improved), complete with its gvim graphical incarnation and its perl and python plug-ins.

• Best Deserving of a $2,000 Award:
  1. The late, great Rich Stevens's children's college fund
  2. Larry Wall's children's college fund
  3. Dennis Ritchie's retirement fund.
  (Perhaps those count as charities :-)

• Best Designed Interface in a Graphical Application:
  1. The eesh shell for controlling Enlightenment.
  2. The ddd debugger
  3. MacOS X's environment.

• Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application:
  1. The {Free,Open}BSD ports collection: being able to just cd and type make and have everything happen is the best thing that ever happened to third-parts apps.
  2. The make menuconfig directive for building Linux kernels.
  3. The v4.0 trn newsreader, with scoring and plug-ins.

• Best Dressed: Larry Wall, whether he's wearing Hawaiian shirts, tie-dies, or best of all, his outlandish, pastel-coloured tuxedos.

• Favorite Slashdot Comment Poster:
  1. Guy Harris
  2. Tom Christiansen
  3. Enoch Root
  4. Jay Maynard

• Favorite Slashdot Author: David Brin wins this one hands down.

• Best Slashdot Story of 1999: Eric Raymond's story about viruses on Microsoft vs Unix.

• Big Dumb Patent Bully: Amazon, followed by Unisys.

• Big Dumb Domain Bully: NSI, followed by Etoys.

• Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism: Slashdot.

• Cost of Living comparsions. (US only) This is huge. Very good reference.
  
• Salary Survey (US only) Nice, because they've been doing the survey for nearly 10 years, so there's data not only on the current situation, but also overall trends. (Good when negiotating your annual pay raise in a non-software company that doesn't realize that we geeks really should get more money. :-) )
  
• Salary Comparsions (US/Canada) (Credit to matman)
  
• Salary comparsions (US/Canada, mainly. Some entries for overseas.) (credit to smalltalker)
  
• Salary comparsions (UK only) (credit to GC)
  
• Salary comparsions (Netherlands only) Not in English, so good luck. :-) (credit to Riddles)
  
• Salary Survey (Ireland only) (credit to bigdaisy)
  
• InfoWorld Salary Survey (location unclear) (credit to The Evil Dwarf)
  
• USENIX/SAGE salary survey (location unclear) Requires registration.
  

http://www.sans.org/new look/publications/1998salarysurvey.htm

http://www.usenix.or g/sage/jobs/salary_survey/salary_survey.html

True, the specific name of the person was changed, but, amusing as this is, it's still inappropriate. The job of a support staff member is to help users, not judge them.

See SAGE and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the ACM for more on this subject.

Why should users be installing software?

In a network of Un*x workstations, applications can be installed once by a knowledgeable sysadmin and shared using NFS. Another option is to install on a master machine and mirror it periodically using rdist, rsync, etc. Or just run the program at the server and display the interface locally with the X Window System.

Remember, the network is the computer!

Of course this advice may not apply to standalone machines administered by newbies.

Also, get it in writing. Many organizations will back down if you make them spell it out. It will also help you if it lands in court. Good luck...

--

--

I would have expected to see a question like this directed to one of the sysadmin guilds you're probably a member of (what, you're not?). If you were a member of SAGE, you would be aware of the SAGE Code of Ethics. SAGE-AU has an equivalent code.

In the SAGE code it mentions:

System administrators will not exercise their special powers to access any private information other than when necessary to their role as system managers, and then only to the degree necessary to perform that role, while remaining within established site policies.

The usual path for this sort of stuff is to get the managers in question to publish a policy (even if it's something as crappy as voicemail to all employees warning them of the policy and the consequences of breaching it). It often helps to provide a draft policy to get them started down a reasonable path.
Then your tasks are clearly defined. Without a published policy you and your managers are walking in a minefield.

Keep in mind that the published codes are there to protect you as much as anyone else. If a manager tries to force you to act against your principles you have a recourse. As a member of a guild you can point to the published code of ethics and say "sorry, I cannot do that". "And neither will any other ethical sysadmin".

Whatever you do, get your instructions from management in writing.

Personally, as a sysadmin, I would not scan everyone's mail for porn, or religion, or anything without ensuring everyone knew it would be done. The trust of all your users in you rests in two things: "I could read you mail but I don't" and "If I do happen to see your mail, like when you have problems reading it, I do _not_ tell anyone else what's in it". Once you lose it, it's gone forever. If your users know what's going on, they can't consider it as you abusing your authority without them knowing. And if they know the company is doing something that just doesn't work, isn't fair, and basing the treatment of employees on it, they might well vote with their feet.

It's practically impossible to scan for porn, or religion, or Monty Python references, or anything else complex. Your company's policy is deeply flawed if they think it is, and it's up to you as a professional person to educate them about what is and is not possible. For example, ask them to define 'porn' in such a way that a machine can scan for it. Then ask them to define, say, "company sensitive information" and similar things.

IMHO - good luck settling this to everyone's satisfaction.

Nicolai

Howdy, I've worked for an ISP that was growing rapidly. We shot from 20,000 to 30,000 customers in a very short period of time. Mail broke almost over nite. There was no warning sign. One day we had lots of capacity, the next... nothing. And we had a fairly beefy server: dual proc Sun Ultra Enterprise 2/300 with 1 gig of ram and gobs of disk. When it had it, the load would shoot up over 20 for hours (and we had 20 set as our sendmail throttle limit). We tuned and screwed around with the pop server and fixing sendmail, but it usually only bought us a week or so. In the end we rearcitected. The solution we came to is highly scalable, very reliable, and fairly easy to do. It was inspired by what Earthlink did a few years back (if you're a USENIX member see her e.)

Basically, we nfs mounted our users mailfiles so they were accessable across multiple machines. The biggest problem you run into here is file locking, but NFS will handle most of it for you... no need to implement .locking or anything like that. Contention is very low for user files. Each box runs cucipop for POP and sendmail for mail, each using very stock configs. We played with IMAP for a bit, and UW-IMAP is about the best around (in the free world, anyway).

We added 2 more similarly equipped mailservers. This gave us N+1 redundancy. So, if a server fails, we still have enough capacity that we don't have any interuptions... we just take the bad server out of the round robin in DNS. (BTW: _all_ servers in this must have an A record for mailhost.domain.com... no aliases.. read the RFC). The NFS server was running on a RAID, so the only real single point of failure was the NFS server itself, not disks or mailserver. To get NFS redundancy, you pay a LOT of money. But, a good NFS server should run for years with a decent load.

So the end result is a care free mail architecture that should run forever and we can scale by just dropping in a new machine when we run out of capacity. Use something like scp and CVS to keep all your conf files the same and you're off to bigger and better projects.

Questions? pls feel free to contact me. Later

What I'd like is if SAGE could offer stuff like a credit union, medical insurance, discounts on stuff besides ora books ;)..

Kind of like a guild without a political agenda, more like a community, or even nation.

Us SysAdmin types already have a trade organization in the form of SAGE, the System Administrators Guild, a part of USENIX. I think forming a SAGE lobbying group and/or PAC (political action commitee) would be one way to go. Of course we need a good portion of the SysAdmins out there to join and support us... It probably wouldn't hurt to have IEEE and ACM start PACs representing their members as well. I'm just surprised that all of these trade organizations were ignored by Katz *and* the Slashdot readership. I only saw one post mention the ACM! Wow.

If the license for XFS is any sensible (i.e. a true Open Source license), this is the single most intelligent thing SGI could have done to score with the Open Source movement. Linux is in dire need of an Journalling File System and XFS is one of the very best of this flock.

Their white paper on XFS explains how XFS is different from conventional file systems and what they did to it to make it fast with very large files as well as with many, many small files (SGI is not Open Sourcing their GRIO capabilities, which together with RT scheduling would make Linux a serious multimedia contender).

If you are a USENIX member, you will be able to download the Sweeney paper Scalabilit y in the XFS File System from the USENIX server. It was published in the Spring 1996 proceedings of the USENIX, so you may also read it in your Universities library.

For example, the BSD groups have been so strapped for cash that they can not even afford to manufacture their own CD ROMS anymore.

Do you have any evidence to back this up? The story cited in another posting says only that they're "providing grants to the OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Debian Linux development projects, to support each of them in issuing new releases.", and says that this is "because CDs of their distributions will be given away for free at the Usenix Technical Conference in June".

If the continued existence of the BSDs (or of Debian GNU/Linux, for that matter) makes you unhappy, I wish you many years of continued unhappiness....

Usenix subsides developement of the *BSDs and Debian because CDs of their distributions will be given away for free at the Usenix Technical Conference in June (I submitted this story to slashdot, but well...).

All of them are non-commercial organizations who rely on donations solely. But this doesn't mean that they are at the brink of collapsing. The term 'charity' is not just false, it was used in an inflammatory sense here.

That's why.

belbo

Usenix subsides developement of the *BSDs and Debian because CDs of their distributions will be given away for free at the Usenix Technical Conference in June (I submitted this story to slashdot, but well...).

All of them are non-commercial organizations who rely on donations solely. But this doesn't mean that they are at the brink of collapsing. The term 'charity' is not just false, it was used in an inflammatory sense here.

That's why.

belbo

This interview, or at least a majority of it was previously published in the journal of the USENIX association, ;login:. It is an excellent piece, and I do recommend reading it, but it did see print before this site. Just another reason to join USENIX for all of you.

Reasonable rates for individuals, and even better if you can get your current employer to pay for it.

The yearly conferences (USENIX, LISA) are great, and there are many Linux supporters (and detractors) present. Great if you can go; I missed it this year.

Other than that? Read O'Reilly books, read man pages for fun and, when you need to, visit the Scary Devil Monastery.