Managing Young Sys Admins At Oregon State Open Source Lab

mstansberry writes "Lance Albertson, architect and systems administrator at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, uses a sys admin staff of 18-21-year-old undergrads to manage servers for some high-profile, open-source projects (Linux Master Kernel, Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and Drupal to name a few). In this Q&A, Albertson talks about the challenges of using young sys admins and the lab's plans to move from Cfengine to Puppet for systems management."

Comments

Re:Especially if they are training developers

[jimbobborg]

Really? I've had the OPPOSITE experience. I've had to fix more crap done by developers who thought they could do sysadmin work than I have dealing with other SAs.

Re:single point of failure?

[phoenix0783]

They're a mirror.

Yes it is.

[Toze]

An admins job isn't just 'make things easy on users'.

Yes it is. It is an admin's job to make things as easy as possible on the users over as long a period as possible. That is why backups are made; so the users don't have to redo all their work if there's a failure. That's why there's firewalls; so the users' machines don't get infected and their network isn't crippled. Without an admin, small organizations can chug along until something breaks (and they have to contract an admin to patch it), but life isn't easy. A full-time sysadmin for a company or a department has only one purpose; to make things easy on the users.