Slashdot Mirror
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."
Most universities don't teach good system management. The CS departments are training developers and programmers. Since good SA's like stability and good developers like chaos the two normally don't mix. Does OSU have a SA degree program?
The main thing that people that age need to learn (both professionally and personally) is that Their Actions Have Consequences.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Young people with their heads on straight. Definitely newsworthy.
I know the whole "you young'un, you can't manage a server to save your life!" feeling and all that, but really... is managing a server, even an important one, really that hard - when you have someone to go to when you have questions? A lot of lab administration seems to be finding problems before they become a real problem, which is time consuming.
You may as well have a story about dental work done by *gasp* dental students and, lo and behold, they are actually doing a good job! Shocking. To think that young people could actually learn something. :)
OTOH, it's interesting to read about the difficulties he brings up. They're pretty ... boring, IMO.
It generally takes around six months for a student to feel comfortable with our environment.
Like most jobs?
Another challenge is the short turnaround with students, as we usually only have them for two to three years before they graduate. This creates a constant issue to ensure our documentation and training is honed.
Two to three years, that's not too short, is it? And it's interesting that it's an "issue" to him to keep their documentation good/honed. I hope the graduates are learning that documentation is a BIG ISSUE in real jobs, for exactly that purpose: if something happens to you, the business can't just stop for 3 months while someone else tries to figure out what you did :)
The members of the CS department at my college actually petitioned to have me take over as their lab admin. The incumbent staff admin was notorious for breaking things and making it a chore to use the systems. Despite the complaints against him and requests specifically to hire me on, the department chair kept the incumbent.
I found it all very amusing, especially since I'm not a CS student. I'm just well-known enough to the group. I'm also greatly amused by how often I get asked for help when I'm around there, specifically one case where a student was in a 390-something class. I replied, "We really don't know each other at all, and I'm not a CS student. What made you think I am a good person to ask?" He said he'd just seen me help with enough other people's problems... and so I gave him a hand too.
Long-windedness aside, my university only uses students to provide, "Cean the viruses off your personal computer," services.
SIG: HUP
Great that the university is giving these newbies a chance to get their feet wet before they venture into the real world. This type of opportunity is what i fine lacking while I was going to school and I had to search this type of opportunity out for myself.
One of the biggest problem I find when you first enter into the IT field as a student is that there is a lack of on the job hands on training. Students really need to be expose to hands on materials more to reinforce what they've learned in text books and labs.
I am in the upper bounds of that range. I do Sysadmin stuff in our corporation, though not as much as the Chief IT Manager. I do the cabling, I set up the racks, I make sure the UPS are tested regularily. All the grunt work a Sysadmin would do. I help with decisions on new network policies, and dealing with security and updates. Network Topology is something I wish I had a say in, but don't. I will on occaison, be called in to reboot a server, or replace a bad drive.
I had to learn the Help-Ticket system on the job, but really that was like a 5 minute breeze because most of it is common sense. (Ticket comes in, prioritize, assign, do)
I'm glad to see that younger people are getting into these positions, since I think they help push forward newer technologies and methodologies. It'll sound like I'm tooting my own horn here (and Maybe I am just a little :P) but we've got a dozen boxes in our server room plugged into the rack so that people from other branches across Canada can Remote in to access certain software. It's a nightmare to look at, and it takes up alot of space. The IT Manager isn't fully familiar with Virtualization, though thats something I was taught in school less than 2 years ago. I'm sure you can see where this is going.
All in all, the only thing holding back us young people from these positions is just experience. Almost any school you graduate from with a CS degree will teach you the fundamentals of system administration. However you can't exactly apply for that position with little to no experience (don't get me wrong, you CAN apply, but the guy who has 5+ years experience managing Windows Server 2003 is going to look a bit shinier).
It's good to have a Looong project like this to show you DO have experience. I went and switched from a CS Degree to simply an Object Oriented Programming because it was shorter and I enjoyed programming more, but now that I'm out here working I wish I had that education. (I know right, how did I land a Sysadmin/Technician job as an OOP grad? Funny story, ask me later). Anyways, If I could show my boss "Here's the webserver that I set up and maintained" I think he'd be more lenient with letting me handle things I know how to handle. It's frustrating when he mentions a problem and you know a solution but he won't admit its a good idea because you're fresh. That's more a problem with my boss though, and probably isn't a good representation of every manager out there.
They're a mirror.
They are server administrators, which means they probably look like the average slashdotter. Do you really want to see that?
While entry-level programmers may make a slightly higher salary than a similar systems administrator, over time there's a lot more upward opportunity for the sysadmin. Systems Engineering and Systems Architecture - being the guy that ties the network, the server, and the apps together, is a very in-demand skill and is something programmers will never have the opportunity to become. Programmers only make the big bucks when they have other specialized knowledge that's specific to the apps they are developing, i.e. finance, GIS, physics, etc..
I'm personally glad I made the decision 12 years ago to move into systems after earning my Comp. Sci. degree. I went from web app development for an ISP to Linux/Solaris/HPUX sysadmin, to Systems Architecure, to Info Security.
Sorry, there is no such thing as an 18-21 year old sys admin.
There are plenty of kids pretending to be admins that are 18-21 years old, but just because someone gives you root, doesn't make you an admin anymore than installing mysql and creating a table makes you a DBA.
Having root on a Linux box doesn't make you an admin, regardless of how ignorant you are of that fact.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
We're a rather bright spot on the university's record; we are the largest open-source datacenter in the hemisphere, and that causes a lot of donations to come in. Take it from Ed: http://osuosl.org/sites/osuosl.org/files/ed_ray.png Nobody will shut us down.
~ C.
I heard from one of the higher-ups that Gnome projects' names are more like an inside joke. "How can we make some of the best software out there and give them the most aweful names?"
The game.
I work for the OSU OSL.
Actually, we're more than a mirror. While mirroring is a major part of the services we provide, we also provide hosting for many projects' core infrastructure - Apache, Linux Foundation, Drupal, kernel.org, etc. Google is a major supporter of the OSL because we provide a place for projects whose needs have outgrown the more "off-the-shelf" structured hosting provided by Google Code or Sourceforge and need a more customizable environment.
As to the single point of failure concern - I disagree for several reasons:
It would take something more than a "pissed off dean" to summarily shut the OSL down.
-Greg
I'm in my fourth year working and studying at the Colorado State University College of Business. Student-facing systems are pretty much 100% run by students, who report to student managers, who report to the IT Director and a student committee representing students who pay the tech fees. It's worked remarkably well, and I've been in several roles throughout my tenure- Lab Technician, network engineer, sysadmin, security team lead, web developer.
In terms of the department's effectiveness, I would say that students receive a great value and enthusiastic service from their colleagues. The risk of system failure is pretty low since we have decent turnover and a hierarchy of newbie and more experienced staff. (It also helps having a good balance of student employees in the technical disciplines and the business administration major.) Everybody starts out with very little experience, and gets direct access to systems they wouldn't otherwise be trusted with. We put heavy emphasis on documentation and formal training requirements, but a lot of stuff is "throwing us in the lake and learning how to swim." I was 18 when I got the security team lead position, and later that week a horrible false positive in $vendor's antivirus definitions rendered every workstation in the college useless. The real-world experience of emergency response and dealing with managing a team and staying accountable to others taught me so much.
I value this kind of opportunity as something much more valuable than an internship, some entry-level jobs, or even my degree program. The job's flexibility with my school schedule and direct pertinence to my studies added several dollars worth of value to the decent student hourly rate.
Well, I haven't seen someone display such blatant ignorance while calling someone with a clue ignorant for quite some time, so I guess I'll set the record straight ...
That is an absurd thing to say, and the irony is that you claim to be a great sysadmin, but can't figure out that a good sysadmin doesn't have ignorant users (at least not for long.)
And how do you plan to accomplish that while leaving them ignorant? You'd be surprised how much happier users are when you actually know how to do your job and educate the users so that they understand why something has to be done the way it does.
Are you fscking serious? Why the hell do you think they came up with /etc/motd ? (Message Of The Day for those who don't know and are following along.) If you are doing your job right then users know when backups happen. They know what new software you are installing, and when; you have visibility.
Maybe he has people similar to you setting the bar ;-)
Non-disclaimer: I was a VAX/VMS system manager at the age of 22, having been professionally trained by DEC at their Burlington Training facility, and I have been involved in various aspects of technology from sysadmin, hardware and software development, SQA my entire adult life (I'm now "over the hill"). I have had to deal with idiots like the parent my whole life, and his/her/it's attitude is outdone only by phenomenal cluelessness.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Linus isn't affiliated with the lab. He works for the Linux Foundation, formally the Open Source Development Lab. The Open Source Lab also host's the rest of Linux Foundation's infrastructure in addition to master.kernel.org
99.99 of sysadmin'ing comes from experience, which young ones do not have, or are in the process of learning (90% of the time due to necessity, being the low person on the totem). the experienced ones know enough to know that experience isn't cheap.
99.99 of sysadmin'ing comes from experience
Right ... which is why we here at the OSL give them the opportunity to gain that experience in a real-world production environment while providing the mentorship they need. It dovetails nicely with the theoretical knowledge they're getting in their CS classroom work.
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.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256