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Common Traits of the Veteran Unix Admin
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia offers a field guide to understanding your resident Unix veteran, laying out the nine traits common to this grizzled, hardcore set. From not using sudo, to wielding regular expressions like weapons, to generally assuming the problem resides with whomever is asking the question, each trait is key to 'spotting these rare, beautiful creatures in the wild,' Venezia writes. 'If some of these traits seem anti-social or difficult to understand from a lay perspective, that's because they are. Where others may see intractable, overly difficult methods, we see enlightenment, borne from years of learning, experience, and overall, logic.'"
vim? svelt? Puhleez. When not using ed(1), Real Unix vets use Bostic's One True vi, not some fagged-up Vegas showplace of an editor like vim.
Really? When your job is entirely about being root, sudo is just getting in the way. I happen to have run systems in a serious environment, and we never used sudo. I would say if you have something to do that ISN'T root, you sir are teh nub.
You're both wrong, I'm right.
Not stupid at all. This guy is into root cause analysis as a process of understanding faults and finding lasting solutions. (See reference to "bandaids".) Covers up your tracks until the next crash. A fully functioning fault-free system working as designed should not require a reboot except for the cases outlined. Unless unix systems aren't as reliable as people like to assume...
Really. I consider it a sign of inexperience and an indicator that the admin has never had to clean up after someone else screwed something up as root. That may be the case if you are super meticulous and you've been the only admin everywhere you've been, but no serious environment only has one root level admin and I have yet to meet anyone who was really good and super meticulous all the time.
I'm doing sysadmin, maybe one out of 20 commands I type *have* to be run with root access. If I am doing them all as root then there is a much greater chance of making a mistake and committing that system destroying action or, even worse, doing something subtly bad that nobody knows about until later when it's too late. It also makes me think twice (instead of just once) before executing that command as sudo.
Sudo logs commands that were run, by whom, and when. Even if I didn't care about whether I was root all the time or not, having a log of what was done with that access can be an indispensable tool when doing system troubleshooting. It's also a handy way of telling if someone screwed something up or if j00 wuz pwndz.
To me, running around as root and not using sudo is like using vi to look at a config file you have no intention of editing or similar. It's too easy to slip up and do something wrong once you get "in the groove". Add a page at 4am to that or a situation where you're at the tail end of a 30 hour emergency maint and it's beyond easy to screw things up.