The Decline and Fall of System Administration

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia questions whether server virtualization technologies are contributing to the decline of real server administration skills, as more and more sysadmins argue in favor of re-imaging as a solution to Unix server woes. 'This has always been the (many times undeserved) joke about clueless Windows admins: They have a small arsenal of possible fixes, and once they've exhausted the supply, they punt and rebuild the server from scratch rather than dig deeper. On the Unix side of the house, that concept has been met with derision since the dawn of time, but as Linux has moved into the mainstream — and the number of marginal Linux admins has grown — those ideas are suddenly somehow rational.'"

Comments

Gee, ya think?

[edremy]

Let's see. When I have a security or performance issue I can

A: Pay a bearded guy in suspenders for hours while he incants various arcane phrases like "sudo" and "grep" and hope that he actually manages to clean up the problem at the end, or

B: Press a button and have a factory fresh install in seconds.

Assuming that you have a decent build done first (Pay the bearded guy big for that) why on earth would *anyone* pick A? It's hardly just Unix- we're a Windows shop and we're heavily virtualized because it makes sense from so many different angles- security, load balance/failover, ease of setup, etc.