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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.'"
"they punt and rebuild the server from scratch rather than dig deeper."
From personal experience this is normally due to management jumping down our throats to simply "get it done" which unfortunately runs counter to our inquisitive desires to actually solve the problem.
I suspect it's the end result of pressure to get more bang for their bucks in a tight economy, but that's pure speculation. It really could be a trend of the times.
There are a lot of cases where pressing the button means that the problem will go away...for a few weeks. It will work right until you hit the same conditions that caused the problem in the first place. Suddenly, your using the refresh to cover up either a poor implementation, or a standing bug, and it isn't going to go away until you call that guy in suspenders.
The real solution? Reimage the production server to just get it working, then you dig around on the dev server until you find out what's actually going on.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
The real solution? Reimage the production server to just get it working, then you dig around on the dev server until you find out what's actually going on.
Exactly.
If the machine is in production it needs to be working. You don't have time to dig around and find the root cause. You need it to work. Now. If you've got a virtualized environment it is trivial to bring up a new VM, throw an image at it, and migrate the data.
Then you take your old, malfunctioning VM into a development environment and dig for the root cause, so that you don't see the same problem crop up on your new production machine.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
That's assuming your new tool that's vitally important actually has a man page. Very little is documented as well as it was 10 years ago.
I'm not sure I buy everything in TFA, but have to admit to a certain extent this phenomenon is real. I've noticed, however a tendency to regenerate an instance, and when it doesn't work regen it again, and again and again because the purposely overextended and/or undertrained admin doesn't have time to figure out that the problem is in his template or due to something external like a dup ip. Come to think of it, this type of endless cycle seems to be fairly common in the Windows world. I guess we've caught up.
Sometimes the user has to diagnose the problem themselves, which is a win for the IT manager because the time didn't come out of the IT budget.
I'm hoping that at some point these practices will be recognized as the false economics they are. But I'm not holding my breath.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This whole argument is retarded. I always pick the most appropriate response to the problem at hand. If your server is hosed and not booting, I don't have time to mess around with some Knoppix DVD, trying to figure out exactly where in the boot process it is dying. Especially if you have nightly backups! Sometimes a clean sweep and restore is perfectly acceptable and reasonable. Why even sacrifice downtime trying to troubleshoot an issue that could be resolved within minutes?!
Now, if it happens again the following night, you do have a deeper problem and should investigate it further, because constantly restoring the machine is now the inefficient part in the process.
It's like we've lost common sense in favor of our technical ego.
... documentation for a GUI, if it exists at all, is often useless..,
How true. There popular explanation of the difference between a CLI and a GUI is that CLIs are so complicated that you need a manual to use it, whereas GUIs are so simple and intuitively obvious that no manual is needed.
Of course, the reality is that this attitude allows vendors to supply GUIs without any "unnecessary" manuals, but make the nested tree of windows and menus so deep and complex that nobody can ever remember where everything has been hidden, and there are no good tools to help you find something that you know is in there somewhere.
Meanwhile, the people who build the CLI know that nobody can ever remember it all, so they include tools for finding your way around. They also tend to make the defaults for the commands fit the most common cases, so you don't have to use the manuals all that often. And most tools have a -help option (though they can't quite agree on how to spell it), to provide quick reminders. And the CLI includes a current directory, search paths and aliasing, so you don't have to remember full paths to everything.
One of the ongoing frustrations with every GUI is constantly seeing a new window pop up, which is positioned back at the root directories, and I have to laboriously poke at things to get down to the directory that I'm working in. Then, when I do what the window was opened for, it closes, all that navigation is lost, and I have to do it all over again the next time I want to access a file in the same directory.
GUIs may have some aesthetic appeal (aka "pretty pictures"), but they remain the slowest, clumsiest way to use a computer that we've yet developed. But I trust that people are working on finding ways to make it even clumsier and slower. This seems to be happening with the "cloud" approach, for example.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Some of the comments here remind me of a post on a woodworking board a few months back. Essentially, the poster was lamenting because he had to fire a guy because he couldn't afford to keep him... Not because of the economy, but because the guy was an absolutely inflexible perfectionist. He'd spend $300 worth of time on what should have been a $60 job... The guy was a hell of a woodworker, at home in his own shop, but just couldn't adapt to a production environment.
This isn't about Windows vs. Unix. This is about admins not understanding their job is to get production rolling again, not to satisfy their obsessive need to understand every problem or their need to satisfy their ego. ("I'm a UNIX admin dammit, I refuse to use habits that make me look like a Windows admin" or it's equivalent is a refrain modded up again and again here on Slashdot.) If a reboot or a re-imaging fixes the problem, that's the right solution. If it doesn't, *then* you dig deeper.
That, is entirely a matter of opinion.
No, it doesn't. Your comment assumes that an interface should *have* to be learnt, to be easy to use.
No, the CLI appeals primarily to people who like to focus on memorising semantic minutiae and believe that doing so is, in and of itself, a productive endeavour.
The implication that GUIs are only used for "trivial" tasks is ridiculous on its face.
There is nothing unique to Windows, or even computers, about this. Do you know the intricacies of how your car works ? How about your blender or oven ? Could you fabricate a new bed or sofa from raw materials, and without modern tools ? Do you grow your own produce ? Could you butcher a cow or chicken ? Could you set a complex fracture or create your own painkillers ? Can you brew your own beer ?
No, it's nothing like that at all. One is an example of financial irresponsibility and the other is simply realising that you do not need a deep and intricate understanding of a given thing to use or take advantage of the services or benefits it provides.