Slashdot Mirror
30 Years a Sysadmin
itwbennett writes: Sandra Henry-Stocker's love affair with Unix started in the early 1980s when she 'was quickly enamored of the command line and how much [she] could get done using pipes and commands like grep.' Back then, she was working on a Zilog minicomputer, a system, she recalls, that was 'about this size of a dorm refrigerator'. Over the intervening years, a lot has changed, not just about the technology, but about the job itself. 'We might be 'just' doing systems administration, but that role has moved heavily into managing security, controlling access to a wide range of resources, analyzing network traffic, scrutinizing log files, and fixing the chinks on our cyber armor,' writes Henry-Stocker. What hasn't changed? Systems administration remains a largely thankless role with little room for career advancement, albeit one that she is quick to note is 'seldom boring' and 'reasonably' well-paid. And while 30 years might not be a world's record, it's pretty far along the bell curve; have you been at it longer?
as a sysadmin!
I've only been doing it for 21 years. :-)
The only thing that hasn't changed is..nothing.
I started out running a Dec Mini-Vax about the size of a washing machine, only much louder...(we still remember the blessed silence in our office/server 'room' the day it was finally turned off.) using (IIRC) kermit to connect to it from my desktop.
Cut my unix teeth on a HP/Apollo franken-unix thing: part SysV, part BSD.
All the machines I am sysadmin for now are Linux VM's, except my desktop systems...which all run OS X....so, yeah, still using Unix.
Oh look a mouth breathing 600lbs 50 year old virgin living in his 80 year old mother's basement...still.
I'm not old enough to compete with her... Read my first Unix book in 1988. Was exposed to a Unix-computer for the first time in 1990. Got my own computer upon moving to the US (486, 33MHz) — and installed FreeBSD on it in 1993. That made me a sysadmin instantly, so I claim 22 years...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
'these people' are growing in counts of armies every minute.
Started with computers in 1980 as a Typesetter. Then a Timex Sinclair followed by a Color Computer and then an IBM. Professionally coding in 84. Building LANs and managing networks in 86. On the Internet at Johns Hopkins APL in 89 and managing 3+Share. Then 3+Open, LAN Manager, and Windows NT, then Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, and Linux at NASA. Now FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and Tru64.
Downloaded Slackware in '93 I guess with all the 3.5" floppies. Mandrake, Red Hat, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and still Slackware on my home gear (along with Windows and Apple gear).
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Did you upgrade to windows 3.11?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
..professionally.
DOS
NetWare 2.15 - 6
SunOS
Solaris
VMS
Linux 0.99pl12 - current
ISC Unix
OS/2
Unixware
Windows NT 3.51 - current
Nothing changes.
Your comment means only that you have no clue! I use Unix/Linux daily with high volume transactions and we have tons of scripts! I'd hire aa proficient Unix guy any day before I'd hire a Windows certified anything!
I automated my gui using powershell.
Now I don't have to do anything.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
and ghost of Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper might decide to choke this fool with a microsecond.
" with little room for career advancement"
Most jobs have few possibilities for advancement beyond going into management. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Its not like brain surgeons are bummed out they can't be something better.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I got my first UNIX sysadmin gig in '89. Had a Zenith Z29 dumb terminal off of a serial line to a Pyramid computer. We had Fujitsu Eagle disk drives that weighed about 300 pounds and had about 1 megabyte per pound of data density. They hung off off a Sun 180 acting as a file server. Backups were done directly to open reel tape. In that first job I once spent 3 days loading UNIX onto an AT&T 3B2. It came off of 8" floppy disks and I had to sit there and swap these things in/out for 3 days.
I later worked at Sun Microsystems as a sysadmin, '92-94. We worked with prototype Sparc Center 1000 and 2000 machines in our server room. They worked with trays of 1.3GB disk drives off of a differential SCSI board. The 2000 (code named Dragon) had a max capacity of 1 TB of disk. When your drives are 1.3 GB drives, that's a LOT of drives. All of the RAID back then was done in software with a Sun product called On-line Disk Suite. Worked pretty well. There were a lot of people at Sun who wanted to kill it in favor of Veritas Volume Manager, but it worked too well and just refused to die.
Command line? Oh c'mon. Of course we work at the command line when it makes sense. If you're not comfortable working at the command line, you should go back to managing Windows servers.
My employer gave me an Apple Mac to use, which I hate. But it's that or Windows, which I also hate. I much prefer Ubuntu running the Windowmaker window manager. The Mac is adequate as a desktop, but I'd never spend money on a product that expensive with a 3 year useful lifespan. After 3 years, most anything Apple won't work with anything Apple which is new, which is why people keep buying the latest Mac toys that come out. It's a great business model, one which Microsoft ran for years.
Computers are toys. I get paid for playing with toys all day long. It's not a bad way to make a living.
loves loves loves systemd
Clearly we should be running APP servers using APPS instead of LUDDITE command lines!
Apps!
Because God exists and there is only one God, that proves that operating systems are broken because there is not one controlling sysadmin that controls ALL local computer operating systems.
The PowerShell command line is the ONLY way to be useful and productive with current generation Microsoft Exchange Server.
I had not thought much about it. I plan on retiring using Unix/Linux.
Oh look a mouth breathing 600lbs 50 year old virgin living in his 80 year old mother's basement...still.
If I had mod points I'd mod this up as Informative.
I get so frustrated with people always having to analyze their datasets in some "app" and having a hell of a time sorting data in some special way, computing non-canned statistics in R, or just all the other ad hoc things that happen daily that the app maker never could have anticiapted. For sysadmin tasks a well tested perl script is so much more visible about what is happening than an app. I like flat files instead of data bases for the same reason. But I can see the virtue in these--keeps things nice and neat- just not very visible and hard to port or provision without some other app tha tknows how to do it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
First program I ever wrote was about 38 years ago, a 0's and X's game on an Wang 380 (programmable calculator from the late 1960's that used punched cards) but I have been working as a software developer professionally for about 36 years now.
"Seriously, command line days are great for reminiscing but nobody, but nobody could ever stay productive and employed in this day and age hammering away at a keyboard. "
I personally know several sysadmins who do stay productive and employed. And I know of several employers who won;t take me on because my command-line abilities have atrophied such I would need a year or more to catch up to minimal efficiency. There are times the command line is much more useful than most any GUI available. If I found myself having to be a sysadmin, I would be recovering my lost skills with sed, awk, grep, regular expressions, and probably giving in and readopting vim and emacs. I still cling to joe with wordstar bindings, god help me.
"Get over it. I did."
Sounds like you found another line of work. Good for you.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Sorry, but that's a relative term and until pretty recently probably meant the exact opposite of what we promote today. Managers used to be the person who lacked the ability to do any real and meaningful work. Not quite smart enough to be the accountant, not skilled enough to touch commodities, and not of enough financial wealth to own their own company. I will prefix this with the fact that there are exceptions, most often in our (technical fields). That said, a large portion of most managerial jobs is taking attendance, making schedules, and filing the paperwork which other people decide on (not making many decisions). Tedious and thankless? Sure, but not really rocket surgery.
While society has made some huge leaps forward, they have also taken some side steps which make no sense and backtracked in other areas.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's treated like plumbing: As long as it works, nobody cares and takes it for granted. It may be a lot of work keeping it tuned and preventing long-term problems with limited resources, but users and managers generally don't directly see or understand such effort.
Table-ized A.I.
Been a System Programmer/System Manager/Sysadmin since 1976. Only worked at three different places...not bad, nicht wahr?
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Must have been a Zilog System 8000. Probably a model 21, as that was dorm fridge sized. The 31 and 32 were the size of a full size refrigerator.
Ran a Z8000 series processor at 10 MHz, and had about 8MB (if you were lucky) RAM. The hard drives were about 40MB and had an SMD interface.
They ran ZEUS, which was Zilog's System III variant.
I loved ours.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I've been doing systems work of some kind since the early 90s. The technology changes a lot, but learning the fundamental concepts early on will allow any sysadmin to continue being productive even when entire platforms get swapped out from under you. Unix --> Linux, Windows GUI --> Windows PowerShell, Physical servers --> Virtual servers, Virtual on-site servers --> cloudy virtual servers -- all these transitions can be made successfully by falling back on the fundamental tasks of controlling access, dealing with failures, providing resources, etc. that are similar at their core no matter what you're running on.
The thing that trips up a lot of sysadmins is getting bogged down in the details of one particular platform or aspect of their job and not seeing the big changes that come up. For the right kind of crazy person, this job is actually fun. I hope I'm doing something like it years from now.
Oh well - the story about Gaby's test has gone missing. It was fun while it lasted but it shows when you are doing a test it's best to check which environment you are in.
Wouldn't be an article if she wasn't a woman. Don't be proud of doing drone work for 30 years.
It's treated like plumbing: As long as it works, nobody cares and takes it for granted.
Except when a pipe bursts the plumber is thanked heartily for fixing it. When a router goes down and nobody in the office can get any work done, the sysadmin is berated for letting it happen in the first place.
30 years ago, men and women competed for IT jobs based on their skills, not their genitalia.
Boycott sexist code.org.
I have been earning a paycheck doing IT work since 1996.
The biggest change that I have seen is the need to specialize. When I started, I was able to be a jack of all trades kind of sysadmin.
One of my bosses imparted the following wisdom to me. "To be a good IT professional, you need to understand systems administration, programming and networking." He was not implying that one needed to master all three of them. One just needs to understand enough about all three to be conversant about them with other professionals who might be experts in them.
These days, generalists are looked down upon. There is simply too much to know, and roles / job descriptions are too siloed. People are hired to perform a specific set of tasks or to have proficiency over a small portion of an entire environment. The larger the organization, the more prevalent this becomes.
Fuck, no wonder you posted anonymously, that's the least insightful comment I've seen on here in ages.
Was a mainframe systems programmer on IBM and Univac machines starting about 1972 or so. First Unix machine I worked on was a Callan workstation somewhere around 1981, followed by 68K Suns, Motorola VME buss systems (which we built from spare parts and installed Sys V on), Sparc Suns, then the usual Linux suspects somewhere around 99 or 2000. Sysadming wasn't my primary job, but somehow I was in charge of keeping them going. I did see a PDP-11 Unix machine in the mainframe room at Western Electric Greensboro, used the console's desk as a footrest while running tests on IBM mainframe front end systems in the middle of the night somewhere in the mid 70s. Asked, but they wouldn't let me fiddle with it.
... after 10 years as sys admin/help desk/various mix of infrastructure support roles. I chose development because I increasingly found myself automating my sysadmin tasks to the point that I had nearly automated myself out of a job. Recognizing that risk, I chose dev.
Quoting The refreshingly naive FA: "little room for career advancement"?? What an amazing understatement.
Being a sysadmin is a grave. Even more so nowadays, when a "traditional" sysadmin, albeit remaining as "largely thankless" than a coal miner, has no choice but shift into a devops figure, for which he or she must have turned overnight into a seasoned programmer: working on abstracted items in a completely different way of thought. Imagine you tried having sysadmins work Agile ten years ago: you would have been seen as mental.
Perhaps there is some sort of "return to the future" in late XXth century sysadmins turning back into programmers: from punch cards and Assembler command sets (late '80s) to connecting console cables and configuring OS services under /etc (late 90s) to programming microservices APIs in Go or ruby or Scala (today). Perhaps programmers are at the core of IT and should always have been, keeping white lab coats. Then Google was right all the time.
The fact is: you, my beloved sysadmin, worked hard like a car mechanic for decades, following a never-ending wave of change that will make today's knowledge and solid grounds turn into rubbish and muddy quicksand tomorrow. In the process, you mutated into a socially impaired keyboard-equipped squirrel. You "generally get noticed least when everything is running smooth" and got fired at the first outage. You will have lost enough contact with reality to miss any chance to grow in the career ladder. How about an elevator pitch in which you try to explain your CEO the inner functioning of the elevator's software or the reason why systemd is overblown rubbish that will ultimately kill the opensource revolution? I can tell: you won't get that management job.
After (just) 15 years sysadmin, the suggestion to a kid is: don't be a sysadmin, programmer or devops. Learn to be an excellent programmer if you like, know all hardware and software technologies as you please, follow your passions that may ever be handy, but don't let head-hunters know. In public, grow your soft-skills instead. Socialize. Be the salesman when talking to the venture capitalists. Manage and coordinate projects as if you had no clue of the technology underneath, without letting anyone know you do. Do an MBA if you want the extreme ride. Your might get lucky and end up with stunningly higher paychecks: you'll still be incredibly busy but much better rewarded (or, well, just rewarded), with a fraction of brain consumption. You may also get busted or decide to become a happy shopkeeper, that's life. But let others program and write ansible playbooks for you, and try to enjoy life under the sun instead..
And now, even the Mac and Windows people have finally realized that you need command-line tools if you're going to be productive on a large scale. I remember the agony of having three redundant deployment applications on Windows just to get to a 97% patch success rate and the joy of having to manually log in to every one of the 3% systems' G.U.I. (out of a 20,000+ station install base) to manually update/change them. I'm not sure how good their numbers are on Powershell now but, it's good to see them going in that direction, at least. Now, if they can only reign in that abortion called the registry; especially with its encrypted registry keys.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
My dad bought a TRS-80 in 1980 and didn't know what to do with it. His 7 year old son learned he could use something called BASIC to make that command line come alive and 35 years later I have been blessed with an astonishing digital career.
Hats off to sysadmins of all experiences levels everywhere, long timers and noobs alike.
Been doing sysadmin on Unix since minicomputers. Started as a Field Engineer on PDP11's and VAXes... Taught sysadmin for a while. Still can't figure out why but I seem to like beating computers into submission. Did SysV, BSD, SunOS, Solaris,Pyramid's OS/x and DC/OSx, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, Linux... Don't know why people think they're different things...
I used to do Sysadmin training for a mini-vendor for a while.
Pretty easy to transition from one to another back when companies were willing to train... The first exposure to AIX 3.23 was surprising, though.
You seem to be assuming that a "new" plumber comes in to fix it, which is typically the case for residents and small biz. If an org has in-house staff plumbers and a pipe breaks, the staff plumbers very well may get blamed. You obviously can't blame it on somebody who's never been to your building before.
Table-ized A.I.
First system I ever booted was a DEC PDP-8. I have actually loaded code with paper tape. Favorite system of my entire career to date was the VAX 11/780 running VMS. Thank you Dave Cutler. Now you kids get off my lawn ...
system manager root ---- the accounts I used 80% of my day
the computer room ---- where I was 80% of the time
my cube/meetings --- the place I was 20% of the day
mac/windows desktop --- the thing I used for documentation/powerpoint/email and web surfing
unix/vms/mvs/os-9 ---- my main operating systems
c/perl/fortran/+ --- the languages used
currently on a medical forced sabatical and working on personal computer projects.
bad systems problems start at the top (budgets/scheduling/manpower/etc), the sysadmin knows this...
bring time, money, and quiet voices, then go to lunch with the sysadmin.
the napkin drawing will be the outline of the solution. (one of my old bosses kept a collection of million dollar project's first napkin designs)
support & listen to your local sysadmin...
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
Started in 1985 as a sysadmin on a VAX 780 running BSD 4.1. Soon after that I was thrusted into the workstation world with Apollos and Suns. Touched a few SGIs, AIX, and other Unix workstations along the way. Then when Unix started hitting the datacenters (early '90s?), I moved to the server world and have been here ever since.
Karma: Bad
Indeed. Hammering away at a keyboard is the only way to do good sysadmin work. Replicating tasks using a GUI simply isn't practical.
A network of Apollo's running Aegis (later Domain/OS), HP's running hpux, RT's running AIX and PC's running Xenix. Also had to deal with the VMS cluster and the Novell 2.51/ARCnet cluster... Later it was SGI's and even a Cray YMP-EL98... But it's been embedded firmware for the last 15 years...
My first e-mail address had a bang-path. Get off my lawn.
I think it was just a few years after its first printing. I think the Unix Programming Environment book I bought in 1985 was still the first edition.
Funny hammer away at the keyboard is the only useful sysadmins, bash, powershell etc is great for break and fix sorts of things. Most everything else youre banging away at puppet/chef etc etc etc. If you're banging/clicking away as a sysadmin outside of wtf break fix or a dev place space (to figure out what puppet etc needs to make it look like) in that last 5+ years you're probably doing it wrong.
No sir I dont like it.
I spend a good portion of my work day using the command line and I make a pretty fair living at it. Just as I've been doing for 10+ years. In the last 3 years, my team has doubled in size and yet there's still plenty of work to keep me busy.
Of course, the future is never certain, but I'd say my chances of keeping this job until I retire (if I want) are at least 50/50. And despite the fact that I've not actually looked for a job in over a decade, I get 1-2 offers a month.
So maybe you should consider learning something. There are plenty of folks willing to pay you for it. They'll be even more willing to do so once you lose the attitude.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Oh look a mouth breathing 600lbs 50 year old virgin living in his 80 year old mother's basement...still.
The standard abbreviation for which is "APK".
I put the company I worked for on Usenet in 1982. (My "hello world" message is still available via google groups.) That was the point where I switched from engineering to systems administration.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
First introduction to unix was in 1983. Hacking with a local group we were wardialing and found several systems.
Hacked with several well known groups, LOD, NOD, Tacton, Even wrote a few files that are still up on the old hacking files archives.
First Job as a Jr. Unix Admin was in 1989 Working on an AT&T System V, upgraded to a SunOS system.
I ran Minix 1.5 at home and downloaded the initial kernel for Linux when Linus posted it to usenet.
Installed Slackware 0.99a and ran it at home developing a BBS using shell script.
Second Job was working as the lead Unix Admin at a startup ISP. (SunOS & BSD)
When they sold to another company and laid me off I went to work as a SunOS Admin/Solaris Admin. Worked for that company for another 4 years.
Went over to contracting jobs and have never looked back. Solaris, HP-UX, SunOS, AIX, Linux, SCO, Xenix, etc. I have experience in all of it.
In the last 8 years I have not had to find a job, companies call me to see if I am available. Networking is the best way to find a great opportunity!
Posting Anon because I really dont want my job to know I started by hacking Unix systems. lol
And now, even the Mac and Windows people have finally realized that you need command-line tools if you're going to be productive on a large scale.
Been bangin away on Macs for a very large value of "finally", as in when OSX came out. Too many things it does for what I do to not use it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Forced to be on winodws by the employer. Cygwin to the rescue. Most people think I am running a linux machine with dozens of shells all over the screens. I use grep, awk, sed, find, comm and join a lot.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That does not pay well vs the Amount of skill sets.
quite right, the systems that handle your money, insurance, communications, inventories of things your buy, are all admined by rooms of people either clicking and pointing on GUIs or moving holograms in the air with finger gestures or speaking into microphone.
Bwhahahaha, you are one ignorant fuck
Been doing this for almost 18 years and cannot see myself doing anything else. I moved from making great money in the NE to the south and making one third of my past salary, but still I chug on. I, too, am in love with the command line. Now, if only I could get Mutt to work well with Office365 email, I'd be set...
The product line I have helped develop over the last 15yrs is nearly all command line stuff with a web gui on top. It means that 99% of the C/C++ code base will build cleanly on linux, solaris, hp, aix and windows. We haven't started using powershell yet because some of our customers are still stuck on win2003. That's the "problem" when your project makes money, using new O/S features is a trade off between improved functionality and pissing off luddite customers.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I won't say whether my first UNIX predates hers, but I've certainly been at it long enough to share early experiences with her. I no longer keep my original ancient hardware, it's too bulky and unusable by now. But oh, my, when an old lesson from the first jobs or the earliest days comes back to haunt you and need explanation to the youngsters, it's gratifying. And when the old lessons from your first mentors can be passed on and shown to still be critical, and still valid, and have not been taught to newer colleagues in their certifications and coursework, it's especially satisfying.
My most gratifying "old-timer" experience in the last month was when a colleague did their Google search on a problem, found the top references based their solution and meeting presentation on it, and I pointed them to the follow-up where I corrected the original answer. This doesn't happen that often, but it's gratifying to see my early work still pay off. It was even more gratifying that my correction was at the bottom of the page of their first reference, and the datestamp on my quoted email message was before my colleague was born. They really should have read the entire thread before quoting it.
I hat to say this, but I was in the field that long ago. Women were pressured and harassed out of the field at every stage of education and employment. The ones who remained were _amazing_, and worth their weight in post-it notes of rootkeys, coffee beans, and pre-tested hard drives.
Changes I enjoyed.
"Imagine you tried having sysadmins work Agile ten years ago: you would have been seen as mental."
You don't know what you are talking about. Sysadmin has always been agile: it has always been about pipelining and automation. True: tools and mindset had a boom very recently among the masses (virtualization on x86 in the early 200x was key for this) but you can go to http://www.infrastructures.org... (back to 1994), or have a look at cfengine (back to 1993) to understand that agilism has been always the case.
Maybe your confusion comes from Windows *operators* that bastardized the term "system administration" so it looked like the kind of things they were doing back then (and even today, for the most part).
Not where I grew up, the 'manager' was the master tradesman/artisan, the person you are thinking of was his assistant, sometimes called a 'coordinator' or an "overseer". Sure any arsehole can shuffle task lists but skillfully herding cats is something very few people can do.
In 25yrs I've only encountered two people who did it really well, neither of them were me and one of them died after 40yrs in the business. My own attitude now is "no thanks, tried that", I really am content being the metaphorical "brain surgeon" in the GP's post. I also get on well with my boss(es) because I have some idea of what they are trying to do and don't take it personally if they occasionally ask me to wade thru sewerage to fix something.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I started on punch cards in 1972. Worked mostly with punch cards on a CDC 3400, 6600 and 7600, and with punched paper tapes on a 12-bit PDP-8 minicomputer in the 70s, and it seems like I've touched everything under the sun since then: Wang, CDC, Cray, DEC PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers, Data General 16 and 32-bit minicomputers, Tektronix (4054?), Prime minis, HP minis and workstations, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Sun, UNIX from AT&T, UNIX from many others, UNIX-clones before Linux, Linux, old Mac OS, new Mac OS, NeXT, Symbolics, and various DOS, CP/M, and Windows of course.
And, of course, whenever possible, a command line to rule them all. Even the old Mac OS had command line tools for sale from Apple and other vendors, primarily aimed at developers.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
Roughly 34 as systems programmer/sysadmin (things were kind of blurred in the mid 70s); Did my time on:
IBM 360/30 (new) (DOS)
Burroughs Medium Systems (B2500 and B3700) (MCP/V) (Pronounced Master Control Program Five)
Raytheon PTS 1200
Honeywell DPS-8/44\ (GCOS -3)
Honeywell DPS-6 (field systems; replaced the Raytheons)
IBM 4381 (MVS)
IBM 3090-200 J (MVS-XA)
IBM 9672-R1 (MVS-ESA)
And finally, starting in 1996 - IBM RS-6000 systems; got into storage area networks with these.
Retired in 2009; 34 years at my second employer, starting with the Burroughs systems. And yes, AIX LVMs rocked! Especially when the DBAs were showing up every other day needing more room in an Oracle filesystem (First cut on database size when we converted to SAP/R3 - 120 GB would last a year; 3 months later we were at 240 GB and waiting for the next shipment of SSA drives and shelves to arrive. We hit 580 GB that first year)
Started in November 1980 as a Programmer on IBM 360, writing Cobol for a life insurance co.
Had a few short term and contract jobs, then 7 years as a Senior Programmer, Analyst Programmer and Systems Programmer for a major bank 1985-1993. Finally settled into my current job as a Senior Analyst Programmer, then finally a Database Administrator for a not-for-profit health insurance company since 1993. All IBM mainframe (now Z series) and DB2. We've been told that we're moving to SQL Server within 5 years. I retire in 10 years - my boss (also my age) says we will still have DB2 when we both retire!
You want to foo a hundred million files? Go ahead and GUI that. You'll be working on it for weeks. I can run a command and let it run on its own in series or parallel, maybe even on multiple computers.
Bingo. My dad was one of several plumbers on staff at a factory. You can be certain that if a pipe rusted out due to a lack of inspections and decided to spew all over the very expensive presses there the plumbers would be in shit. Not that that means much because they had a union, but for certain fixing it wouldn't have made anyone thankful.
Debugged first program in ~ 1969 -- NCR NEAT-3 - can't remember the computer (3000 ??) ... ... later used appliance pc's - Tandy Model I, .... ... ..) ... ... :-( ... :-(
Later in '70's, when first micros appeared (Xitan General - shortly after Altair), spent time
dis-assembling & modifying Bill Gate's BASIC
Model II (a lot !), Model III, Model 100 (the first laptop...). TRS-DOS, CP/M, then M$ XENIX,
SCO XENIX, SCO UNIX, Linux
Been a long time - made good money for a large part of it
Still active, with clients running Linux throughout the company - on desktops (thin
and server(s)
SystemD is pushing me to BSD, though
If something doesn't change soon, Linux is dead
1985, Centix Operating System, booted over CTOS on the Burrough XE-550.
https://books.google.com/books?id=1mW5f8lXoEYC&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=burroughs+xe-550+operating+system&source=bl&ots=-fyVj98Ycq&sig=oLKhww7sa6Doq553Co1ELqsbvuA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMIwcj4o-OiyAIVkqiACh3yLQWY#v=onepage&q=burroughs%20xe-550%20centix%20ctos&f=false
After logging in to UNIX for the first time, I never looked back.
ROFL - wrong answer - obviously you're clueless. GUIs are for idiots. Command line still rules the highways and byways.
I was a programmer, not a sysadmin, though sometimes I was in small shops where everybody kinda did sysadmin. My first experience was in college in the mid 60s with a PDP-8 but I didn't really get serious for another 10 years. But, it was a good time to be in computing. There were lots of different companies trying out different things, and you weren't forced into specializations. I worked for small companies, big companies, scientific companies with PhD physicists and chemists running around, business companies in one place working on transaction software for things like a supermarket checkout line and in another on stock trading software, and software development companies writing parsers with Lex and Yacc. Sometimes, working on unix systems, I'd just grab the manual and leaf through the whole thing looking for functions to do what I was trying to do. Now there's all this specialization with vast APIs to learn! I feel lucky I was in the field when I was.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
on VMS machines. Once you got your ducks in a row, it was fairly easy - usually it was very easy. On Unix, however ... well, that's another story entirely ...
I started as a UNIX sysadmin and ended up a CIO with more than 1,000 employees+contractors. Sysadmin is a fantastic job (I loved it!) with vast opportunity for career advancement.
The old saw about CIO, however, is true: it stands for Career Is Over. It's all meetings, metrics, finance and public speaking. SysAdmin and SysEng was a blast. Be careful what you wish for, being a monkey in a suit banging the corporate cymbals ain't fun. Ever.
I learned to program in school in 1974, we used Fortran IV. But there were no computers at the school, so we had to write our programs out on special coding forms, post them via snail-mail to the regional computing center, where they punched them onto cards and fed them into their IBM mainframe - if/when they had time to spare at the end of their payroll runs. The resulting paper printout was then posted back to us. It took about 10 days to turn around a single run - and our course only lasted 8 weeks - so, as you can imagine, you learned to check every dot and comma!
I've been a programmer of varying degrees of seniority for the last 40 years - I resisted going into management, but I make a good living and have lead small teams, designed my own graphics chips, built a multi-million dollar laser projected graphics system, made arcade machines, written XBox games, built my own laser cutters and 3D printer - more projects than I can easily remember. I used the very first implementation of Bjarne Stroustrups C++ compiler (which compiled to C code) - and have loved C++ as my 'go-to' language every since.
Over that many years, programming gets a lot easier - I don't have many bugs anymore - and my interests tend to focus more on large-scale architecture and attacking the mathematical basis of image processing and graphics.
I still enjoy the art of programming - making something elegant, efficient, bug-free and useful - and doing it on time and in budget - is always a challenge.
www.sjbaker.org
Most people work from their 20s until late 60s. Since people who love their jobs stay longer?
Are we supposed to be impressed with this idiot?
Started out by a fluke as a COBOL maintenance programmer on a Unisys A series. Micro Focus was a godsend. On to Netware 4.1 and Windows NT 3.51 and "Yggdrasil" and Slackware. Scrounged around and put 2 systems together using Ethernet cards and coax T connectors running TCP/IP. Can still remember the feeling after seeing the first ping / reply. Never got a chance to try out OS/2. No one knew I was even running Slackware at work. But it was dev and when I built the first Intranet in '96 on httpd on SCO skunkworks people were blown away. Need I say people accessed it over a 64k frame relay I built to about 20 sites. Running a Clearpath and on to home built SANs to real Netapp to now VOIP (Cisco and FreePBX) and private cloud. Thought Sniffer PRO was manna until Ethereal and now WireShark. The feeling was giddy like when I discovered the MicroFocus animator. MPLS and VPLS. Linux Journal subscription since 1994. My only paid for magazine subscription.
Money was never a priority - but pays a mortgage and directly and indirectly puts food on the table for 5. Can I call my self a generalist?
I used to be a sysadmin but like many huge companies we just don't have them anymore. We have a helpdesk that does some sysadmin stuff but most of the systems are left to rot in a corner and is being replaced very five years. Data? We don't need no stinking data! If there is a move to a new system the old system is kept in parallel for a while and is then thrown out with its data.
Computer maintenance matter very little in the modern IT world...
posts by authors with slashdot user numbers having only 5 or 6 digits.
Any customer still relying on a non-supported server OS from 12 years ago SHOULD be dropped. The amount of work you need to do to cater to these lost souls is probably affecting your bottom line negatively anyway.
Chinks go in your armour, not on it.
At the bottom of the
The product line I have helped develop over the last 15yrs is nearly all command line stuff with a web gui on top. It means that 99% of the C/C++ code base will build cleanly on linux, solaris, hp, aix and windows.
Sounds like a good separation of the domain and presentation. I find thats the interesting difference between *IX and MS paradigm. You need design patterns in MS to make it stable however when you apply the same practices to *IX platform the application is *almost* indestructible. That's probably a part of the reason your application is successful.
We haven't started using powershell yet because some of our customers are still stuck on win2003.
I think it could also be called powers hell because, yeah it's great that there is a native shell for windows now however it has a long way to go before it is as elegant as even sh - let alone ksh, and bash. Don't get me wrong the object paradigm in ps is great but, it needs more work for it to come anywhere close to traditional shell script utility. *IX shell is just so easy and consistent. Smartest move MS made for a long time, even if they are still trying to work out why. Good that they will support ssh too.
That's the "problem" when your project makes money, using new O/S features is a trade off between improved functionality and pissing off luddite customers.
The irony being is with MS having such a tightly coupled UI makes it's greatest strength a weakness. The bar to fail on *IX is really high and you have to make a lot of really bad choices to get the the level of "technical debt" is an issue. Not bashing MS here by the way , just an observation of the differences in fundamental design of the OSs.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I've been doing UNIX since about 1974. I started out on research version 5 on a PDP-11, because that's the only architecture UNIX ran on in those days. v6 was the version that was much more widely distributed to academics, and v7 was the even more widely distributed update that led to the BSD derivatives.
v5 was pretty damn raw. There were no shell variables. "ed" was still written in assembler. Etc. Uphill through the snow both ways. Still, it was FAR better than any of the vendor OSes, no matter what people say about RSX-11. So I founded the first UNIX User's Group Software Distribution Center, purely so I could get my hands on all that goody-poo software. I also produced the very first T-shirt with a UNIX demon on it, for the Urbana, Ill. UNIX meeting - the first national meeting of UNIX users. I gave one to Ken Thompson, one to Dennis Ritchie, and kept two for myself. I still have them. If you've ever seen early USENIX T-shirts with a PDP-11 with pipes, demons, pitchforks, and a barrel labeled NULL, well, that was me (art by Phil Foglio to my design).
It's difficult to express the level of amusement reading this comment. It's like looking at a stray dog trying to take a shit on a lawn and just at the critical moment the sprinkler goes off and as the hapless creature jumps from lawn to lawn, more sprinklers go off as it is ejected from the neighborhood unrelieved.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Started learning Fortran on an IBM 1130 in grade 9. Started IBM 360 assembler in grade 11. First personal computer was an Apple II+ clone, currently use linux most of the time and boot into Windows to aply the updates and then get out:-). Worked in IT for 30+ years covering IBM mainframes, HP3000, HP-UX, PCs, Macintoshes, Univac and probably some other stuff for too short a time to remember right now. Languages included Fortran, Assembler (various), Watfor, Watfiv, GPSS, Algol, Snobol, JCL, RPG, Cobol, C, C++, Pascal, Ada and tiny amounts of BASH and Perl. Various database systems both hierarchical and relational, currently working on MySQL for fun. It was fun but I don't do much of it any more, I relax in the garden and create large amounts of sawdust by woodworking.
Im begin as Unix sysadmin at 1991 running SCO Unix in a Pentium 4 PC, Nice time at "Palacio de Computacion" La Habana/Cuba
7/10 You managed to get a few sparks and gave me a chuckle.
around 1988. The hardware was a Sun 3 (Motorola 68020 CPU), the console ran SunView (I think we installed X11 later). Shortly after that I began dabbling in Minix on an 8086 machine at home, later installed Coherent on a 386. Didn't try Linux until I bought a distro from SLS, it had 0.99pl14 and the box came with about 30 floppy disks.
On my next job I was an AIX admin. It was another 10 years before I was working with Linux full time.
CLI is great for flunkies to use for maintenance, keeps the lower class nerd busy thinking they are kewl, the important people have work to do and not fiddle dick getting command syntax perfect to replicate a mouse click
I've been at it about that long. My very first UNIX support role for pay was with UNIX System III in 1985, so yeah 30 years this year. Creepy.
I worked on other things before that though, just not in a perm role.
I am unix grognard.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
I started out as a programmer, and spent my first 10 years in IT doing green-screen programming on various flavors of Pick. I got my first taste of system admin'ing on a Sequoia running TOPIX, and then made the move to full time system admin on a DEC Alpha 8400 running Digital Unix and Universe. The first version of Linux I worked with was Red Hat 3, and have not looked back. I admin 50 servers today and none of them run a GUI, it's all command line using bash and Python.
Started coding for a living in 1980, added in doing sysadmin in the mid-nineties, so about 20 years of that.
mark "thank you, Aeleen Frisch and O'Reully"
24 years for me, started on a Netware 4.12 ThickLAN network running Banyan Vines.
yes I worked with vampire taps and token rings.
How little you know. Any environment, even Windows, has command line functions that are far faster than using the GUI.
I'd suggest you learn them, even your browsing of script kiddie archives would be improved. How do you think those scripts operate?
powershell is still command line.
even in a windows environment, when something has to be done fast CTRL-R, cmd, ENTER is how it all starts.
42 years.
so far. and still going.
Your doing it wrong