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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.
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.
I had not thought much about it. I plan on retiring using Unix/Linux.
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.
http://foldoc.org/GCOS
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.
We have Flying Spaghetti Cabling.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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)
As for programming prior to gaining acces to UNIX, roughly 1980 on a school owned Apple computer, shortly after that, Commodore Pet 4032 and Commodore CBM, and in late 1982, a TI 99/4A.
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)
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
posts by authors with slashdot user numbers having only 5 or 6 digits.
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.
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.
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"
Ah - but the sawdust from your woodworking means you're still making things - excellent. Congratulations on a long and (sounds like) productive career.
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.
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.
Dude, why in the world are you an AC? Get a userid!