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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the modern tension. Old School folks want to understand how things work and the new school just wants to run applications some expert wrote and not worry about the details. The latter is more productive when it works.
But, the former is needed when it doesn't work.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Since 1991:
System 6/7
MS-DOS
386BSD (no, not BSD/386... 386BSD, Jolitz's version)
Windows 3.11
Solaris
IRIX
AIX
Linux/Windows Server 2012R2
What has changed since 1991:
1: More reliance on networks for security. Most places, if the firewall or core fabric get compromised, everything is hosed. Since Windows usurped Solaris as the primary Internet based OS, it pretty much is assumed hosts will be compromised or misbehave.
2: Less interest in what is happening at other sites. Used to be that if someone at a.com had an attack coming from them, email to postmaster@a.com or a phone call from the InterNIC record stopped it in the tracks (with the user being properly LARTed.) People even had identd so if a misbehaving user was causing trouble, other remote sites would know who it was... which kept IRC sane for a long while.
3: The back-turning on security. Used to be virtually every company took security seriously. Now, unless someone rm -rfs /ifs/data/* on the core Isilon cluster, nobody gives a rat's ass, since security has no ROI.
4: How shitty IT people are treated. Sysadmins used to be treated with some respect; basically the priests of the temple of Syrinx. Now? Viewed as fungible with cheap H-1Bs supposedly able to do what they do, except cheaper and 100% loyal (or they get deported).
5: The offshore fetish. This is sort of equivalent to an enema fetish or vacuum bed fetish, except more messy. Move it offshore, even though it causes major delays and code quality issues with development, the initial costs are cheaper.
6: Pertaining to #5, the fact that code quality has gone to crap. What would be an in-house version never seeing the light of day is now a pre-release candidate. "If it builds, ship it", is the motto now.
7: No interest in backups. SANs are reliable, but it isn't tape, and it is only a matter of time before some hacking group starts purging SANs as a matter of course. Yes, the controllers are behind a management network, but there is always island hopping and unknown bugs. RAID isn't backups, replication isn't backups (it replicates the "rm -rf /"), snapshots are not backups, the only thing that are backups are copying to media that can be stored offline with 0 watts needed (other than HVAC/environmental items.) This already has killed a local company here in Austin when someone knocked their main servers offline.
8: The fact that if you even have a -hint- of being depressed or anxious, you will be fired -stat-. So, you have to always pretend to be 100% "sane". Someone dies in your family and you are bereaved? Grounds for termination. Again, it is an offshoot of #4.
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.
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
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.
Sorry to hear #8, none of the IT companies I have worked for in the past 25yrs have had that attitude, companies ranged in size from IBM down to a three man startup.. As for #4, I spent 15yrs in blue collar work before stepping inside an office, so I knew how to handle arseholes before I started. The working conditions I have now are light years ahead of any blue collar job.
Hard work or otherwise I know that I'm lucky to be in my position, having spent time as a member of Australia's "working poor" I think a lot of the people who haven't had that experience simply don't appreciate their good fortune.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
"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.
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)
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).
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.
Thats why they keep us around. I work with several of the click it and go people. But when something breaks, all eyes turn to me.