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?

Comments

Well for once I don't feel ancient

[bjohnson]

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.

Re:A girl sysadmin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look a mouth breathing 600lbs 50 year old virgin living in his 80 year old mother's basement...still.

35 Years Coding and Admining

[Bigbutt]

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]

Re:You know what's wrong with the world?

[behrooz0az]

Did you upgrade to windows 3.11?

Re:You know what's wrong with the world?

[NatasRevol]

I automated my gui using powershell.

Now I don't have to do anything.

Re:A girl sysadmin?

[laurencetux]

and ghost of Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper might decide to choke this fool with a microsecond.

Been at since '89

[russbutton]

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.

Re:Been at since '89

[russbutton]

I have a friend who had a 4 year old Mac laptop. He was big into recording his own music with ProTools. When he got a new iPhone 6, iTunes wouldn't work with it. He was instructed to upgrade Mac O/S, which did get his iTunes working but then broke ProTools. 4 years of recording work was lost unless he purchased a new ProTools license.

Another friend had a Mac Laptop old enough that she couldn't upgrade it to the current rev of Mac O/S. When she purchased a new Airport Express, the version of the Airport Utility on her laptop wasn't compatible. She had to borrow an iPad from a friend to manage the Airport Express, which is just a home router. Every other home router on the planet is managed through a web browser GUI, but Apple makes you use their proprietary utility and that's how it is with everything Apple. It's all proprietary and you pay through the nose for it.

I run a hi-end audio system at home and for a music server, I have a 10 year old Intel laptop running Ubuntu using the free, open source Banshee music server/manager. Nobody leaves my home without envy after hearing my rig. Linux software works fine on older gear and doesn't obsolete itself the way Apple products do.

36 years here.

[JustNiz]

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.

I've been at it a while....

[VAXcat]

Been a System Programmer/System Manager/Sysadmin since 1976. Only worked at three different places...not bad, nicht wahr?

The Zilog mini computer...

[sconeu]

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.

Fundamentals never change

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Almost 20 years

[dave562]

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.

Re:Some of us still dream in perl

[TheReaperD]

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.

Re:22 years

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

39 years and counting

[ChesterRafoon]

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 ...

1978-2007+

[randalware]

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...