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The Life of the Sysadmin
Manuka
sent us a pretty nifty little story from SF Gate that talks about those
heroes of the wodern workpace:
The Sys Admin.
Talks about their charachteristics, their responsibilities
and the lack of respect they get sometimes. Kinda cute.
And you sysadmins out there should show this to your
bosses and ask for raises *grin*.
Look it up. It's in the "S" section in the dictionary.
Nobody gets a PhD for the money. /I
ROFLMAO!!!!
MC
Uhm. Hello? What makes you think that sysadmins are not capable of programming? You're a very closed minded individual for judging people by the job title they hold.
Its not a pretend thing at all. Every troubleshooing job is greatly enhanced by a knowledge of it. I think everyone in an IT support role should understand it. -- especially how TCP/IP and Ethernet maps to it. Hell, even the uesrs should understand it a bit. That would stop them from saying, "My hub's collision light is flashing a lot and I think it's corrupted my Excel spreadsheet."
I'm 29 now (the "incident" occured when I was 27-28). As far as punch-cards and Fortran goes, that was around 1979, which would have put me at around age 9. I'm wasn't trying to imply that I was a Fortran genius (far from it!), but that I was very comfortable around computers (a vast understatement), and that this clod not only was treating me a like a moron, but that I probably had more far more computer experience than he had.
It reminds me in a way of the occasional cocky young grad-student (we're not in a cs or ee department, BTW). A quick quip by one of the older professors of "When I was your age, we programmed using soldering irons" is usually enough to put them back in their place (which is a relationship of equals, not of hot-shots and peons).
You know, corporations charge as much as they can get for a product or service, and you don't hear the caplitalists complain about that (unless they have monopoly power, and even then, we see them getting away with it.) You never hear that we need "less corporations, not more." Why not?! Why do you say we need less unions and not less corporations?
In my opinion, unions are no worse than the large corporations. The fact that they are portrayed as evil or "greedy" shows how much the major corporations have used the media to brainwash people.Union bad, greedy; Giant Corporation good, innovative.
Go read "The Concrete Jungle" by Sinclair to see what life is like without unions. You'll find a very brutal reality where human labor (and really, human life) is used cheaply.
. . . because I assume that my fucking socks are wet. Deal with it.
"What was your username again?"
See the asr faq.
If your boss reacts and responds in this way, dump the parasite and look for a better place.
If the sysadmin job is full time, then that just means you need a better sysadmin.
Well maintained systems need little upkeep short of backups and minor tweaks. Sysadmin work should be part-time or additional duties to a real job.
Been there, doing that.
Out of 8 net admins, five have left.
Out of 10 senior sysadmins, four have left (or are leaving, and one of the remaining is a co-op student).
That's 18 -> 9 senior-level people.
We are rapidly getting to the point where as things start to fail, we will have no idea how to fix them. Part of me really wants to see how badly the place falls apart, without us even trying. It's almost scary to see how much each of us was carrying by ourselves. Too much to document, that's for sure! So with each person, more and more intellectual property falls into decay. I pity the new people that will have to figure all this out!
Luckily, I'm going to a better group in the company, with managerial support all around. The only thing I regret is some of the teammates I'll be leaving behind.
The best major I can think of is Business Administration with emphasis on MIS. Sys. Admin /year)
is not just technical, but also social interaction. I think a Business major can
do lots of good for you if YOU APPLY yourself.
But yes the people who posted here
are right you can pretty much major in whatever
you want. (xcept 4 nursing or something)
Our Sys. Admin at work got her AA degree in
a foreign language (Spanish I think) and can
use that knowledge to serve the Spanish
fluent employers at work.
Also consider taking an internship with a
startup business preferably where you can
learn some Sys. Admin skills. I think
http://www.listfoundation.org should have
a lot to offer. Oh yeah, don't take those
Certification courses unless you actually
are willing to learn the material. Most
people I know of taking the MCSE are one
of 2 things: 1.) They've been in the
workforce for so long the MCSE material
seems second nature. These people just
want to increase their credentials through
paper. 2.) These types "think" its just
that easy to land a high paying job in
just a few months. Sorry, but the only
job I can think of for them is tech support
or customer service. Though it still pays
well. (around 15k - 30k
This is a direct result of quotas. Too many people handed a job they can't handle because we need to keep the gov't off our backs for not meeting a sex/skin color count.
Not enough Hedy Lamars (not just an actress, but a mathematician with scads of patents), and too many Madeline Albrights and Hilary Clintons.
And I add Hilary not because she wanted national health care, but because she totally destroyed the credibility of a policy she advocated.
he said he was 28 when the incident occurred, some unspecified time ago.
i'm 30 and i never used a card-punch in the 1970's, but i saw 'em in action. dad was an academic and took me to the computer center on campus. way cool. of course, here i am 20-odd years later still staring at a f*cking computer
What makes you think that sysadmins are not capable of programming?
What makes sysadmins assume that all users are morons? (Including those who are a lot brighter and more knowledgeable than they are) What makes sysadmins assume that nothing that a user asks for every really needs to get done? Gee. I dunno.
Are there good sysadmins out there, who make all my generalizations look pretty weak? Yeah, I used to know one.
You're a very closed minded individual for judging people by the job title they hold.
No, I'm judging the people I've known by the things they've done.
Regarding certifications of sysadmins.
Currently you have your Novell and MS certifications for Novell & NT admins. SAGE, the Systems Administrators Guild, is working on a more general sysadmin certification. Supposedly there are *4* separate groups working on Linux sysadmin certifications.
Michael R. Brown
SAGE member
When you go to college, work in the computer labs. Take a programming course or two. If I had it to do over, I would probably major in cs, but you can major in whaterever the hell you want. Do yourself a favor though, take math classes through linear algebra.
More like Canadian geeks go to the US because Canadian pay and taxes suck.
I totally agree with the last comment. Getting a fancy degree does not mean anything if you cant fix real world problems that appear in the workplace.
"I have to say no all the time when somebody sends out an email that they think is wrong or stupid and then call up asking me to delete it from everybody's mailboxes. That would mean I'd have to go poking in everybody's mail. You have to say no in that situation, because a sysadmin can be held liable for violating people's privacy."
Umm last time I looked, most companies consider the computer systems theirs. They can poke wherever they please, your consent nonwithstanding.
I have. Probably a lot more than you.
You're probably right, but pissing contests prove nothing nor does greater volume indicate greater understanding.
That wasn't intended as a "pissing contest" sort of remark. In retrospect, I can see that it was one anyway, and for that I apologize. I really have read a buttload of Rand, though. Enough to be confident that I'm responding to what she said, not what people (especially her disciples
It's true that sysadmins don't "create" in Rand-ish terms, but they're definitely as much architects as Howard Roark or Peter Keating.
You'll have to give me an example.
don't be so closed-minded about Rand
I'm not closed-minded about Rand. I'm a former Believer, now apostate. I've been there and back, and I don't buy her logic, nor the axioms she starts with. Tangentially, most of her followers remind me of Moonies, and that bothers me, too (not that it means she was wrong about anything, though it is a bit odd that she defined "people who think for themselves" as people who absolutely, unswervingly agree with Ayn Rand about every single thing she ever said. IMHO that's a danger sign).
Seems to me that American computer geeks are just a little cooler than Canadian computer geeks. ;)
If you worked for a living, you'd have to do something useful. Sysadminning isn't so bad. It pays far better than Burger King, and requires only half the skill set.
. . . with no job skills of any description, who's desperately trying to blame his problems on somebody else.
Madeline Albright, incidentally, is a monstrously evil individual -- which is to say that she is, beyond a doubt, perfectly qualified for her job. Deal with it, loser.
uhh...besides noticing your shameful product
endorsement in your hyperlink, I couldnt help
noticing that your site is an MS endorsement
in itself...runs on IIS eh?
...and after you verbally torch ms...shameful
You say "no way and take that shit"
what shit are you refering to that could put you offm doubling your salary? I bet you would be doing exactly the same shit as you are doing now just getting paid more.
Heh. The sysadmin was a cretin. Good riddance.
Come to think of it, all sysadmins are cretins. The job they do serves no purpose in and of itself; their only purpose in life is to help productive people do their jobs -- yet sysadmins think the users are there for their benefit. Uh, yeah, right. Servants are always annoying, but servants with attitude problems are intolerable. They're "at your feet or at your throat", too: If you treat them with any respect, they get cocky and refuse to do anything at all. I've chewed out a few moronic sysadmins myself. They all deserved worse than I gave them. I'm very sorry to say I only ever got one of them fired.
I also once knew (it only ever happened once, by the way) a competent, helpful sysadmin. He was professional, knowledgeable, and pleasant. He knew his job well enough that he didn't need to feel insecure about the fact that he didn't know mine (programmer). We got along great. Everybody was happy. He's not still a sysadmin, though. As you can see from the above, he was bright enough to get a real job, so he eventually did.
Then again, I'm going on as if sysadmins were the lowest form of life on Earth, which is really unfair. There are two forms of life even lower then sysadmins: Bacteria, and tech support. Wait, I thought of another: "Technical writers" -- who are invariably neither.
I never studied computers, never bothered with a PhD, and still get paid the same as you (just for being a sysadmin.)
Heh. Nobody gets a PhD for the money. People who care that much about money often become sysadmins, but the (relatively) smart and honest ones generally sell crack or pimp their sisters instead.
Basically, that about sums it up. You are exactly the kind of ignorant/arrogant sysadmin that annoys him (and annoys me, too, I might add).
Why don't you take your adolescent bitching somewhere else.
He had to put up with arrogance and incompetence from somebody had been hired to help him do his job, but who was not capable of doing that. The idiot was fired. With your cocky attitude, you stand a good chance of being fired also. With any luck, I will be the man who fires you. You sound a hell of a lot like somebody I know of in my department.
Bear this in mind, "fucko": Your aggressive, cocky arrogance is a clear sign of incompetence. People who behave that way are compensating for insecurity, and insecurity about job performance is almost always justified.
Yes, it's rather funny when a sysadmin is setting up TCP/IP for you, has problems getting it to work, and you have to tell them to not forget setting up DNS.
A few years ago (and in my previous job) I used an X-terminal to log on to a Sun Sparc. Half of the time it was impossible to log in because the fontserver had stopped running. They were never able to solve this problem.
Before that, I met a sysadmin who got furious because I tried to do a 'su' once. I was a student then and just learning about Unix. I wasn't running a password cracker or anything.
Of course most admins know what they're doing. But those that don't are annoying.
So sysadmining is not a full time job, and if it is we aren't doing our job. What an increadbly ignorant thing to say. This is the kind of nonsense I would expect from a PHB.
A 'well maintained system' is only possible because of a lot of hard work from sysadmins. It does not happen automatically, despite what Bill Gates et al claims. Also, most systems are constantly being added to/changed. Hardware/software is being added/removed/changed. Who do you think does it??? Sysadmins.
I suggest you learn about computer systems and how they are setup and maintained before you spout off more garbage.
MRB
Maybe some sysadmins do that. Personally I find it offensive, I am a sysadmin and am probably one of the hardest working employees at my work. If I'm not having to troubleshoot silly printer, winbloze, networking or other problems (our AIX and Linux boxes aren't usually too much a problem fortunately, well the software on the AIX box does but anyways...) I'm busy coding or helping develop customer systems (via web page, hand held units, etc), problem solving things that happen that most of our users are too stupid to figure out themselves (and not directly computer related mind you), etc I'm lucky if I can manage to work only 8 hours or get a lunch, etc. I could work 16 hours a day and not run out of stuff to be working on. I don't quite get your attitude though, maybe you had one bad experience with a bad sysadmin. All I can say though, is thank God you're not one of my users. I already have one guy who thinks he knows more than he does that messes up his laptop, etc because of it, I wouldn't need or want another one...
As I can only assume you are, from you're incredibly witty and well thought out post.
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Rand herself was drunk as a skunk, sysadmins are parasitic organisms. It's a job done by people who would be working at McDonald's if they were honest. They're not honest, though. They're lazy, arrogant entirely without justification, unskilled, uneducated, butt-ignorant, and dumb.
Here's how the average sysadmin spends his time:
40%: Hide in office and play video games.
20%: Break things.
20%: Invent elaborate lies to avoid responsibility for breaking things
20%: Invent elaborate lies to avoid responsibility doing anything productive or useful.
Gimme me a break, man. They're losers. A good index of the low mental quality of sysadmins would be the fact that some of them mistake Ayn Rand's mystical mumblings for "philosophy". Read some f*cking A. J. Ayer if you want philosophy. Hell, just learn to read, for starters. Rand wrote kitschy, lowbrow romance novels. Utter garbage.
I hope nobody mistakes you for a team player.
I am well known to be a team player. I treat people with respect unless they are "problem" people who need to be straightened out. Such people do exist. It's a fact.
...and they ask you to work on real stupid stuff
that has nothing to do with work. And when you
tell them "No" they get all pissy and whiny.
When they ask why not and you tell them, they get all pissy and whiny that you're "making it too hard for them" or demand that you "stop talking computer at me and give me a real reason".
I had this one a couple weeks ago bugging me about
some obscure plug-in error she was getting with
Netscape. We're an Internet media company, fine.
There might be a valid reason for her to need to
use this plug-in. It was only when I saw the "CDNOW" page up in her brower that I politely told
her to go jump. I'll bend over backwards to help
you for business reasons but I'm not going to waste my day trying to help you fucking SHOP!
...and here on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, we are searching for the elusive beast, Sysadminus Arrogancus. When they are cornered, they can be quite viscous beasts, and will often snarl "I'll take the network down, lusers". Their mating call has a musical ring to it, and sounds like "users are lusers". Yet interestingly enough, there have never been actual sitings of a Sysadminus Arrogancus mating taking place. There is quite a heated debate as to the physical characteristics of young Sysadminus Arrogancus. One popular theory states that Audiovisual Clubus is not a separate species but is the pupal form of Sysadminus Arrogancus. Other theorists believe that Sysadminus Arrogancus are asexual and replicate through budding, whereas other believe they mate with their hand...
A good - a must for all sysadmins to understand where they belong and the nature of their true power.
Either don't go to college and take up w/ a startup being a general tech. support guy(or girl) as soon as you get out of HS or go to
college, major in whatever the hell you want(CS, Physics, Geology, Interpretive freakin' Dance if it floats you) and get a job w/ you University Computer/MIS Operations Dept.
You will pick up more useful skills in a couple years of graveyard shifts in operations than you will in any class.
SysAdmin-ing is a very practical, experiental job.
Books and courses are part of it, but I've always
gotten more out of hands-on fiddling than anything
else.
Ask yourself if you really want to do this though.
Once you get into it, it's hard to get out of. It's both a blessing and a curse to be so needed.
It's a great way to spend your late teens and
20's, maybe even into your 30s, but it's not something you're probably (IMHO) going to want to be doing when you're 45.
- Become a sysadmin yourself
Look, I've dealt with enough of them to know what they're like.
- Read some Ayn Rand for yourself
I have. Probably a lot more than you. As philosophy, it's a crock of irrational, mystical garbage. As literature, it's dogfood.
Furthermore, none of it has anything to do with sysadmins. Rand fetishized creative people who create wealth. Sysadmins don't create anything. They're tinkerers. A few of them here and there may be inspired tinkerers who more than earn their pay, but I sure haven't ever met one like that. A good example of the kind of person that Rand admired would be Bill Gates. In fact, the hilariously-named Committee for the Moral Defense of Microsoft is a Randite organization.
- Re-evaluate your post
I just did. It holds up pretty well.
28 year old used punch cards in the 70s?
hmmmm
you need to get out more.
Great, another bunch of suits telling us how to do our jobs (what software to use).
Considering that you're using the above bet you get to stand around a bit. :)
You're just an elitist liberal commie intellectual
it's weird, man, how the right-wingers have turned education into a perceived evil. if you admit that you've ever read a damn thing other than the bible or bill bennett's "morality" propaganda, they use that to write off anything you say. "oh, you went to college, you're a communist!" oh, my god . . .
for those on the right wing (that is to say, those who are sounding this out): pol pot was a dictator in cambodia. he killed off all the "intellectuals". he defined "intellectuals" as anybody who wore glasses, among other things. the spirit of the religious right, eh?
I guess it just depends. Here it's 4 -- all
male, all on call 7x24, and all ex-military
except me (but then, I'm the college dropout).
And, of course, all underpaid, which is why
there's such high turnover in our positions (and
at our company in general). Of course, we
actually walk out to the user's desk to fix
things, which is bad (physical contact with
people) and good (none of this remote troubleshooting
crap). [And I'm the only black-clad, longhair. The rest are almost normal.]
Well my point was that when an employee walks thru that door a lot of there privacy disappears.
Phones are routinely monitored, E-mail is read. Some places have cameras everywere.
And most importantly the law backs a lot of this up.
A sysadmin.[amongst others] has little recourse when the boss requests the contents of an employees E-mail. Say no and the unemployment line usually follows.
"She rides in to save the day." Besides the bad cliche, most sys admins are male, and in the case where the gender is unknown, english uses the male pronoun. But then again, maybe she's talking about the dozen or so competetent female sys admins that exist.
The sys admins time is so precious to him that he
can't take the time to tell the users when the servers been restored. Maybe if you would make it a practice of letting people know that you are working on the problem, and you inform them when its been restored, they wouldn't keep bugging you. But then again, that also requires you to be responsive to the users. Seems like the sys admins that complain about the users don't seem to understand who their customers are.
for (a=1,a++,a5)
I don't get it. I'm guessing that it would be:
for ( a = 1; i 5; ++a )
in C; is that where you're going with that? I don't know perl at all.
As long as [programmers] don't screw the box and respect the fact that the real users - those that make the company money, are more important than they are.
"Real users"? "More important"? Whaddya work at, a bank or something? I once interviewed for a programming job at a bank. The programmers were all zombies who couldn't even make eye contact. They thought I was a genius because I had done Win32 API GUI programming in C, without MFC "wizards" or whatever. I ran for my life. It was horrifying. I have grave doubts about anybody who'd be willing to write code in that kind of environment. Having read your post, I see it more clearly: A programmer willing to be "less important" than a bunch of salesman must have a serious self-image problem. The mere thought of it is horrifying to me. No, no, no, I'm not cocky and I don't expect to be treated like I'm "more important" than anybody -- in fact, it bothers me that anybody is considered "less important" than somebody else.
God, I get the willies thinking about it even now.
Anyhow, at a lot of companies, programmers are the "real users" who make the company money.
The worst thing a sysadmin can do is try to figure out the users...like why after 3-5 years they still have no clue to how anything on their computer works and I mean no clue. It drives me nuts when I try to ponder that.
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitler
"Fixing things and making things work are what make me happiest"
It's the same for coders it's just a different level.
I did so on the basis of having read her novels, her play, and a boatload of essays. I actually believed it for a while, when I was a teenager. Then I read some real philosophy in college, which knocked a lot of holes in it. After that I started thinking about the implications of it, which knocked quite a few more holes in it. When I realized that the famous "epistemology" is a fan-dance, I moved on. *shrug*
Incidentally, even when I liked Rand's ideas, I still knew that her prose, plotting, and characterization were atrocious. Whatever you think about the ideas, she's just a rotten novelist. The funny thing is, when I say that to Randites, I always get one of three responses:
Type 3 I can deal with -- up to a point.
While the sysadmin certainly sounded like he had a terrible ego problem you didn't sound *any* better. Take two people who insist on their own intellectual superiority on a certain matter and you are almost certainly to find that same type of feelings towards each other in any situation/occupation. I think the article made a good point that good people skills are a requirement to be a good sysadmin. It also makes a good point on how hard it is to work with some users. I can deal with users who don't know anything and those who do. The ones that do make my job easier, the ones that don't are usually trying there best and are open to learning. The users I *hate* to deal with are those who are unwilling to learn or those who think they know more than they do and have really bad attitute. Fortunately, no one on my work falls into the latter category and I have a good working relationship with the people in my office. As for sysadmins being useless, well considering that my work would be pretty much screwed if I left today with no notice I'd have to disagree. Of course I do more than the "traditional sysadmining" in that along with the troubleshooting and day to day activities I do lots of programming and such, but in a larger company I can see how just doing sysadmining can keep one busy. My guess is that most people that would post on /. would find sysadmins useless because you are all probably geeks who know about computers but aside from the fact that someone has to keep the servers, etc running the average user can run his PC but doesn't have a clue to call when it breaks.
Ok, think here:
1. A union is hired by a company.
2. That company hires the ENTIRE union(that's what they're for).
3. That company only needs 1 sysadmin.
4. I guess hiring more sysadmins than actualy workers is a bad idea.
This concept would work, but, the union would have to be a self-run business =P.
I would say if you're not going to major in something in computers, major in liberal arts. Oh, and by the way - something like 5 colleges teach REAL liberal arts, and they're all traditional catholic colleges. Everyone else is just obsessed with the newest thing (I know). Believe me, Euclid and all the other stuff that they used to teach is the best, and the way it teaches you to think will help.
One question though: What is the best university for computers/sysadmin?
There is also no mention of the fact that the majority of sysadmins out there are incompetent.
What a cool word. Thank you.
>> I feel sorry for the schmucks that have to take a class from you! You seem to be
>> very close minded on a topic which you clearly know nothing about.
I'm not sure where you got that impression. I'm very open minded. I just had an
incompetent and arrogant sysadmin.
>> Had it occurred to you that your particular sysadmin has to go through several
>> offices every day, working on machines with stuff cluttered up all over the
>> place, and still have to fix a machine without touching any of your precious
>> icons?!?
C'mon, they guy couldn't have used "find file" to find what he was looking for?
Sounds a lot faster and easier to me -- which also supports my claim that he was
incompetent. How would you like it if I came into your office and rearranged your
furniture? "You can't have the filing cabinent over there, you can't adjust your
seat that high".
>> This would be similar to a car mechanic trying to fix your vehicle
>> without being able to touch the hood of the car!
No, it would be similar to the car mechanic reprogramming all of your radio
stations to his favorites when he tests to make sure he installed the new antenae
correctly.
>> Many organizations, including Universities, have specific rules about what >>
types of software can be installed on a system. The system administrator is >>
usually the policeman having to lower the boom on software. Many users
>> install all sorts of garbage on their computers, never heeding the fact that >>
this software may be incompatible in a multitude of ways with the OS, with >> other
software on the system, or with the computer in general.
We're not talking about pirated software here, we're talking about software that
came installed in the computer. And anyway, the rules were if it's paid for and its
work related, you can install it.
>> You, sir, appear to me to be like the users vaguely referred to in the article.
>> You sit on your little thrown believing the computer you use is yours! You preach
>> about his condescending attitude, yet you go right on to say you gave him "tongue
>> lashings"?
Well, some of the equipment (not this piece) was mine (or paid for through
grants). This guy was an incompetent moron with an attitude.
For anyone with a smidgen of experience setting up a network, it was painfully
obvious that he was hardly qualified (but sure thought he was God!).
For analogy, imagine that you are an engineer at Ford. Your job was to design the
engine in the Taurus. You take your car (a Taurus) into a dealership to get a
tune-up. When you come back in the afternoon, not only is the mechanic looking down
his nose at you, but he is bullshitting you too. It's obvious (due to your
knowledge) that not only does the guy not know what he is talking about, but he is
bullshitting you and trying to get you to pay for extra parts you don't need. To
make things worse, he reprogrammed your radio to all Country and Western stations!
For a little history, my first sysadmin was great. He was a real smart-alecky bastard, but a good guy.
His attitude was "Do you know how to install a simm? Ok, here it is".
My second was the incompetent moron sited above.
My third and fourth are both highly competent and nice guys.
. . . that'll make you overqualified. Just practice saying "that's not my job" every time you wake up from a nap. You'll be fine.
A. The incompetent 95% don't want to hear about it.
B. The competent 5% are in denial.
If you live down here in the Silicon Valley, it shouldn't be to hard to get a job as a computer guy at a startup. I have four nice job offers with only three years of real world experience under my belt (the first year being at a nonprofit organization), and I'm still in Highschool. Part-timers in my age group, without formal training, are making between $12.50 and $20.00 / hour.
Make sure you know your stuff though. You have to be able to implement solutions with your favorite flavor of UNIX as well as use the crap Microsoft spews forth. Luckily, the basic things you need to know aren't too hard to learn (eg: setting up webservers, dns, samba, linux, nt, windows95 together with knowing how to setup hardware: wiring, hubs, routers, etc).
I'm doing sysadmin because the real sysadmin quit, leaving a mess and a gateway full of holes (some left quite deliberately). Try explaining this to a boss who has trouble reading his email, and you realize the only thing you can do to get attention is to point at horror stories, or be a jerk and let the whole system fall down.
Good article. `Nothing is wrong with the system' should be a positive and the evidence of someone doing his job, not `oh, well, of course it's running, that's what computers do'.
Major in English, History, Sociology, Math, whatever...
Nothing beats a good liberal arts education as preparation for life. Don't waste your college years trying to prepare for a job that won't exist when you graduate. Develop strong thinking and communication skills and then get whatever training you need after you graduate. Honestly, most MIS training is OJT-- you learn what you need to when you need to (usually when something breaks).
I think its obvious from this discussion that the best sysadmins are not necessarily the ones with the most technical expertise, although that certainly is important. The best sysadmins view the network as a network of hardware, software, AND USERS. Good people skills and the ability to solve problems in a creative, efficient way are paramount. That's what a liberal arts education is all about.
MC
It's pretty well recognized that the day you arrive on most university campuses, you get, along with a class schedule, a map, and a handbook, a set of cultural/political attitudes. Cliff Stoll remarked in _The Cuckoo's Egg_ that he was unprepared to find that military apes and CIA spooks could actually be real guys that were fun to know and work with. That real-life observation conflicted with what he had been taught in college. (In the astronomy program??)
;-)
So when you're feeling persecuted by those atavistic right-wingers, just remember that they might just be expecting you're another of the mind-clones they have seen hitherto.
From a right-winger who has read a few things, is a sysadmin, and incidentally wears glasses, but is not revealing his identity just in case pol pot turns out to be a lefty.
I write C++ code. You?
Say no and the unemployment line usually follows.
Yeah, but if you're a sysadmin, you'll be standing in that line for about ten minutes, total. Suck up on that while it lasts. Be moral while you can afford it. The situation may not last, but while it does we should get PHB's used to the idea that some people have ethics that can't be bought out. The lesson may stick.
Ah! There it is. Here's the part I think particularly
appropriate to your question:
SysAdmin'ing is like "learning Unix." You cannot really "learn" System Admin.
in school. This is why so many of us get such a laugh out of certifications
like MCSEs and the like.
The thing is, depending on where you are working at any particular point in
time, there are no end of tasks that you may be called- upon to perform. And
you can bet the rent that you will constantly be confronted with having to make
something work that you've never encountered before. If nothing else, the
rapid changes in technology make that a pretty sure bet.
I'd say the best thing you can learn to prepare yourself for SysAdmin'ing is
how to learn
The closest thing to a 'sysadmin union' is SAGE, the Systems Administrators Guild, and a special interest group of USENIX.
SAGE is the ONLY professional Sysadmin group (BayLISA that was mentioned in the article is a local version of SAGE, afaik).
Many sysadmins are a member of this and other computing societies (ACM, IEEE-CS, etc).
Michael R. Brown
where i work, all newbie NT admins are converted to Linux after a couple months on the job. they become converts to the point where messing with nt makes them ill - thus the suits fire them and hire another nt admin.
and the cycle starts over again.
guess superiour software like Linux speaks for itself, and convinces them based on intrinsic value.
Come to think of it, all sysadmins are cretins. The job they do serves no purpose in and of itself; their only purpose in life is to help productive people do their jobs
I hope nobody mistakes you for a team player.
And you know this because you work at burger king for a living, yes?
...and this clod was closed-minded by not assuming that faculty are not capable of systems administration.
What a strange quote. I'm visualizing playing tic-tac-toe with a big hairy computer named Vinny in order to prevent nuclear holocaust.
Weird. I need another beer.
-- ultra1
It's an old story... I've only done UNIX admin as a sideline but I've been a networking geek for years. I recently told my (clueless) boss.
"The problem with being a "Network Artiste" is that the art form is only appreciated in it's absence."
UNIX admin has the same story. Bad administration is easy to detect... your stuff doesn't work.
Good administration is (and should be) invisible. A good sysadmin should be a creater of tools. Bulletproof network stability and a clean environment should be part of those tools.
Steve Daggett
blitter@mindspring.com
Nice Spelling...no, really I love users, they make me laugh all the time. Plus, most of the time they are amazed you know how to fix problems so quickly. (I mean they didn't figure it out after 4 hours! :)
The toys are great also!
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Get a degree in whatever you want, just like the others are saying. I'm getting mine in Mechanical Engineering. Basically, it's what I was interested in before I decided to be a sys/net admin. All the degree really means to me is that I'm willing to stick with something difficult until the task is complete. The most important thing though, in my opinion, is don't just get the degree. Get a university job as a sys admin. The experience is valuable beyond belief. At least here, sys admins tend to get paid more than any other undergraduate position. Additionaly, if you go to the right school, you'll probably happen upon a lot of technology that's still in the developement stages. When it hits the industry five years later you'll be one of the few people that knows what's going on. The only problem is that my grades are slipping because my job is a helluva lot more fun than classes. -Dop
I modified that Process Roulette script so that I can specify a victim user; I think I did another change, but I forgot what it was supposed to do. Now if only I could remember where I put it....
The users are an interesting aspect in sysadmining. They are the reason your doing it, your greatest anoyance, and a source of great fun all at once.
It is best if you have your users know who you are and realize that you are human, but can still kill the acess with a couple of keystrokes. I spent some time sysadmining at a school with approximately 500 other students and they all knew who I was and they also knew that if I just stared at them when they told me about a problem that they best ask about it later. (I always knew abou thte big problems before they did so it wasn't a concern.)
There are also the joys of having a lab full of sparcs with limited floppy drives. One day you get bored and rearange the lab, leaving one sparc with a slot for a floppy but no drive, and another with the drive and slot. You watch several people go up to the sparc that no longer has a drive, slide a disk in, watch it fall into the case then walk away. When no one is around you just open up the case and count how many users didn't think to check for a drive.
And every once in a while it is nice to see the smile on someone's face when you tell them that they can read there e-mail again.
Jag
I think it fits perfectly, although I've managed to avoid interactions with users on the phone (keep it to email).
Oh yeah, I live in San Francisco.
The one thing that didn't fit for me was the part about being able to ramble on for 30 hours about what I spend my time doing. I find it a bit harder to quantify, since it's so... dynamic, large in scope, varying. It's like trying to describe the shape of a gas cloud.
It's a seven-layer abstract model describing the layering of networking protocols. You have levels such as physical (the ethernet cable), application (http), etc., that show how the various protocols layer on top of each other.
However, IIRC, the DoD four-layer model is more like what the TCP/IP suite of protocols is like. Again, IIRC, the OSI seven-layer model was being offered as an alternative to system based on TCP/IP, but as we all know, it did not succeed in displacing TCP/IP.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by DonR:
Hey, did you ever notice that the FAQ is 66(*&)^*&%^%T*NO CARRIER
*grin*
---
Donald Roeber
errr, 7 layer networking model.
Physical, uhhhh.... application layer... uhhh...
Yeah, so anyways, it's sort of a pretend thing that someone at IBM or BBN came up with a long time ago. Anyways, here's a reference:
http://www.europa.com/~dogman/osi/
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I've only been a sys admin for a year and a half, but there's some things that you can seem to pick up after experience.
:)
:)
:)
As a sys admin for a smaller ISP, we usually have to field second-level tech support calls. That isn't so bad, especially if you schedule to work on low phone frequency days. (friday and saturday, but that has the drawback of taking away probably the most exciting days of the week from you).
Most sys admins don't treat users as if they knew what they were doing simply because 95% of users that call really have no idea. It's just natural to assume the person that calls up isn't going to understand you the first few times.
Basically, you have to assume the user is an idiot (and I mean *ID10T*) unless they prove otherwise. Even then it's hard because they use specific buzzwords they've heard that just might make themselves sound knowledgable.
It's unfortunate for the user that does know what they're doing, but if you want to get something out of a sys admin, you should probably state the exact nature of your problem (be specific) in as few words as you can. There are so many times when I've had a user ask me a question and I'll know what the answer to his problem is as soon as he opens his mouth, but he goes on and on. It's bad for business to yell at users over the phone.
Other than the misfortune of users calling up, my job is a blast. If something isn't broken, I usually spend the day optimizing typically used commands for our particular system (you DO have the source code to your system, don't you?
Lately I've been doing junk with NT. I know it sounds horrible and I feel somewhat tainted and dirty whenever I finish up what I'm doing on it, but it's almost tolerable if you install Perl.
While I would consider myself a sys admin, I also program considerable amounts when I'm not doing sys adminly things. It's hard to sum up the job accurately so I just use this equation:
Systems Admin + Programmer = Systems Development
I consider that my title. That work for anyone else or what?
Ick. It's late. I should sleep.
Having been on both sides (user and sysadmin) in an academic setting, let me present my feelings:
At the beginning of the school year, I thought our sysadmin was an incompetent jerk and was constantly complaining and saying how much better I could do. One afternoon, he chewed me out. As it turned out, his problem was not so much his own inability to run the system, but that his freedom was being crippled by a slew of stupid rules, plans, and policies written by the administration. In an academic or government setting, never underestimate the power of technological stupidity of the administration. After I understood this, he and I got along better.
Now from the sysadmin perspective: "Know it all" users are basically a black-and-white issue: they're either a lot of help, or utter hell. The biggest problems are not the users who are clueless, but the ones who "know it all." They aren't the ones who take up the most time, but the ones who are the biggest hassle to deal with because they always insist they're right. There are details about computer systems that we know that the users don't. It's a fact of life. Either we won't, can't, or just haven't been able to tell you, and you either need to live with that, or ask in a calm manner (for which we will almost always give an obliging answer). Every sysadmin I know, including me, gets harried when helping users. Seeing "clutter" just upsets us. While I agree that it probably wasn't necessary to completely re-arrange your icons, it may have just been to preserve his wearing-thin sanity -- how do you know he wasn't working under a lot of stress, like most of us do? We also tend to be pretty possessive about "our" systems, and there is some degree of justification for that. It's our paid job, so please respect it. Do you not think you have some students who think they're smarter than you are? How do you feel if they shoot off at you? In some cases, they may be darn well smarter than you, but they still need to recognize that there's still something they can learn and they need to respect you. Sysadmins are the same way. Like it or not, we're paid to run your system, and thus demand at least a little respect. It is a difficult thing to understand without actually having had the experience, so please either take my word for it or ask your current "highly competent and nice guy" if you can have a day-long sample of what it's like.
In rare cases, it may be that you are in fact right and that your sysadmin is truly incompetent, in which case, you take it up with the administration, not the sysadmin {him,her}self.
One of the guys in my LUG said a few weeks ago "the only good NT sysadmins have come from either a UNIX or a VMS background" which, as I thought about it, is largely correct -- having dealt with quite a few NT and UNIX admins myself. Now, I have no experience with VMS, but I think that the reason UNIX breeds good sysadmins is that UNIX forces you to understand not just what computers do, but how and why they do it.
The worst part about NT, I think, is not so much that it's just an inferior OS, but that it's an entirely inferior model for an OS. It makes stuff too easy, which means you never learn about how and why the computer is doing what it is. This is just fine for end-users, but for a sysadmin, this is a Very Bad Thing. The UNIX (adn I guess VMS) admins understand the computer, not just knowing about the computer.
That's actually pretty much how I got my training. With basically no experience, I started with a small ISP a little over a year ago, working behind a guy who had inherited the business from the guy who started it. I asked questions, solved problems, observed, screwed up my fair share of times, and when the "head" sysadmin moved about 2 months ago, I took over. I'm now training my replacements.
My advice is to find either a small company that needs another admin (or even one to being with!) that is willing to take someone with brains but not a long resume. Either that, or find a nice sysadmin in a large company who will be willing to take you under his/her wing for a year or two.
Look, I've dealt with enough of them to know what they're like.
That's not what I said. You need to be one to really understand what being a sysadmin is like. Trust me. It's not something you can really empathize with.
I have. Probably a lot more than you.
You're probably right, but pissing contests prove nothing nor does greater volume indicate greater understanding.
Sysadmins don't create anything. They're tinkerers. A few of them here and there may be inspired tinkerers who more than earn their pay, but I sure haven't ever met one like that.
Further support that you don't really understand syadmins. It's true that sysadmins don't "create" in Rand-ish terms, but they're definitely as much architects as Howard Roark or Peter Keating.
My originial proposal stuff stands. Go become a sysadmin, don't be so closed-minded about Rand, and then re-read your post.
Dear Mr(s). AC:
Assuming your post is not intended to be humourous, I submit this 3-part suggestion:
- Become a sysadmin yourself
- Read some Ayn Rand for yourself
- Re-evaluate your post
It's not a good idea to try to start a flamewar when all you have is fumes.
What about these guys who eat, sleep, breathe Win NT only sysadminning UNIX at work because they have too. They always try to break into your Linux box only to give up and send you hate mail from their Micersoft exchange client about exceeding disk quotas or some other retaliation topic.
SCNR,
Regards, Jochen
Regards, Geewiz
"nasty problems that take forever to debug"? I thought debugging NT problems was a two step process:
- reboot. If that doesn't solve it
- reinstall.
But the idea of bringing servers down so that people know that you're on the job is a good one - very BOFHish.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Major in the School of Hard Knocks.
Get a degree of some sort to prove that you can learn, read the camel and the bat books, get an entry level position at a small startup where you have to do everything for everbody, and you're on your way to understanding an Adminspotting t-shirt.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
this is so(!) right. i work in a team administrating a mainframe, an as/400 and several unix-boxes (oh, and some nt-servers. i always forget *that*). when other employees enter the office they usually see some young people standing around an talking some hich-techie stuff. it is that rare (lucky me) times when something *really* goes wrong that they notice that my job is not just standing-around-drinking-coffee.
it took me some time to believe that they have a picutre of my job that wrong. and some more time to make at least the PHBs of other departments understand what im doing and that unlocking network accounts on monday ("that password did work on friday") is not what im coming to work for.
its becoming better now. slowly.
Could be worse. Could be raining.
Unions have served their purpose. We don;t need more unions, we need less of them. They cause more trouble than they're worth. These days, unions are not about fair working conditions, they're about greed, and getting payed more money than you're worth.
"Give me liberty, or give me death, Zogwarg Queen!" - Spiff.
I seem to remember the computer being named WOPR.
Let's see well since a good Unix admin should be able to do more than setup systems. Well maybe the admin can do some programming. And, how about a little system tuning. Maybe setup a web server or mail server. How about a smooth upgrade. A good sysadmin sets up good systems but also chips in other areas, plans for the future, tries to make things run better. I would think paying someone the fix a OS that crashes is a waste of money. How about putting in a system that allows an employmee to add to the compnay in a wide variety of areas.
....Jeff
My last two years in college I was the sysadmin for the CS dept (on a Burger King wage, I might add). I'm glad for the experience since I learned an incredible amount and it looks nifty on my resume, but there is no way in Helsinki I am ever going to take another sysadmin job. Stress, abuse, dull maintainence tasks, being blamed for everything by everybody, having tasks dumped on you when someone just doesn't feel like doing it; TRUST ME: being a programmer is much more fun.
-Eric
while(not_working) {
if ( reboot() == TRUE ) {
printf("What an NT genius\!\n");
break;
else if ( re-install.os() == TRUE ) then {
for (a=1,a++,a5)
( re_install_servicepack[a] ) ;
}
else break;
backup_from_tape();
printf("What an NT genius\!\n");
break;
}
else printf("Upgrade to Win2000");
break;
)
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Most of the sysadmins that I work with (including myself) all have CS degrees.
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
I have to remote-administer many linux and SGI machines. This requires flying out to remote sites with a ton of machines/hardware and gettings things to work, sometimes with shitty power, lame networks, undereducated users, ... I'm working on a project in Juneau, Alaska which has machines scattered all over the place and all connected via PPP connections (there are around 20 phone lines total (clients and servers) that all run some sort of PPP service on them). Some are on top of mountains, some are in the middle of fields. The phone lines in Juneau are totally unreliable. The system is up and running for the most part, but sometimes a line will drop and the programmers will get all pissed off at me asking me why the network isn't more solid. How's that for gratitude? Personally, for this problem, there are many fixes - better physical network (management won't pay for it), or software that allows for drop-outs (programmers don't want to write a 'work-around' for it).
..." and I have to help them because nobody else that he can go to knows anything about the machine. I'm not a software engineer - I don't get paid to be one, but I have to do it anyway.
More issues: some users come to me with questions that require me to revert back to my programming days like, "I'm trying to write a script to do
Other people come to me and ask how to take screen-grabs of stuff or something - things that any user should know how to do. It really makes me wonder who hired these people? (I just had to that very same thing just now as I was writing this note).
I can deal with sendmail and password files; that stuff is brainless - the tough part of the job really, is doing people's work for them or putting together a project on a shoestring budget and having people wonder when it doesn't work like a million-dollar operation and point fingers at me.
My message to all of the non-admins out there: take your admin out for a beer once in a while, because if you piss him/her off one too many times, you're going way down on the admin's priority list and you'll have to figure out how to deal with this stuff by yourself. We're here to help and support you - be appreciative.
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
Do not major in MIS. It is a major for those who have heard there is lots of money to be made in the computer industry, but don't have the smarts to slug it out in the trenches -- Computers for Dummies (and Suits).
One of the glories of the sysadmin trade is that there is not any one course of training to encapsulate it. Programming, networking, screwdriver jockeying, human interaction... you need to use a bit of it all.
My advice would be to major in whatever the hell you feel like. Hell, get a BA in Underwater Basketweaving. Then get out in the real world, take a couple hits, get some weight under your belt, and give it a shot. You'll know when you're ready.
...especially the really irritating ones:
Me "It's a bug in Word, here's a workaround."
User X "Well, can't you just reprogram it?"
Me "[mumbled comment about Bill Gates] It's a bug in Word, here's a workaround."
Then, of course, is the occasional user that actually helps, and understands my duties. The one who knows I came in on a Sat to install a new switch or network printer, and takes the time to thank me for it. Those (very few) users are worth their weight in gold, if only because they make me feel appreciated.
Unfortunately, the only part that usually gets back to my boss is the mumbled comment about BG. Sigh.
Fine. So maybe poor female sys admins are the result of a quota thing-- i don't support hiring inferior workers because of some stupid quota. but there are bad white male sys admins too--but there's no quota to use as an excuse there.
By no means are all male sys admins bad, BTW-- i'm just saying that we can't name quotas as the be all and end all reason behind poor quality sys admins.
Whatever.
--anneke
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
May just be my opinion, but major in whatever the heck you want-- I'm a /german/ major, for crying out loud, (cities minor), and I have a job waiting for me when I graduate in 6 weeks-- SysAdmin'ing, although unfortunately more NT than UNIX, and they don't understand why linux is SOOO cool, but I digress.
A lot of the other posters have it right-- It's all about experience. Sure, dabble in programming, it'll totally help you out-- but I know way way more about UNIX, linux, troubleshooting, being a webmaster and sysadminíng than any of my comp sci major friends (and I'm even at a women's college), because that's not what they teach you. 1- Read the O'Reilly books (like someone else recommended), 2- Read the redbook (System Administrator's Handbook, i think), 3- Take a couple/few programming courses on the side, 4- run Linux.
I'd say the last helped me more than anything else-- having an actual system running and playing around, especially if you (are allowed to) have other users on your box.
Personally, I've learned more job-relevant stuff by working in the computer center, having a linux box, and being a sysadmin/webmaster for our college student web server, as well as asst. admin for the college email server, than i have in classes (even math/comp sci ones).
Pardon my verbosity...cheers and best wishes!
--Anneke
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
"Umm last time I looked, most companies consider the computer systems theirs. They can poke wherever they please, your consent nonwithstanding."
Not quite. Most systems have motd's explaining the policy so you have it every time you log in and can't say they didn't tell you. Normally, it's something along the lines of...
1- people using the system in excess of authority may be monitored and have their activities recorded.
2- in the course of monitoring abusers of the system or during general system maintenance, authorized users may also be monitored.
3- users of the system implicitly consent to the above policies, and users realize the legal repercussions of illicit use.
...or something to that effect. Basically, SysAdmins are supposed to let you keep your privacy-- innocent not until proven guilty, perhaps, but innocent until suspicion causes the sysadmin to check out a few things. Although somewhat Big Brother-esque, it also provides a certain level of security for the legitimate users out there.
--Anneke
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
Not really-- from the 5 or 6 sys admins I've dealt with, (not including myself, obviously,) quite a few fit the black-clad, suspicious-towards-users mentality. And however much I yell that female sys admins like myself (and yourself) exist, we still hold the vast minority. (Which in some ways, I suppose, can be pleasant)
/like/ helping users, because I like making them happy, but I admit the extreme annoyance I feel when I have to deal with lusers who seem to have missed the path labeled "This Way to Common Courtesy" and stumbled upon "I don't get it, so why don't I act as if you're incompetent." But luckily I haven't dealt with many of those so far.
I for one haven't achieved the rank of Supremely Bitter and Frightening SysAdmin yet, and hope I don't. I
I digress-- basically, I think it's pretty accurate. And as for the $60k US-- I'm only going to be making half that (post-grad in May), but remember, we're also not working on Silicon Valley..and it's also dependent on experience.
--Anneke
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a truly fabulous book-- my favorite, actually, and I would agree with the A.C. above-- highly, /highly/ recommended reading. I'm not quite sure how much her philosophy has to do with sysadmin'ing, other than its philosophy that one should do their best, and that man is supreme and his intelligence and accomplishments the sum of his personal worth. So that paragraph above about doing a good job as a sysadmin-- that fits.
/loved/ that book" than any other piece of literature, and no one I know found it boring. It's generally a better idea not to judge something with which you aren't too familiar-- it may weaken the strength of your surrounding arguments, not to mention sound closer to flame than constructive criticism.
Putting down Rand w/o having read her-- careful. I've had more people see me reading her work and say "I
As for the rest of your commentary-- touche'.
--Anneke
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
Again, I'll try to refrain from flaming, since I know you're a real person and not some random entitiy-- regardless of how many female sysadmins, myself included, you've just alienated.
/woman/ wrote the article, and that women are acknowledged as a part of the techie (and SysAdmin) world, no matter how small. We're out there. It seems somewhat closed-minded to reject our existence merely because we don't hold a majority. Three cheers for diversity.
Although men are the vast majority, I for one find it admirable that a
--Anneke
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
in answer to your question-- Slashdot is 4% female, according to the poll they ran a month or two ago.
-- Anneke
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
I agree that I should ask for a raise. I even :(
showed this to my boss. His response: So what...
bummer
Do what I did - major in Theater, switch to Political Science, then drop out. It worked for me... so well they made me a PHB eventually.
On second thought - maybe that track doesn't work for everybody!
Seriously, I think that just about any major is fine, so ling as you have the interest and aptitude for sysadmin work. Liberal Arts may be a good place to go, personally I find that a lot of "diverse thinkers" tend to come from that background and it seems to help. Is it the person or the major? I'd say it's probably more the person, though ou can learn "how to think" in a good college program.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Well, haven't I used enough crappy software in my life to think that developers are morons? What about all the shitcan applications I have to make work on a daily basis? Oh, yeah, developers are gods. Right.
What you don't understand is that while yes, we have essentially a service based job, we also have an utterly thankless job. Most of our time is spent dealing with flashing-twelve morons who know about 5% of what they should know about computers. Then there are the idiots who know about 25% of what they should know - look out. These are the idiots that think they "own" the computer and install all sorts of crap on it, download pirated shit all day, and make your life a miserable, intolerable hell.
The other day a luser came up to me with some ascii garbage her printer spat out at her. She showed it to me and asked "What does this mean?!" in a very surly manner. I told her I didn't have my decoder ring. She wasn't amused. "You're the computer person, you're supposed to know what this means!!" she insisted. I look at it for a second and pretend to translate: "you .. are ... umm .. a FUCKING MORON!". Well, that's what I wanted to do anyway.
No one cares about your lunch hour. Everyone expects you to say "how high" when they say "jump". And we're all underpaid. So go to hell!!!
Oh, and yes, there are a lot of cluessless support people, but they are not real admins. I was dealing with one the other day who literally didn't know how to compress a file to email it to me (it was a word doc - of course - and way too large to email). I don't understand how people like this get jobs, but, whatever.
support gun control: take guns from cops
It doesn't really matter what major you have; CS would be good, but they won't teach you the applications you need to know, or networking, or any of that stuff. Buy the ORA book on TCP/IP for starts, perl, sql are probably the most useful languages. And you need to know hardware. You certainly don't need a CS degree to be a sysadmin, a few of the right CS classes will most definitely help.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Um, if it works, then it's up. If it's up, then it works. You're a perfect example of what sysadmins have to deal with.
This quote reminded me of that Russian Roulette PERL script that either Cmdr. Taco or Hemos wrote oh so long ago. :)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
Hah! You obviously don't have the most critical job requirement of Sys-adminning: Looking really busy.
"Mr. Sysadmin, my 'elm' keeps beeping when I read this email message!"
"Too bad, you should have been using 'pine' instead. Use a mailer that actually knows how to handle attachments!"
"Mr. Sysadmin, how do I delete a line in 'vi'?"
"Who cares! Everyone should be using EMACS or pico"
"Mr. Sysadmin, the Internet connectivity is slow again"
"I'm working on it" (I call some stupid help desk and they ignore it for 3 hours before they realize they unplugged one of their ATM lines -- *again*. ATM really stands for 'a' 't'errible 'm'istake.)
"Mr. Sysadmin, I need some help with this..."
"CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY?"
(I'm really re-compiling GIMP so I can doodle all day long and look busy).
-- If you met me, you probably wouldn't remember me. I'm pretty hard to remember.
If you're still in university, query around your employment office for an internship that deals with systems administration or send queries out to various computer companies you suspect use some version of UNIX. There are quite a few companies out there who would love to have some fresh bodies to throw into the machine at student prices.
Good luck.
-S. Louie
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
Um, perhaps you should enhance your programming skills before writing code. if (boolean expression) {} or if (boolean expression) then {} You curly brackets are misaligned. Come on.
--Ivan, weenie NT4 user, Jon Katz hater: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
I would just like to point out that everybody is different, and that what this article depicts as a sysadmin, is not always true.
Yes, I know I should have posted this as an AC, because now, my High School's sysadmin will know my SlashDot nick. As I did not already find his.
:)
My High School's system admin!
I on the other case, I have a ponytail, and I'm a Teenager!!!!
:)
Very right... I administer NT at work and am an MCP because my job requires those skills but those certification tests are a JOKE! I had to sneak Linux onto my desktop and one lone Web server...
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
Sysadmins hold the economic system of North America together. If they do their jobs properly, noone knows they exist.
;)) and endusers aren't always the greatest for explaining exactly what the problem is.
The article also brings up a interesting point re: sysadmins and human interaction. I'd say it's probably the #1 most important part of the job. Someone has to respond to all those problems (well, if there are any for those Linux sysadmins
I didn't see any mention of the bastard system operator from hell, though. Anyone have a good link?
æeee!
That's nothing, at my old job when I started there were 3 people in the tech department who weren't me. Ross, Mike, and Jim. Then another Jim (the owner's son) started and the old Jim left. Then Stewart started, and Ross left shortly there after. Then Mike quit. At this point I was the senior member of the tech department, at 17 years old. Stewart gave his two weeks shortly there after. Then three new people came in (Jonathan, Zandro, and Doug). Jim (the bosses son) left for college soon, a few weeks later I left to return to school. I heard that Jonathan had left, but I don't know if that's true. All in all it's a huge turn over rate in a 3 month period.
-matt
You my friend obviously know nothing. First, the guy says he has been programming since the 70s. I think that would qualify him as an expert on computers. I fancy myself an expert and I've only been using them since the early 80s and programming since the early 90s. Second the sysadmin has no need, or right to mess with someone's desktop. Third, incompatibilities with the OS? Since when is Microsoft Office incompatible with windows? I know ms does a shitty job w/ software, but they can atleast get their own products to sort of work together. A lot of schools do have strict rules about what goes on lab machines, but that's because they are public machines. On a professor's computer, as long as everything's legal the sysadmin shouldn't care what the people put on it.
Bah! I can't stand to argue with you anymore.
-matt
I don't know about sysadmins, but I do know that there is a group certifying cable TV technicians. The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers provides training and certification for all those folks who put in your cable.
And of course, there's that MCSE certification ^_^
AFAIK some of the sysadmins at AT&T and Lucent branch offices used to be members of either the CWA or IBEW. What the branch admin at our office mostly did was fix hardware and basic LAN maintenance. Most things ran (and run) from a remotely located frame relay.
So, yes, there are unions that probably docover some sysadmins, or something similar to such. It really depends on what positions at a company are covered by the union contract. The union, as it has been posted later in this thread, covers more a specific company than a job. Exceptions to this may be unions like the IBEW which does solicit independent electricians to join. I'm not that sure about where the technical fields fall in.
My degrees (having been a professional student for awhile
---
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will deserve neither and lose both."
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
I've done both, and like each for different reasons. Sys-admining is cool because of the variety of work and the pragmatic mentality the job engenders.
Programming appeals to my creative/builder side more. I enjoy the process of taking an abstract idea and turning into a concrete, working app.
To use a metaphor... its sort of like the difference between a handy-man and a carpenter. The handy-man is all over the place, doing everything from electrical work to painting. While the carpenter may take a few months to build a table and chairs.
---
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will deserve neither and lose both."
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
YESSS! "making things go". I thought I was the only one. My girlfriend didn't understand when I explained to her that the Sun 3/50 occupying most of my room wasn't actually much *use* to me, I just wanted to make it *work*. She was astonished when I gave the machine to a friend only a few hours after I had achieved my goal.
I would love to be a sysadmin, because it's about the only thing I know I could be quite good at. Unfortunately, I'm a Risk Analyst, which is interminably dull by comparison...suggestions, anyone?
How many sysadmins have a bald head and wear timberlands to work. I just don't think the pony tail look would work for me.
-- Bryan
Sys Admin is a strange field, basically you get quite a few arseholes. This is true in most fields, but whereas an idiot programmer is generally bothersome to his team, and his team alone, a difficult system adminstrator is difficult to everyone.
Most systems administrators have a difficult job, most of these comments are by programmers who insist that we can't do there job. To be honest, I'm a great programmer. I haven't been good at much in my life, but I've always been great at that - however, I can't be arsed to write Databases or bloody awful Access based kludged which look good but do bugger all.
And we know about Access....
As a systems administrator you get this a lot, a manager outsources the project to a software house, or IS services company. The company produces a piece of shit program which only just fills the spec (which hasn't been back to the systems admin or even the poor buggers who have to use the application - it may have been to there manager, who hasn't the slightest idea). The program is implemented, with out IS even seeing it before hand. And then its up to the systems adminstrator to support it.
This is not the fault of the programmers who wrote what they expected to be a prototype, or the admins who have to support the shite afterwards, and its definately not the fault to the users who have to use it. It's the fault of the management who haven't got the slightest clue, but insist on making the decisions.
But the point is (after that I have a point), the question is you have to know how to deal with it. Yes you get bad sys admins, this is because either management employ seemly competent techies which no personal skills, or morons who can answer the phone well but finds Windows 98 complicated. When I was still doing desktop support, many of the agency staff we were allocated had never used DOS before, I daren't let them near UNIX.
Also, programmers aren't really users - they are techies, whenever I've worked anywhere with programmers we general allow them to "heal thyself". As long and they don't screw the box and respect the fact that the real users - those that make the company money, are more important than they are.
Cor, that was a long post.
Mark.
People ask me what I do for a living. To those that know I'm a solaris sysadmin. To everybody else?
I used to do hardware work - then I fixed computers, then I did Desktop support, then I turned computers on in a way that made the users not feel stupid (which they were, frightenly. These people had slip on shoes because they couldn't handle laces).
Now, er, I "do stuff with computers to keep them working". They look at me as if to say that doesn't seem so hard.
You try and automatically produce a web page to show the revisions of the operating system in Perl while at the same time, incorperate new, non standard, hardware, with virtually no documentation, and then write an ISO compliant document to tell the rest of your team how to do it again, while being constantly interrupted because NIS-bastardly-plus isn't working again.
Mark.
I believe the point being made here is that the positioning of the icons on the desktop is in no way related to any networking problems. I know the pain of repositioning all 30 icons on my desktop, and one of my bigger complaints is when Win9{5,8} rearranges them for me.
Moreover, the computer in question came with Office installed. If the university/corporation does not want Office installed on its machines by the manufacturer, they should tell the manufacturer that when they order. I believe that this sysadmin had a bit of overbearing arrogance with a touch of control-freakishness thrown in.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
Can I get an "amen"? (Amen!). I'm at my best when I'm "making things go". Nothing like fighting entropy to make it through an otherwise boring day. Fixing things and making things work are what make me happiest. (BTW, I don't understand coders either.)
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
When my mother (or somebody else with a not so technical background) asks me what I do for a living I usually tell her that I pat computers on the belly so that they are kept happy.
Thinking the bad thoughts that keep the systems running next week is the picture for those who know something about computers.
I feel this gives a good picture of sys-administration, the best job there is you do things once, the second time you automate it.
And no ponytail, cut that of years ago...
-- Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom.
Well once again you Slashdot readers have proven yourselves to be something the internet would really suck without. Thanks so much for the enormous response. Well from what I've read I think I'm gonna go ahead and stay with M.I.S. as planned simply because the Buisness school at the University of Alabama (where I'm going) is a really good program (better than their engineering department anyway which is where CS is based) Plus that way I can take computer classes and buisness classes so when I get older maybe I can dabble in the stock market alittle. :P
As far as getting experience, I'm starting school up there this summer so I'm gonna try to get a job in the network department as soon as I can. Thanks for the tip. As far as previous experience, I already was sysadmin for my high school's lan (nt and netware -puke-) It made me from a geek to a school hero once I put Quake on the network though
Thanks again everyone
-Lee
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
All this talk of sysadmin unions and certifications makes me think of apprenticeships.
Think about it, it works well in other fields where a high degree of technique and hands on experience is needed and the current problem of people graduating from college or a certification course not knowing much of anything could be solved.
As a person with absolutly no real professional experience and only 3 years of college as a CS major I would welcome a 1-2 year job at low pay if I could learn something and guarentee career growth.
This job is exactly what I wanted it to be, which is doing something that no one notices until it goes wrong, meaning that if I do my job right no one notices me (except for my boss, who hounds me every day) unless I appear at one of those "employee recognition" functions. (Does anyone ever go to those things? I'd like to know... People tell me that all black is bad for a formal affair, but they sure as **** don't want me wearing t-shirt and jeans)
Actually, you may visit the Bastard's home at NetworkWeek, where new columns come out every Wednesday, and you may read all stories back to the beginning in 1995. Highly recommended for a start-up page.
either I misread this post your you did.
"80 hours every 2 weeks" is not the same as "80 hours a week." if the former is the correct number, I have no problem with that, being required to work over 40 hours a week to recieve overtime makes sence to me, I also think that the 12 hour shift number is reasonable, I know quite a few people who's regular work shift is 12 hours, if their company was required to pay them overtime every time they worked I don't think they would have a job for very long. If indeed the article you were referring to said 80 hours per week, I think that's not only rediculous, but more than likely a violation of federal labor laws.
-Ted
> Palms, notebooks, wire rooms, raised floors,
:)
> routers, racks, RAIDs, switches, CAT5 cabling,
> thicknet...line printers, ZIP drives, CD
> burners...
That paragraph is better than porn.
-Chris
I feel sorry for the schmucks that have to take a class from you! You seem to be very close minded on a topic which you clearly know nothing about.
Had it occurred to you that your particular sysadmin has to go through several offices every day, working on machines with stuff cluttered up all over the place, and still have to fix a machine without touching any of your precious icons?!? This would be similar to a car mechanic trying to fix your vehicle without being able to touch the hood of the car!
Many organizations, including Universities, have specific rules about what types of software can be installed on a system. The system administrator is usually the policeman having to lower the boom on software. Many users install all sorts of garbage on their computers, never heeding the fact that this software may be incompatible in a multitude of ways with the OS, with other software on the system, or with the computer in general.
You, sir, appear to me to be like the users vaguely referred to in the article. You sit on your little thrown believing the computer you use is yours! You preach about his condescending attitude, yet you go right on to say you gave him "tongue lashings"?
Bah! I can't stand to argue with you anymore.
Starting from top:
Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data-link
Physical
Oh, yeah, I'm 18, in high school working on getting my Cisco certification. Oh yah, my A+ too.
ask yourself this: do you know where your sysadmin is right now?
Yup. I know where the sysadmin is: im sitting in front of my comp, typing these words.
well, it fits here.. I'm 22.. i make 55k a year + Profit sharing. I build web severs for big companies.. Its my job to gurantee 99.9 percent updtime on these servers..
:)
I do find it interesting how in canada the work week is much shorter then here in the US and well, i don't see how you could get close to what happens here being that way.. the jobs i saw up there while browsing considered full time to be 25-30 hours a week.. pshawww i wish it was like that here. i'm lucky to be under 50 hours a week at the office (and alot more spent at home/onsite and whatnot).
while the money is good. the life of a sysadmin is busy and fast paced.. i'm not here for the money, i like the people, i like the tools i get and i like being able to take credit for building the systems i build.
i definatly say its more of a pride system, and good admins are proud of what they do and thats the only good reason we spend the many hours of our life starring into these big ass monitors.. to be able to say look what i did
I'm 17, in high school, but I should be in college because I completed my 75+ required credits last year, so I don't show up to class 4 days a week so I can run the Fortune 50 company I am the Founder, CEO, CIO, CFO, President and Chairman of. In addition to running this company at the executive level, I also manage the 300 SGI Orgin2000 supercomputers we have, the 100Gbps connection running out of our offices, and the 10,000 desktops in the building.
Oh, yeah, did I mention I don't know what the 7 layers are in the OSI? Thanks for enlightening me! I'm the MSCE test tomorrow. Think it will be on the exam?
Looks like somebody is riding a big fucking ego.
--
"Fuck you." - Me
And if this came about, unionized sysadmins would never be able to get a job, no matter how qualified. I don't want to hire a sysadmin whose primary loyalty lies outside my company, and I can't think of any company that would - especially if that external leige had a policy or precedent that would damage the company.
Think before you type.
Try this.
And be sure to check the "Other FINE Works by Simon..."-Link!
Here you go : http://www.silcom.com/~scooter/bofh/bofh_index.htm l
Well, I guess the /. effect worked. This note just went on-line and I already can't get there.
Jeremy D. Zawodny /
Night shift....all by myself in a room full of NT and NetWare boxes. And in the corner a sad Red Hat Linux box with a crappy screen, doing nothing but DNS. The shame of it.
I am currently installing NT using instructions written by some goddamn committee which we have to follow. I've done about 30 reboots and each one takes 5 mins (no joke) and I'm getting mighty pissed off.
In a large organization sysadmins have to follow standards, which limits creativity. You have to go through CHANGE CONTROL for the slightest thing. The levels of beurocracy are a pain, it takes weeks to get anything approved.
I'd like to work for a small/medium sized org where you are not constrained so much.
To date, I have met exactly _1_ MCSE that was both proud of the certification and actually knowledgeable to be useful. Luckily, my job environment does let me interview new applicants. Since we're a small company, everybody is expected to pull some of the weight in just about every area of what we do. I look forward to interviews with people whose resumes show certifications but little or no real experience. Those interviews are hilarious. It's wonderful to watch their self esteem crumble as I fire a mixture of UNIX and NT questions at them that they can't answer. It's especially nice if I find a way to work in that I have no certifications, no degree, and am only 22. Yeah, I could probably make more elsewhere, but add doing something I like (except those days when the users decide to screw up something, or one of the NT servers I can't make the client get rid of goes down) to the pleasure of watching an M$ whore writhe in interview pain, and you've got a combination that I wouldn't give up for anything short of $150K/yr and an unlimited, unregulated hardware budget :)
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Apparently you've never held a position as a sysadmin in an organization of any size. Corporations ranging from medium-sized offices to cube farms as far as the eye can see, as well as universities, often have strict policies as to what software can be installed on workstations. It doesn't matter if the machine is public, private, locked away, the user swears he won't blame it on you if it fucks up, whatever...the sysadmin is still responsible for enforcing those poilicies. If he doesn't, he has to answer to people who usually matter more than the dickhead installing non-standard/unsupported/unapproved software.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Yes, sysadmins are powerful, but they're not the only people who could cause terrible things by abusing their power. That's why air-traffic controllers /can't/ strike.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Now you know why you want to install NT twice into different directories. Boot the spare one to recover the primary one.
A 17yrold guy still in high school that can find the time to own/run a fortune 50 company? As I am in a fun gullible mood, I would like to know who this guy is and why the hell he's still in school. -- too much thought, not enough time. Caffeine IS a replacement for sleep.
Anyone remember these?
Looks like the authors of this article missed the beautifull descriptions of the agony true sysadmins experience with (l)users.
Read this and never trust your sysadmin again!
The final collection of BOFH stories!
If a trainstation is the place where trains stop, what is a workstation?
I am just getting out of college and looking for sysadmin work. Let me describe what I took in prep.
;)
c++, linux, nt, perl, web programming, java, networking, security, software engineering, database management, machine arch, op systems
This is a highly abbreviated list. I also worked as a work study in the department, as a lab monitor, then as a lab manager, then as a "we don't know what to call you so lab manager will stay even though you do more than any lab manager we ever had before". A lot fo troubleshooting and finding solutions, etc. I worked at a local computer store as a tech to keep up my hardware skills. I did some web work on the side, and volunteered for helping to network the local school district.
The one thing I did not do was sleep
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Despite what a complete genius you view yourself to be, 99% of the working world would be totally lost without sysadmins. Why don't you take your adolescent bitching somewhere else. "I was programming in my diapers... wahhhh!!!!" "I have a PhD, I'm 28 years old, I have 10 times the computer knowledge of sysadmins!!!" Yeah, well guess what, fucko, I never studied computers, never bothered with a PhD, and still get paid the same as you (just for being a sysadmin.)
Hey... it's OK, man, chill, have a beer. It'll be all right. :-)
... well, it wasn't exactly a ground-breaking article ('adminspotting' says it more succinctly), but you can bet thats one journalist who gets great tech support from now on!
-----Sharkoid
I'm in CIS (computer information systems) & trying to 'go up the ranks' as some others have mentioned. I have noticed the rare mention of Novell in the posts/article which seems odd with the shear volume of novell servers I've seen (including my college where I work & the big companies around here like Nationwide). So you might want to learn that as well.
I've always been the type wanting to 'just make things go', but the road for me is a difficult & curvy one.
/begin rant
I worked as a computer consultant with small businesses back home (the only type of business their). Then I decided to go to college for computer Science (the actual course is CIS or 'computer information systems') for 4 years, but the best choice of college in my area (& hence the only one I can reasonably go to) has an obsession with COBOL. If I was at their California branch I'd have lots of networking classes, but I can't go that far away.
Because this school is in a large city my old job was not feasible (way to much competition from bigger consulting groups, none of which would higher me for 'lack of experience'). I finally have a job in the IT/IS department at my college, but low pay & no respect from my superiors (who think having a degree makes you smart) makes this job frustrating. It wasn't that way to start, but soon after I got hired they replaced my boss with a suit (aka a business major) & things have gotten worse since.
When I graduate in less than a year though, I hope to finally be able to get one of those sysadmin type jobs & fit in that nitch to be able to 'make things work' all day.
/end rant
in my experience colleges (like the one I work for) & high schools (like the ones I've seen) don't give a damn about privacy. we are required as part of our job to scan peoples files for 'porn'/'indecent'/'imoral' materials on a regular basis. Though we do tell everyone that they have no privacy on our system they still say they have never heard that when they become disabled for such things. Personnally I advicate privacy, but I have no decision over what we do & can't quite over something like that.
I wonder what the percentage of slashdot readers
gender is.. Could be a good idea for a poll.
My best friend is a Sysadmin... and I almost fell out of my chair. He has a ponytail and wears birkenstocks!
Oh how accurate!
If I could count how many times we've been at his terminal, drinking beer, at two a.m....
Also, they didn't mention the effects of caffeine, sugar, and beer on networking. That would be an interesting story...
BTW - Weekly updated BOFH
"Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
I agree whole-heartedly about the scripting languages, programming languages, TCP/UDP and the management thereof, but when was the last time you used OSI modelled networking? Admittedly, I'm a lowly student, and I like my mac as much as my linux box, but I've never seen anything based on OSI. Oddly enough, I know it, all 7 seven layers, but I really have no idea why or where I would ever end up using it.
itachi
I'm in my low (very low) twenties, I work in a group of 5 people. The guy in charge used to be a hairstylist. I'm a conservative university dropout. Two of us are women with children, and the other is also in his low twenties. None of us have ponytails. Being as how we live in Canada, we don't get paid anywhere near 60kUS. We're not constantly on call yet, either (that starts in a couple months). Is it just me, or is the computer geek image a little romanticized even in a "real life" article like this one?
Now that you mention it, In the daily dead tree edition of the news, a local Multimedia group has started the union ball rolling. The International Woodworkers of America just put a union into a high-tech place. See, our wonderful provincial government just pass legislation that states that any company with 50 or more employees must work 80 hours every 2 weeks before any overtime is paid. Or, 12 hours must be worked in one shift to get overtime for any hours over the 12 hours worked. I welcome the unions into high tech to prevent more governments from walking all over us. 80 hours a week. That is rediculous!!
Darren Brown
Computer science?
well, i'm an idiot, seems someone already posted this question.
my bad
I don't consider myself to be a very strong programmer, I like perl, c-shell, korn shell, and in dire consequences I might throw together an executable via C. Networking is only a means to an end to me. Administration is where I live.. Seeing paterns in usage, timing upgrades, doing more with less, maximizing resources, it is what I live for.
Fear is my only adversary, that maybe I might make a mistake, and not catch it until it is too late. I'll never forget the day I lost my NIS server for the third time in one day..
Sysadmins, the good ones at least, have to be able to see into the future, deal with the present, and learn from the past to make today happen. Thank you programmers for creating the world I live in. Thank you Network Admins, for making the roads I traverse, and thank you Users, for making me usefull...
-D.Alphaeus
Not all sysadmins are angels or particularly bright. I've run into a few in the past that were a waste of precious oxygen.
I'll rag on just one guy for now. First there was the sysadmin (or whatever the hell he was) that had to connect my computer to the network. It ended up being a bit difficult for him (I don't know why, since the computer networked just fine for the previous occupant of my office). One of his first comments when he looked at my desktop was "You can't have your icons there", and preceded to rearrange my desktop. Listen, bub, I can have my icons any damn place I want them. I eventually solved this problem by pasting a sign on my monitor that read: "Rearrange my icons and you die!".
Meanwhile, this clod sees a copy of Microsoft office on my machine and informs me that since University doesn't have a site licence for it, he will come back tomorrow and delete it for me. A few hours later while moving my stuff into the filing cabinets, I come across a Microsoft Office for Gateway CD that shipped with the system. Damn moron didn't know what software belonged on what system. The department could have bought me a copy of Mathematica to run on my system, and he would have tried to delete it. Moron.
The worst part was that he was a condescending jerk from the beginning. Keep in mind that I was generally known by my students as the nicest and most laid-back professor in the department. After a few more days of his condescending attitude and incompetence (If the guy would have given me the IP address and password, I would have had everything up and running in 5 minutes), I blew my cool. Here I was, a 28-year-old PhD that started computer programming in the 1970's using Fortran and punchcards (yes, I started young), and this computer "plumber" that didn't have 1/10th of my computer knowledge was treating me like an imbicile. After I gave him a few ego-whipping tongue lashings, the guy started treating me (and my fellow faculty members) like human beings. A few months later he was gone.
I feel sorry for the schmucks that hired him.
I still draw my idea of a sysadmin from the big red book "Unix System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth et al. When I saw how it covered everything from adding a disk to a UNIX system, moral issues with root powers, all the way to the sort of hardware you use in networking, I was hooked. Who wants to program ten hours a day when you can be out there making things go (rhetorical -- I know there a plenty of you who just want to code all day. I just don't get why).
Palms, notebooks, wire rooms, raised floors, routers, racks, RAIDs, switches, CAT5 cabling, thicknet =), shell scripts, kludges, line printers, ZIP drives, CD burners, Perl -- these are the spice of life.
Give me a job as an admin and a workplace where they appreciate what I do and I'm happy as a clam.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"Pretend" might not be the right word for it, but it's certainly not an accurate reflection of reality. It's one of those deals where the committee sat around in a room and designed the model, while the hackers were out building something that actually worked and ignoring what the committee was saying they should be doing.
The lower layers map okay, if you're not too picky about details, but things get fuzzier and fuzzier the higher up you get. And I never have figured out what the point of the application and presentation layers is...
Actually, I personally don't want to install NT at all, much less twice...
As far as I'm concerned, the inability to update a live system is a bug. With Linux, if I lose a drive, I can install a base system, on the replacement drive, boot it, restore a backup on top of the live system, and, if I haven't done any extensive kernel modifications, I don't even have to reboot it when it's done restoring...
Yeah, but that "reinstall" step can take days... and it's always a pain in the butt.
Last time we had a major NT failure at work (lost the C drive) the Unix admin and I ended up standing around watching in morbid fascination as the NT guys spent hours trying to get the thing to restore a backup onto a live system drive without hosing the registry.
It was amusing at first, but after the first dozen or so times, "NTOSKRNL.EXE missing or corrupt" got kind of old...
I don't see any real mention of how annoying users can be. They give fague descriptions of problems and expect you to know exactly what they're talking about. They call every five minutes when a server has crashed, hoping that will speed things up. They repeatedly wreck the contents of their homedir and expect you to immediately restore their homedir from tape. They expect you to work 28/7 without any vacation. They expect you to know the answer to just about any goofball question they can com up with. In other words, they're really annoying.
On the other hand, it would be pretty boring without these (sometimes misguided) individuals...
(How the hell did you get your pencil stuck in the diskdrive?!)
Mathijs
Yes, but when you're the guy with root, you have to think about these things. Would it be honest to post to Slashdot all day defending privacy from government intrusion, and then go to work and make it easy for your fundamentalist boss to scan everyone's email for "obscenity" and "blasphemy"? Or to rail against spam, and then, when Marketing asks you to give them the ability to send spam, to go along with it?
In any profession where power can be abused --- in other words, in any profession --- people need to think about ethics. Doctors and lawyers do it all the time, and a person can have his/her license to practice medicine or law revoked if s/he violates the ethical standards of his/her professional organization.
System administration is no different really. Saying that just because your employer owns the computers that you are ethically justified in following any order they give you regarding the computer is to create a moral vacuum.
...for one thing, as a communication tool.
Try to explain what a bridge or a switching hub does using the OSI layers, and then without. See what's clearer, and what conveys more information.
See?
I must confess I have never calculated dissipation requirements for a computer room and I do call myself a sysadmin, though (well, the architects that designed the buildings did ask me about power usage, and they did calculate based on that).
hmm I am considered a god if I am the one who saves the day from a downed network or bsod but if everything works I am percieved as someone wasting company resources and time.
:-)
:-)
Now lets think about this. Unix= no crashes, NT= crashes. unix admin= someone wasting resources and money, NT admin= hero who saves the company and network and makes sure that your network is safe. In other words, if the co-workers can't see me then I am not there or not needed. hmmm which side should I take
Of course I will always use linux at home.
"Never stick an electrical appliance down your pants." -Tim Allen
Hey just a quick question since I'm sure all the sysadmins are reading this. I'm a senior in highschool and I want to be a sysadmin once I get out of college. Whats the best thing to major in if I want to be one? M.I.S.? Comp-sci? or comp engineering? Thanks
-Lee
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Well, you could always set up some nice, reliable systems, and when the lusers start taking you for granted, just take a machine down. Set your voicemail to something like, "Yes, we know the server's down, and we're working to fix it," then lock yourself in the server room and play Quake until you think they've gotten a nice taste of how it would be without you around, then bring the server back up. With NT, you get those nasty real problems that take forever to debug... it's much easier if you know exactly what's wrong to begin with. :)
i had a big obsession with "making things go" from day one of using my computers.... I too never understood coders, but I always was interested in programming on the side, and was quite good at it... never really felt it was a career option because i couldn't see myself doing it all the time. Furthermore, I always envisioned "real programmers" as extremely bright people.
....
After a time I got to experience the typical large IS department politics, hubris and the bags under the eyes of most senior IS managers... The future for IS people doesn't look pleasing, unless you really enjoy being yelled at by users and having to put up with incompetent coworkers. Everyone and their dog wants to be a sysadmin/IS worker, with MCSE's being more common than VISA cards now. It didn't seem to be what I wanted in a career - everyone else was doing it, and I didn't see the potential to differentiate myself enough to advance to the level of salary & responsibility that I wanted to have.
So - the stories in this forum are comforting because they remind me that there ARE (a few) competent sysadmins who are trying to fight against the tide of managers and cheap, clueless-neophytes turning IS into a "factory worker's job".
Anyway.. I got into programming heavily over the past three years, especially with higher level languages like Smalltalk, ObjC and Java... and the thrill is pretty similar: you make things work, but this time it is on a much grander scale. There is *so* much to learn in programming & designing and communicating with users/coworkers that it is a never ending journey
Of course, what I *don't* understand are the coders who label themselves as "C coders", or "COBOL coders", and basically sit in a corner all day, bitter at anyone who challenges the "one true way".
To me, this is sort of like arguing in favor of stone tablets vs. paper. While I can see the joy of twiddling bits with older/lower level languages, programming can be so much more than that, given a broader set of tools and stylistic ideas. Use the right tool for the right job - Perl vs. C vs. Java vs. SmallTalk.. they're all good for their own uses. [well, Perl is good for everything, but.. >;) ]
Programming is great BECAUSE there are so many paradigms, styles and idioms, and the religious wars continue to amaze me.
On the ironic side, there seem to be as many clueless programmers out there as there are clueless IT people (if not more so)... though for now I think it's easier to differentiate your skills in the programming world (where your past designs/code speak for themselves) than in the sysadmin world (where everything is based on intangible effectiveness).
-Stu
Well, I think that you've accurately described BSOFH, which is probably a decent portion of the admins.
:-)
On the other hand, there are people who have to add accounts, give people new passwords when they forget them, fix hardware that doesn't work, fix software that stops working, add new software that people want, add hardware, get rid of security leaks, add features to binary-only programs through ugly and painful hacks (perl scripts to convert text to html comes to mind while doing things along a specific and varying layout), selecting and installing new hardware, switching people's computers on when "their monitors are broken", keeping NT out of the workplace as much as possible, etc.
I suspect that you're right about Ann Rand. Someone I know read Atlas shrugged, and after 20 pages it became a contest of wills to see if he could keep awake during it.
Don't forget the people who have to clean up after the sysadmins that you're talking about. Someone has to clean up after them, because the systems do work for some part of the time.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
What is the OSI model? I haven't heard of it yet, and it always helps to be up on one's TLAs (not to mention learning is fun, etc.). :-)
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
That might be scary actually, if there were some sort of accredited sysadmin union or something...
/. will have much better suggestions, and much more real examples, of what they could do if they decided to wield their power openly...
Companies seeking to hire qualified sysadmins would look at the webpage for the union(like they'd have a physical location? Pshaw!), search by area code, phone number, or street address, and contact the closest 10 or 20 in the area...
However, the scary part is the power they could wield, in part and separately. If, for example, this union or guild of sysadmins wants to send a message about some state tax, or a bill to control immigration, or even how Clinton is handling international politics, they can hide many small messages, comments, and statements throughout a system, in fortunes, in sigs, in updates, etc.
Even worse, they could, if they decided to boycott for a day to bring city/state/national attention to a subject, they *could* shut down an entire industry, if only for an hour!
Call the local/state news agencies, give them a message like 'If we don't get a response in 10 days by , we are going to shut down/slow down for the period of
As an example, we might be able to get all the banks in a city or state to bear pressure or call attention to an environmental issue or two, or to get a bill passed, etc.
Of course this is very coarse, crude, and clumsy. I'm sure all the practice sysadmins reading
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
That's very true; a company wants loyalty in its workers...
But it has to go both ways. The current job market seems to incur no loyalty between workers and companies, what with regular layoffs, temp workers, and part time employees.
My original post shouldn't be taken too seriously exactly for problems like this...
Hmm, I guess the point I was meditating about is perhaps a 'company' or organization who's job is to qualify and provide quality professional sysadmins. Colleges are entities who provide CEs, EEs, CSes, MEs, chem Es, etc... I'm not sure such an organization exists for sysadmins. It's main purpose is not to wield power or abuse it.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
As a sysadmin at BBN (now owned by GTE) I can tell you the crop of people I've interviewed over the last year has been abysmal. It's especially true of those with training in only NT. I've seen guys who don't know the difference between TCP, UDP, and ICMP and who didn't bother to read up on the OSI model. Many haven't learned even a basic scripting languages like sh (never mind C) yet sell themselves as competent mid-range system engineers. Or how about the guy who had never caculated the power requirements and heat dissipation (hence air conditioning requirements) for a machine room, yet calls himself a Sr. System Administrator. This is the kind of guy who calls in a consultant whenever he needs to get real work done.
And these attitudes are prevalent throughout the industry. It seems to me that much of the problem with acceptance of this kind of blatant incompetence by management is partly because of all these certificate training programs run by businesses like Microsoft and Novell, instead of accepting the standards set forth by nonprofit industry groups like LISA and SAGE. Microsoft isn't in the business of teaching skills, they are in the business of collecting money for handing out certificates. And most businesses would prefer to hire the less skilled admin with a certificate because he/she is cheaper than a good admin with a track record and job history. This is partly because many managers don't have their engineering staff interview potential candidates before hiring; management often seems to express a policy of 'what does an engineer know about hiring someone and conducting an interview???' Well, DUH! 'What does a manager know about engineering??? And why does he/she think they know enough to determine a candidates core competence of the requisite skills for that position???' I figure if you work at a place like this you're better off just looking for another job.
Hell, good admins don't take PHB bullshit too well because they know the next job is a telephone call away. I happen to know I'm good at what I do and deserve every dollar I earn (more, really). But I'm willing to take a cut in pay in order to stretch my skills and learn something new. Where I work we have several hundred Linux, Solaris, and IRIX hosts in our machine room running compute intensive batch jobs for speech modeling, very similar to a Beowulf or GNU/QUEUE cluster (though the software was internally written). This is a useful and fun skill to learn, but working in scientific and software development fields certainly doesn't pay top dollar. Could I double my salary to six figures? Tomorrow. I need only say yes to one of the multiple cold calls I get every week (the six figure offers usually come from financial houses). Now, Would I? And take that shit???? No way!