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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*.
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.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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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!