I wouldn't pirate software for work and not just because I work for a megacorporation that has business deals with many vendors, but because it is morally and legally wrong.
I don't pirate software for personal use. I don't download music or movies illegally. I make decent money so there's no reason I can't shell out the bucks for the software that I deem worthwhile.
Then take the tech support job and work in it a short time. Prove yourself worthy of moving up, and then move up.
From discussing with my graduating peers several years ago, I had the lowest salary of anyone in the class. It was barely above tech support. But I went to do something that I was really interested in and it got me enough experience to get into a large company that I really wanted to work for.
Sure, I could have gone and programmed COBOL like most of them (graduation year 1999). But I wasn't interested in that kind of work at all, so I did something else.
Still doing it. Not loving it as much, the novelty has worn off and I have a family to spend time with now, instead of computers in a data center;).
I work for a large corporation as a Unix/Linux system admin. While I only manage 25-30 server systems we have hundreds of customers with thousands of systems, and a couple hundred system admins.
A proper change management system is crucial, as well as well documented processes and best practices for maintaining the systems. You cannot hope to manage dozens or hundreds of systems without documentation and change management! http://www.infrastructures.org/ is a good resource to get started. Yes, its a lot of work, but its best to get your support infrastructure ready before you really take off with supporting more systems, so you aren't working those 60 hour weeks until you all burn out and quit.
Never underestimate documentation. Keep both copies that are on a secured internal system, and a hard copy as well. Update it frequently and make sure when you make system changes, they're documented in your change management software and the documentation. Wikis are great for documentation (its what we're using now). I've heard some people had a lot of success with Bugzilla for their change management. We have to use an internal, proprietary company package so I don't have experience with it for that.
And as a previous comment stated, you'll probably need to hire someone that is familiar with corporate IT. You might even need to hire more people that have specialized skillsets, instead of people that wear every hat.
I'd never consider upgrading a distro like this. Save off your settings and personal files, wipe and reinstall. As many have found, the alternative is asking for trouble.
Preposterous.
Ubuntu as a Debian-deritive distribution is designed to be upgraded directly, rather than wiping it and reinstalling. I have upgraded several Debian or Ubuntu systems via "apt-get dist-upgrade". If this doesn't work from Dapper (or even Breezy) to Edgy, then the new distribution is broken - or the user is doing something wrong.
I can't even remember which distributions, but my current server (running Dapper) started with a Warty install and has been upgraded via apt-get for every release since.
That said, I'll be holding out on installing Edgy since this is a server and there's no compelling reason to migrate. Its stable, so I plan to utilize the "Long Term" aspect of the Dapper release until there's a version of Ubuntu that really gives reason to upgrade.
Uh, except thats more than three commands. In fact, it is 22 commands. Even worse, stringing them together with &&'s is stupid because if you make a mistake somewhere or a command fails, the whole thing fails.
certified, not certifiable. Just RHCE now, but I should be getting SuSE certified in the next year or so. Anyway to answer the questions:
<i>Do you have certifications? </i>
Yes, see above. RHCE on RH 8.0 (technically expired). I worked on a Solaris certification, using a Java-based training CD, but I moved to a Linux team and no longer support Solaris.
<i>Was it worth getting certified? </i>
Yes? Probably. It hasn't changed my employment if that's what this question is asking.
<i>How do employers, employees and management feel about them? </i>
The company I work for places significant value in certifications. All around. Certified professionals are more likely to get hired on full time.
<i>Do you pay for them? Does the company pay for them?</i>
I work for a gigantic megacorporation that paid for mine. They will pay for any upcoming certifications. Its probably not fair to the other/.'ers that had to pay their own way, but I don't feel bad:).
<i>Is it worth being certified if you do not get a pay raise for it?</i>
To me it is, as I didn't have to pay for the class or the test.
<i>What certifications bring more than others? Are specialized more employable than general certifications? </i>
From my observation, specialized certifications are more valuable. Certifications that require significantly more work than simply answering a multiple choice test are also more valuable. For example, the Solaris certification I was studying for was a multiple choice / fill-in-the-blank test. On the practice tests with little more than a few hours of study, I was getting passing grades. In contrast, the Red Hat certified engineer test was extremely difficult. Only a small portion of it was multiple choice (now removed completely). You really have to know what you're doing to pass the test even at the RHCT (technician) level.
I know several people who took the RHCE exam with a mixed bag of skill levels. Only a few without much (at least 2 years) experience as Linux admins passed the RHCT and the minority there passed the RHCE. Some of those who took the exam even with a good amount (2-5 years) of Linux admin experience even passed the RHCT!
The CISSP, CCNA, CCIE and other four to five letter acronyms are known to be good certification exams that really test the knowledge of the test taker. Note that the MCSE is NOT one of those tests.
This is the same April fool's crap Slashdot posts every year. Maybe not the same protocol, but there's always a new RFC for some protocol on April 1st. Boredom.
"People have been criticising MySQL since we started [in 1995] for not having stored procedures, triggers and views," said Axmark. "We're fixing 10 years of criticism in one release."
For experienced users the one thing that really annoyed me was the complete lack of GCC in the default install.
This FAQ describes how to install development tools on Ubuntu, which any experienced user, particularly developers, should be able to accomplish. The absence of gcc and other dev programs was a design decision. I can't find the conversation, but it was on the forums or mailing list.
Worse still, however, is the core change in attitude: now learning is all about fnding a job.
You bet your ass it is. College is RIDICULOUSLY expensive. People are paying, or borrowing thousands of dollars for an education and I don't blame them for wanting to learn something they can apply in a job/career.
You have to get enough education to be able to pay for that expensive schooling. Too many employers require a college degree on a resume to even consider the candidate, let alone give them an interview or a job. Companies hiring new prospects from universities want employees they don't have to train extensively. Training is expensive, because those that know the material had to take expensive courses to learn it, so they can teach it, get paid and pay for said training.
I'd love to have a nice four year degree in something like History or something else non-technical. However, I can't afford it. Not until I paid off my current student loan tab from my first degree.
Despite the flamebait nature of the question, I will add my thoughts.
First off, every company is different and every company's requirements are different. Second, every Slashdot user is different and has their favorite (or least favorite). Third, most of the vocal commentary on Slashdot seems to be from programmers, who are NOT professional admins. Seriously, this is important to note and consider.
That said, as a professional Linux system administrator for a very large corporation, my preference is SuSE.
best balance of stability
SuSE undergoes extensive testing of new packages and ensures that bugs are patched with solid working code. That can't be said for all the distributions out there. SuSE is a company that backs and supports their product with professionals who are paid to fix code. Not hackers in their basement submitting bugs in the hopes that it gets implemented. This is also true of Red Hat.
high-level support options
This is vague. If you want a corporate entity that supports the distribution, SuSE does that. If you want to have easy to use GUI tools, SuSE has that too. While I prefer to do as much as I can via commandline and.conf file editting, SuSE converted me to ease-of-administration-tools with Yast2. Out of the Linux distributions I've used (damn near every well known and even some lesser known), Yast2 is the best administrative tool I've come across so far. I would go as far to compare it to AIX's smit (or smitty).
security
Security is a major concern for corporations, and SuSE has a plethora of security options. Honestly though, any Linux distribution can be just as secure as any other by a competent admin, particular when using common tools such as SELinux, Firewalls, TCP Wrappers plus monitoring and IDS. SuSE has security options built into Yast2 that are easy to find (on the main menu), and any experienced admin can do many things at the command line.
rapid updates
I will assume this is either updates are applied on the system quickly, or updates from the vendor are released quickly after patches are submitted to code trees. This is true in both cases for SuSE. Their package reviewers ensure that security updates are tested thoroughly and released in a timely fashion. They also don't trickle out package update releases like Red Hat. The minor bugfixes are bundled up and released together, so end users don't have to continually update systems and potentially cause outages. We have been very pleased with the package update schedule SuSE uses. It is far better than that which Red Hat follows.
and ease of administration?
I think this is addressed above. I'd like to reiterate that SuSE is very easy to manage. As an example for my server at home, I had a brand new SuSE install up and running with mysql, apache, samba file shares, cups network printing all set up and serving my network in less than an hour.
If an admin wants to standardize on one Linux distribution and have the best of all worlds on everything from file-and-print servers to database boxes...... then they'll deploy SuSE 9.2 Professional on workstations and SuSE Standard or Enterprise Server on the servers. At least, in this admin's opinion.
Other distributions also have a lot to offer. It really depends on what the company's requirements are. Personally, I would eschew the others in favor of our Green Lizard Overlords.
I only see x86 CPUs. What about the PowerPCs, SPARCs, MIPS, Alphas, ARMs, and so on?
Because Tom's Hardware Guide is a site aimed at users of the Wintel Platform. I don't read the site on a regular basis, but they certainly don't review the latest in other architectures.
Particularly because many people who read Tom's are looking for information for Windows gaming.
Incompatibilities due to minor differences in versions in the above are a great source of frustration for me. I have a customer running Red Hat 2.1 instead of RH3.0 (their other environment) because their application isn't supported on anything newer, due to differences in the glibc between RH 2.1 and RH 3.0.
It would also be really nice if LVM were supported on RH 2.1, and ReiserFS were supported on 3.0. As it is, my SAN storage is all custom and difficult to manage due to lack of support for both of these technologies across all the systems on the account.
That has to be rebuilt/recompiled if you switch kernels, even when switching between 2.6.9-r1 to -r2 etc (Gentoo!).
This is true of any binary driver. Some manufacturer's distribute a somewhat closed source version that can have the new kernel symbols compiled in, some are open source. This is a design requirement of the Linux kernel as of 2.4, I believe. However, I am not a developer so I don't know all the details, just that getting IBM tape drivers on RH 2.1 is a pain.
Slashdot Mirror
This book will give you all the answers you need for choosing a career that is a vocation.
I wouldn't pirate software for work and not just because I work for a megacorporation that has business deals with many vendors, but because it is morally and legally wrong.
I don't pirate software for personal use. I don't download music or movies illegally. I make decent money so there's no reason I can't shell out the bucks for the software that I deem worthwhile.
What did RMS *INNOVATE* though?
gcc is a C compiler. There were C compilers around before he wrote gcc.
Most of the GNU utilities have closed source equivalents on other Unix platforms.
Doesn't the BSD license predate the GPL? I fail to see what is innovative about the license itself anyway.
And I actually still have that copy of Nintendo Power in my basement... Wonder what I can get for it on eBay...
IBM also has a large facility in Austin.
Wow thats gonna be crappy news for the people who have been freezing themselves for the last 2 weeks...
Then take the tech support job and work in it a short time. Prove yourself worthy of moving up, and then move up.
;).
From discussing with my graduating peers several years ago, I had the lowest salary of anyone in the class. It was barely above tech support. But I went to do something that I was really interested in and it got me enough experience to get into a large company that I really wanted to work for.
Sure, I could have gone and programmed COBOL like most of them (graduation year 1999). But I wasn't interested in that kind of work at all, so I did something else.
Still doing it. Not loving it as much, the novelty has worn off and I have a family to spend time with now, instead of computers in a data center
I work for a large corporation as a Unix/Linux system admin. While I only manage 25-30 server systems we have hundreds of customers with thousands of systems, and a couple hundred system admins.
A proper change management system is crucial, as well as well documented processes and best practices for maintaining the systems. You cannot hope to manage dozens or hundreds of systems without documentation and change management! http://www.infrastructures.org/ is a good resource to get started. Yes, its a lot of work, but its best to get your support infrastructure ready before you really take off with supporting more systems, so you aren't working those 60 hour weeks until you all burn out and quit.
Never underestimate documentation. Keep both copies that are on a secured internal system, and a hard copy as well. Update it frequently and make sure when you make system changes, they're documented in your change management software and the documentation. Wikis are great for documentation (its what we're using now). I've heard some people had a lot of success with Bugzilla for their change management. We have to use an internal, proprietary company package so I don't have experience with it for that.
And as a previous comment stated, you'll probably need to hire someone that is familiar with corporate IT. You might even need to hire more people that have specialized skillsets, instead of people that wear every hat.
Preposterous.
Ubuntu as a Debian-deritive distribution is designed to be upgraded directly, rather than wiping it and reinstalling. I have upgraded several Debian or Ubuntu systems via "apt-get dist-upgrade". If this doesn't work from Dapper (or even Breezy) to Edgy, then the new distribution is broken - or the user is doing something wrong.
I can't even remember which distributions, but my current server (running Dapper) started with a Warty install and has been upgraded via apt-get for every release since.
That said, I'll be holding out on installing Edgy since this is a server and there's no compelling reason to migrate. Its stable, so I plan to utilize the "Long Term" aspect of the Dapper release until there's a version of Ubuntu that really gives reason to upgrade.
Uh, except thats more than three commands. In fact, it is 22 commands. Even worse, stringing them together with &&'s is stupid because if you make a mistake somewhere or a command fails, the whole thing fails.
Reinvented? What FPS came before Wolf3d?
Get a cheap 32M or so USB Flash drive, a copy of Portable Firefox and there you go, all your cookies, passwords and sekrets are yours to keep.
certified, not certifiable. Just RHCE now, but I should be getting SuSE certified in the next year or so. Anyway to answer the questions:
/.'ers that had to pay their own way, but I don't feel bad :).
<i>Do you have certifications? </i>
Yes, see above. RHCE on RH 8.0 (technically expired). I worked on a Solaris certification, using a Java-based training CD, but I moved to a Linux team and no longer support Solaris.
<i>Was it worth getting certified? </i>
Yes? Probably. It hasn't changed my employment if that's what this question is asking.
<i>How do employers, employees and management feel about them? </i>
The company I work for places significant value in certifications. All around. Certified professionals are more likely to get hired on full time.
<i>Do you pay for them? Does the company pay for them?</i>
I work for a gigantic megacorporation that paid for mine. They will pay for any upcoming certifications. Its probably not fair to the other
<i>Is it worth being certified if you do not get a pay raise for it?</i>
To me it is, as I didn't have to pay for the class or the test.
<i>What certifications bring more than others? Are specialized more employable than general certifications? </i>
From my observation, specialized certifications are more valuable. Certifications that require significantly more work than simply answering a multiple choice test are also more valuable. For example, the Solaris certification I was studying for was a multiple choice / fill-in-the-blank test. On the practice tests with little more than a few hours of study, I was getting passing grades. In contrast, the Red Hat certified engineer test was extremely difficult. Only a small portion of it was multiple choice (now removed completely). You really have to know what you're doing to pass the test even at the RHCT (technician) level.
I know several people who took the RHCE exam with a mixed bag of skill levels. Only a few without much (at least 2 years) experience as Linux admins passed the RHCT and the minority there passed the RHCE. Some of those who took the exam even with a good amount (2-5 years) of Linux admin experience even passed the RHCT!
The CISSP, CCNA, CCIE and other four to five letter acronyms are known to be good certification exams that really test the knowledge of the test taker. Note that the MCSE is NOT one of those tests.
I wish people would stop spamming these comments...
Mark links Not Safe For Work appropriately, sheesh.
This is the same April fool's crap Slashdot posts every year. Maybe not the same protocol, but there's always a new RFC for some protocol on April 1st. Boredom.
It's already in the article:
"People have been criticising MySQL since we started [in 1995] for not having stored procedures, triggers and views," said Axmark. "We're fixing 10 years of criticism in one release."
For experienced users the one thing that really annoyed me was the complete lack of GCC in the default install.
This FAQ describes how to install development tools on Ubuntu, which any experienced user, particularly developers, should be able to accomplish. The absence of gcc and other dev programs was a design decision. I can't find the conversation, but it was on the forums or mailing list.
You bet your ass it is. College is RIDICULOUSLY expensive. People are paying, or borrowing thousands of dollars for an education and I don't blame them for wanting to learn something they can apply in a job/career.
You have to get enough education to be able to pay for that expensive schooling. Too many employers require a college degree on a resume to even consider the candidate, let alone give them an interview or a job. Companies hiring new prospects from universities want employees they don't have to train extensively. Training is expensive, because those that know the material had to take expensive courses to learn it, so they can teach it, get paid and pay for said training.
I'd love to have a nice four year degree in something like History or something else non-technical. However, I can't afford it. Not until I paid off my current student loan tab from my first degree.
simply to work the ad banners on his site.
Really? Hmm...
I don't have any ads in my browser for Dvorak's article.
Despite the flamebait nature of the question, I will add my thoughts.
.conf file editting,
... then they'll deploy SuSE 9.2 Professional on workstations and SuSE Standard
First off, every company is different and every company's requirements are
different. Second, every Slashdot user is different and has their favorite (or
least favorite). Third, most of the vocal commentary on Slashdot seems to be
from programmers, who are NOT professional admins. Seriously, this is important
to note and consider.
That said, as a professional Linux system administrator for a very large
corporation, my preference is SuSE.
best balance of stability
SuSE undergoes extensive testing of new packages and ensures that bugs are
patched with solid working code. That can't be said for all the distributions
out there. SuSE is a company that backs and supports their product with
professionals who are paid to fix code. Not hackers in their basement
submitting bugs in the hopes that it gets implemented. This is also true of Red
Hat.
high-level support options
This is vague. If you want a corporate entity that supports the distribution,
SuSE does that. If you want to have easy to use GUI tools, SuSE has that too.
While I prefer to do as much as I can via commandline and
SuSE converted me to ease-of-administration-tools with Yast2. Out of the Linux
distributions I've used (damn near every well known and even some lesser known),
Yast2 is the best administrative tool I've come across so far. I would go as
far to compare it to AIX's smit (or smitty).
security
Security is a major concern for corporations, and SuSE has a plethora of
security options. Honestly though, any Linux distribution can be just as secure
as any other by a competent admin, particular when using common tools such as
SELinux, Firewalls, TCP Wrappers plus monitoring and IDS. SuSE has security
options built into Yast2 that are easy to find (on the main menu), and any
experienced admin can do many things at the command line.
rapid updates
I will assume this is either updates are applied on the system quickly, or
updates from the vendor are released quickly after patches are submitted to code
trees. This is true in both cases for SuSE. Their package reviewers ensure
that security updates are tested thoroughly and released in a timely fashion.
They also don't trickle out package update releases like Red Hat. The minor
bugfixes are bundled up and released together, so end users don't have to
continually update systems and potentially cause outages. We have been very
pleased with the package update schedule SuSE uses. It is far better than that
which Red Hat follows.
and ease of administration?
I think this is addressed above. I'd like to reiterate that SuSE is very easy
to manage. As an example for my server at home, I had a brand new SuSE install
up and running with mysql, apache, samba file shares, cups network printing all
set up and serving my network in less than an hour.
If an admin wants to standardize on one Linux distribution and have the best of
all worlds on everything from file-and-print servers to database boxes...
or Enterprise Server on the servers. At least, in this admin's opinion.
Other distributions also have a lot to offer. It really depends on what the company's requirements are. Personally, I would eschew the others in favor of our Green Lizard Overlords.
OS/2 Warp will make a come back, don't worry. I'm sure IBM will get right back on development of OS/2 and forget this whole Linux thing.
I only see x86 CPUs. What about the PowerPCs, SPARCs, MIPS, Alphas, ARMs, and so on?
Because Tom's Hardware Guide is a site aimed at users of the Wintel Platform. I don't read the site on a regular basis, but they certainly don't review the latest in other architectures.
Particularly because many people who read Tom's are looking for information for Windows gaming.
What, you mean like libdb?
Or glibc?
Or the kernel itself?
Incompatibilities due to minor differences in versions in the above are a great source of frustration for me. I have a customer running Red Hat 2.1 instead of RH3.0 (their other environment) because their application isn't supported on anything newer, due to differences in the glibc between RH 2.1 and RH 3.0.
It would also be really nice if LVM were supported on RH 2.1, and ReiserFS were supported on 3.0. As it is, my SAN storage is all custom and difficult to manage due to lack of support for both of these technologies across all the systems on the account.
That has to be rebuilt/recompiled if you switch kernels, even when switching between 2.6.9-r1 to -r2 etc (Gentoo!).
This is true of any binary driver. Some manufacturer's distribute a somewhat closed source version that can have the new kernel symbols compiled in, some are open source. This is a design requirement of the Linux kernel as of 2.4, I believe. However, I am not a developer so I don't know all the details, just that getting IBM tape drivers on RH 2.1 is a pain.