now if they could take the satelite radio system and rig it up to do IP for your VAN (vehicle area network) or remote areas where even dial-up would be costly, then they might have a product. But data rates would be low probably.
We used to give applicants a quiz, and a laptop with linux installed on it (man pages and all), and then look at their command history when they were done.
You can tell a lot about how someone thinks by what man pages they read or what files they grep.
true, there are cases (laptops especially) where users may need root. for things like ipchanges, sudo is your friend. And if you don't maintain a machine, who cares who has root on it (except now they have root on your network and you have to remember that they can run tcpdump just like you). Like you said, when they screw it up, they re-install. That is what's known as a "personal problem" in other words, it doesn't affect me.
you can't swing a dead cat in this industry without hitting at least 3 "unix admins"
Everyone and their duck wants to be a unix admin because it's "cool" or whatever, so a) there are a lot of clueless people out there who suck, we don't need any more, b) because there are plenty of clueless admins (and more clueless managers to hire them) it will be hard for you to find a job, and c) because all the clueless idiots are happy to make $30/hr, those of us with a clue have a hard time convincing the clueless managers that they really want to hire the clued seasoned admins and tack on a couple of the newbies as Junior admins.
But if that rant doesn't discourage you, then first, get a clue. Educate yourself. Listen to people who sound like they're being overly cautions, they aren't. Never trust the users, give a user root, and he'll fuck up his machine, it's a fact. NEVER trust developers, they either want to be admins but aren't good enough, think they are admins but haven't a clue (worst type), or used to be admins and are in recovery. Give the last sort root on their machine and they'll make your life hell just to educate you.
Learn perl, you'll need it to automate all the mundane shit managers (aka manglers) will want you to do.
Learn networking. You should be able to find your way around inside cisco kit at least, preferably configure it from the ground up.
Learn how to program. You may not do a whole lot of it, but a good sysadmin needs to be a good programmer, if just to shit all over the "programmers" that are hosing his machine.
Never invent a new way to do something. Whenever you want to do something, it's already been done. Use google or freshmeat to find what you're looking for. If you can't find what you're looking for, look harder. If it's still not out there, then shut up and write it yourself.
And finally, never hit the enter key unless you are ABSOLOUTELY SURE what's going to happen when you hit it. Really. No, REALLY.
I'd tell you to develop a bad attitude, but that will happen on it's own as you deal with people who don't really know what they want, but expect you to provide it for them.
Come the revolution, comrades. Wake up! Throw off your shackles etc.
Exactly, that's what the second amendment is all about. Oh wait, the democrats want to take that away also. At least I don't live in the Republic of California.
I still can't for the life of me understand why they put everything in a bsd-like/etc/rc.config, yet still have a SysV style init. Maintaining information 2 places (links in/etc/init.d/rcX.d and also in rc.config) is bad. very very bad.
if they wanted to build a bsd-like system around the linux kernel, then why go half-assed about it?
For a mid or Sr. level sysadmin, I like to ask:
"A developer demands that he have the root password on his desktop system. What do you do?"
I'm looking for him to ask, "Why does he need the root password? What does he want to do?" And eventually, after I give him some need for root access, "I'll explain sudo to him, and tell him to use that instead."
If they say, screw him, he doesn't get it. I ask "So, what's the first thing that developer is going to do when you leave his office?" of course, dick developer is going to break into his machine, so we may as well give him sudo to do the things he needs to. At least that way we can keep an eye on him.
I also like to throw in "Why shouldn't a developer be able to install new versions of libraries on his system?" If they know the answer, they've worked in a dev environment before. (answer: Because Dick developer is going to install new libraries that support calls that the approved ones (on the build system) don't. Then when his code is merged, everyone is looking at lost-time and headaches)
This will show if they have a
"screw the user" attitude or have a realization that the user is the job.
It depends on what they're doing as to whether or not the "user is the job". If you're hiring a jr. sysadmin to do desktop support, then yes, that's a concern. If you're looking for someone to run your server farm that handles all your production traffic, then "screw the user!" If you're trying to find someone to do both, good luck finding a good, experienced sysadmin that won't wring the user's neck half the time. That's what jr. sysadmins are for.
I'm digressing, but the point is, a sysadmin job usually requires that you help fellow employees, and that is something
to check for in an interview.
No, that's a help desk monkey, or a jr. sysadmin. A sysadmin keeps the infrastructure servers and/or the production servers running. I'm a Sr. Sysadmin. Having to handhold users annoys me. If there is a netork problem, or a server problem, I can fix that and get back to them, but if they are having problems with their mail client, or need help setting up mail filters in pine, they can go RTFM. Likely their time is less expensive than mine.
What I've always done in production environments, is install RedHat, then forget about the RPM database all together.
Use the source luke! Grab the tarballs, compile and install. I've been known to build my own RPMs
for installation on several machines, but still, build it yourself. (I say we dust off and nuke the site from orbit) It's the only way to be sure.
People who _Need_ a gui tool to get the job done really should do them self a favor and learn the basics.
AMEN! These people who absolutely must have some frontend to do everything for them annoy the crap out of me. iIf you want to use the frontends, fine. But know what they do.
Hell, if you can't put a machine on the net with ifconfig and route, and add and delete users with vipw, mkdir, chown and rm, then you need to learn how. (If you want to call yourself and admin that is.)
I won't pretend to have an objective opinion as I wrote some of it, but it covers most topics that a linux admin would want to know. Yes, it's red hat based, but the information inside can be applied to almost and distro. The parts I wrote were aimed at any distro mainly. I suggested geting and using the source tarballs. Not relying on RPMs.
When it was written, 6.2 was the latest and greatest, so that's what it's aimed at, but the next edition (I think Tom's working on errata and additions already) should have more up to date info.
January 2000, I'm speaking with a couple of people I know. One of these people is an astronaut on STS-101. The two non-astronauts in the conversation (myself and Jim) were commenting on how incredible it was, and how exciting it must be. Our Austronaut friend responded with "It's just my job. Sure the launch is exciting, but the rest of it is just my job, It's not a big deal"
I was floored. "Just my job"?? I didn't know what to say. If the astronauts aren't excited about their job, I think they should be.
Those things you are talking about aren't programming, they are system administration. I
agree that a mediocre system administrator can be good -- at least, mediocre as in not very creative or perceptive.
Perceptive?? Nope, gotta be perceptive to pick out the things that management and the rest of the sysadmins miss. Creative?? You've got to be creative when dealing with programmers that insist they're right and you're wrong, but refuse to put their changes through QA before they want them to go on production servers first.
A good sysadmin is perceptive, and creative, and above all, experienced. I don't care how many cert's you have, if you don't have time under the gun, being a certified widget administrator isn't going to help you.
And good (even average) managers know better than to force-feed their
implementation ideas to the guy that actually does the implementation
Unfortunately I've dealt with poor management (VP actually) that force-fed us some implementation methods. I ask for the "what" and I usually decide the "how". Being force-fed a rotten "how" is shitty. Last time I had it done, I wrote the code so it was in the program, but mysteriously, that function never got called. It was code to see what state the printer connected to a spooler was in (flashback: "if the printer isn't idle, don't send jobs to the spooler. Yes, I know that's the spooler's job, to spool jobs until the printer is ready to print them. No I don't care. Do it this way.")
once I "implemented" that solution for this VP,
he was amazed at how much better things ran. I want some of that crack.
prima donnas don't need to spell well. you understood what he was trying to say didn't you? All the underlings should be able to do that. If not, then they weren't meant to hear what we said.
"if they work against the corporation that is paying them, their genius is *useless*"
So you'd rather have someone who mindlessly implements something when management says "do it", rather than someone who thinks through the "it" and comes up with a better solution? Is it better to be obedient and implement a solution that is O(n^2), or refuse to do that and come up with something that is O(log(n))??
Refusing to write crappy code, refusing to implement a stupid solution to a simple (or even complex problem), thinking through a problem before coming up with a solution. Are these marks of a prima donna?? Ok, count me in.
The fact that sysadmins now treat ident requests as 'attempted crack attempts' or
(potentially) 'hostile network connections' says
What it really says is that there are a lot of people out there who are calling themselves admins, who still have their heads planted firmly in their asses.
There are a lot of people hwo call themselves "SysAdmins" who don't know how the internet really works. All they know is their little NT box, or their little RedHat box, and that it logged something they don't understand. Therefore, the source IP must be a nasty person. (it takes them a while to figure out what a source IP is too)
Guys, do yourselves a favor and go back to development, or the mailroom, or janitor, or wherever it was that you came from.
how many people got fired over the whole xbox technologies thing?? Isn't there supposed to be a process when a name is picked? You go through trademarks, domain names, other incorportated entities in your target market...
Slashdot Mirror
how about a $200 lifetime subscription?
Tivo Lifetime subscription info at tivofaq.com
now if they could take the satelite radio system and rig it up to do IP for your VAN (vehicle area network) or remote areas where even dial-up would be costly, then they might have a product. But data rates would be low probably.
We used to give applicants a quiz, and a laptop with linux installed on it (man pages and all), and then look at their command history when they were done.
You can tell a lot about how someone thinks by what man pages they read or what files they grep.
"God I hate Linux, nothing is where its suposed to be"
He has the same problem I have, just in reverse.
"Fscking solaris, nothing is where I'm used to it being"
true, there are cases (laptops especially) where users may need root. for things like ipchanges, sudo is your friend. And if you don't maintain a machine, who cares who has root on it (except now they have root on your network and you have to remember that they can run tcpdump just like you). Like you said, when they screw it up, they re-install. That is what's known as a "personal problem" in other words, it doesn't affect me.
you can't swing a dead cat in this industry without hitting at least 3 "unix admins"
Everyone and their duck wants to be a unix admin because it's "cool" or whatever, so a) there are a lot of clueless people out there who suck, we don't need any more, b) because there are plenty of clueless admins (and more clueless managers to hire them) it will be hard for you to find a job, and c) because all the clueless idiots are happy to make $30/hr, those of us with a clue have a hard time convincing the clueless managers that they really want to hire the clued seasoned admins and tack on a couple of the newbies as Junior admins.
But if that rant doesn't discourage you, then first, get a clue. Educate yourself. Listen to people who sound like they're being overly cautions, they aren't. Never trust the users, give a user root, and he'll fuck up his machine, it's a fact. NEVER trust developers, they either want to be admins but aren't good enough, think they are admins but haven't a clue (worst type), or used to be admins and are in recovery. Give the last sort root on their machine and they'll make your life hell just to educate you.
Learn perl, you'll need it to automate all the mundane shit managers (aka manglers) will want you to do.
Learn networking. You should be able to find your way around inside cisco kit at least, preferably configure it from the ground up.
Learn how to program. You may not do a whole lot of it, but a good sysadmin needs to be a good programmer, if just to shit all over the "programmers" that are hosing his machine.
Never invent a new way to do something. Whenever you want to do something, it's already been done. Use google or freshmeat to find what you're looking for. If you can't find what you're looking for, look harder. If it's still not out there, then shut up and write it yourself.
And finally, never hit the enter key unless you are ABSOLOUTELY SURE what's going to happen when you hit it. Really. No, REALLY.
I'd tell you to develop a bad attitude, but that will happen on it's own as you deal with people who don't really know what they want, but expect you to provide it for them.
Come the revolution, comrades. Wake up! Throw off your shackles etc.
Exactly, that's what the second amendment is all about. Oh wait, the democrats want to take that away also. At least I don't live in the Republic of California.
I still can't for the life of me understand why they put everything in a bsd-like /etc/rc.config, yet still have a SysV style init. Maintaining information 2 places (links in /etc/init.d/rcX.d and also in rc.config) is bad. very very bad.
if they wanted to build a bsd-like system around the linux kernel, then why go half-assed about it?
And....
Milk crates come in handy when you tell your SOB of a boss to shove the job up his ass.
You can just stack all your milk crates up and put them in the back of your car.
For a mid or Sr. level sysadmin, I like to ask:
"A developer demands that he have the root password on his desktop system. What do you do?"
I'm looking for him to ask, "Why does he need the root password? What does he want to do?" And eventually, after I give him some need for root access, "I'll explain sudo to him, and tell him to use that instead."
If they say, screw him, he doesn't get it. I ask "So, what's the first thing that developer is going to do when you leave his office?" of course, dick developer is going to break into his machine, so we may as well give him sudo to do the things he needs to. At least that way we can keep an eye on him.
I also like to throw in "Why shouldn't a developer be able to install new versions of libraries on his system?" If they know the answer, they've worked in a dev environment before. (answer: Because Dick developer is going to install new libraries that support calls that the approved ones (on the build system) don't. Then when his code is merged, everyone is looking at lost-time and headaches)
- This will show if they have a
"screw the user" attitude or have a realization that the user is the job.
It depends on what they're doing as to whether or not the "user is the job". If you're hiring a jr. sysadmin to do desktop support, then yes, that's a concern. If you're looking for someone to run your server farm that handles all your production traffic, then "screw the user!" If you're trying to find someone to do both, good luck finding a good, experienced sysadmin that won't wring the user's neck half the time. That's what jr. sysadmins are for.- I'm digressing, but the point is, a sysadmin job usually requires that you help fellow employees, and that is something
to check for in an interview.
No, that's a help desk monkey, or a jr. sysadmin. A sysadmin keeps the infrastructure servers and/or the production servers running. I'm a Sr. Sysadmin. Having to handhold users annoys me. If there is a netork problem, or a server problem, I can fix that and get back to them, but if they are having problems with their mail client, or need help setting up mail filters in pine, they can go RTFM. Likely their time is less expensive than mine.Ok, we're worth our weight in expensive coffee.
:)
$8/lb*200lb=1600/wk or 83200/yr.
I guess I need to gain some weight, or get really expensive coffee.
What I've always done in production environments, is install RedHat, then forget about the RPM database all together.
Use the source luke! Grab the tarballs, compile and install. I've been known to build my own RPMs
for installation on several machines, but still, build it yourself. (I say we dust off and nuke the site from orbit) It's the only way to be sure.
People who _Need_ a gui tool to get the job done really should do them self a favor and learn the basics.
AMEN! These people who absolutely must have some frontend to do everything for them annoy the crap out of me. iIf you want to use the frontends, fine. But know what they do.
Hell, if you can't put a machine on the net with ifconfig and route, and add and delete users with vipw, mkdir, chown and rm, then you need to learn how. (If you want to call yourself and admin that is.)
I personally like this book.
I won't pretend to have an objective opinion as I wrote some of it, but it covers most topics that a linux admin would want to know. Yes, it's red hat based, but the information inside can be applied to almost and distro. The parts I wrote were aimed at any distro mainly. I suggested geting and using the source tarballs. Not relying on RPMs.
When it was written, 6.2 was the latest and greatest, so that's what it's aimed at, but the next edition (I think Tom's working on errata and additions already) should have more up to date info.
he said it impacted at 100-200mph, as "the atmosphere slows it quite a bit". so it was going considerably faster at some point, thus the sonic boom.
January 2000, I'm speaking with a couple of people I know. One of these people is an astronaut on STS-101. The two non-astronauts in the conversation (myself and Jim) were commenting on how incredible it was, and how exciting it must be. Our Austronaut friend responded with "It's just my job. Sure the launch is exciting, but the rest of it is just my job, It's not a big deal"
I was floored. "Just my job"?? I didn't know what to say. If the astronauts aren't excited about their job, I think they should be.
Funny story btw, it's always nice to hear from real life PHB
Funnier story... that real-life PHB is still working for the company, and they've been featured on fuckedcompany in the past couple of months.
Those things you are talking about aren't programming, they are system administration. I agree that a mediocre system administrator can be good -- at least, mediocre as in not very creative or perceptive.
Perceptive?? Nope, gotta be perceptive to pick out the things that management and the rest of the sysadmins miss. Creative?? You've got to be creative when dealing with programmers that insist they're right and you're wrong, but refuse to put their changes through QA before they want them to go on production servers first.
A good sysadmin is perceptive, and creative, and above all, experienced. I don't care how many cert's you have, if you don't have time under the gun, being a certified widget administrator isn't going to help you.
(yes, I'm a sysadmin, look at my sig)
And good (even average) managers know better than to force-feed their implementation ideas to the guy that actually does the implementation
Unfortunately I've dealt with poor management (VP actually) that force-fed us some implementation methods. I ask for the "what" and I usually decide the "how". Being force-fed a rotten "how" is shitty. Last time I had it done, I wrote the code so it was in the program, but mysteriously, that function never got called. It was code to see what state the printer connected to a spooler was in (flashback: "if the printer isn't idle, don't send jobs to the spooler. Yes, I know that's the spooler's job, to spool jobs until the printer is ready to print them. No I don't care. Do it this way.")
once I "implemented" that solution for this VP, he was amazed at how much better things ran. I want some of that crack.
prima donnas don't need to spell well. you understood what he was trying to say didn't you? All the underlings should be able to do that. If not, then they weren't meant to hear what we said.
"if they work against the corporation that is paying them, their genius is *useless*"
So you'd rather have someone who mindlessly implements something when management says "do it", rather than someone who thinks through the "it" and comes up with a better solution? Is it better to be obedient and implement a solution that is O(n^2), or refuse to do that and come up with something that is O(log(n))??
Refusing to write crappy code, refusing to implement a stupid solution to a simple (or even complex problem), thinking through a problem before coming up with a solution. Are these marks of a prima donna?? Ok, count me in.
- The fact that sysadmins now treat ident requests as 'attempted crack attempts' or
(potentially) 'hostile network connections' says
What it really says is that there are a lot of people out there who are calling themselves admins, who still have their heads planted firmly in their asses.There are a lot of people hwo call themselves "SysAdmins" who don't know how the internet really works. All they know is their little NT box, or their little RedHat box, and that it logged something they don't understand. Therefore, the source IP must be a nasty person. (it takes them a while to figure out what a source IP is too)
Guys, do yourselves a favor and go back to development, or the mailroom, or janitor, or wherever it was that you came from.
how many people got fired over the whole xbox technologies thing?? Isn't there supposed to be a process when a name is picked? You go through trademarks, domain names, other incorportated entities in your target market...